Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

Her daughter lived in an apartment building hemmed in by smaller buildings on the Marina's narrow peninsula. Herons and ducks alit on a dirty-looking canal; wide ramps led up to the front doors. The building's functionality, he thought as he passed through the foyer, gave an impression of coldness, as though the Herculean effort of making the premises handicapped-friendly had drained those in management of all their energy reserves and left them no choice but to decorate the lobby with two dead philodendrons and a stained brown carpet.

Casey seldom left the building, Susan told him as they waited for the elevator, not because she was not able to do so but because she was angry and depressed. Susan brought her food and supplies twice a week and had done so, she told T. as they stepped into the freight elevator, ever since the accident nearly six years before.

The apartment felt temporary, with plywood on bricks for bookshelves and ripped pieces of cloth tacked over the windows. Susan set down a grocery bag on the counter and the two of them passed into the dining room and the hall, where dirty beige indoor-outdoor carpeting bore deep gray grooves from thin wheels.

"She won't let me make improvements," whispered Susan.

"I hear you, Mother," called Casey. "Don't apologize for me, OK? If I want to live in a shithole that's my choice. I'm not sorry."

"I wasn't apologizing, honey," said Susan calmly as they turned a corner and stood at the bedroom door.

"You were making excuses for the paraplegic. Same thing."

T. saw a thin, pale young woman sitting in her rumpled bed. She had her television on with the sound muted; on the nightstand sat a fish tank containing a single blue-and-gold fish, its long fins waving. She scowled at him.

"This must be the boss," she said. "COLA raises plus five percent."

"T., this is Casey. Casey, T."

"I'm a bitch. Did she tell you?"

"Not in so many words," said T.

"Yeah well. You can't say bad things about a cripple."

Susan had warned him she was outspoken. He went with it.

"True," he said.

"The best thing about this room is the view," said Susan cheerfully, and opened the blinds over a wide window. "Would you look at that? Beautiful!"

"I forget the Pacific is even there," said Casey to T. "I look at Oprah and Jerry Springer. And my betta fish. At night sometimes, when I'm moisturizing my atrophied legs, I look at the test pattern. You should give her a ten percent raise this Christmas. She has a cross to bear."

"Indeed," said T.

"Did you bring the batteries for the remote?"

"Everything on the list, dear. Like always. Mind if I clean this up here?"

"Go for it."

He watched as Susan picked up balled tissues, brown apple cores, coffee mugs full of mold and glasses coated with the residue of old juice. Oddly he was relaxed, even sleepy. He felt content in the room. Susan gathered the detritus into a waste basket and carried it out.

While she was in the other room Casey glared at him.

"Is this a staring contest?" he asked, amused.

"It was. You just lost though."

"I'm devastated."

"You should be. Staring contest performance is a measure of social anxiety. Losing means you're even more spineless than me."

He cocked his head, waiting for her to continue.

"Get it? Spineless?"

"It's not funny."

"Tell me about it. Hey. Pass me that chapstick, would you?"

Before the car accident, Susan said on their way out, her daughter had been quiet, gentle, somewhat passive. She had been seventeen then, a good student, popular; she had been accepted to Stanford, but then came the accident, a pileup of cars on the freeway in an ice storm outside Denver. When the school semester began she had still been in the hospital.

Later she refused to attend, though the school was willing to make accommodations for her. She was stubborn, said Susan. All she had left was speech, and speech stood in for action. She magnified herself through bold talk; she put her words where the rest of her couldn't go.

"And she's still my baby. I love her just as much as I ever did," said Susan, backing out of her parking space.

Fruiting olive trees were planted on the parking lot islands, and beneath them black ovals littered the asphalt. He could hear the tires crunch them.

"No, that's not true," went on Susan, muted. "I love her more.

He watched her tired profile as she looked over her shoulder and then turned back to the steering wheel. He felt a sympathy that made him wince and then a wash of gratitude.

"I know I'm lucky to have you," he said.

After that he began to pay visits to Casey almost every week. He ran up and down the beach five or six miles on weekday mornings, his dog loping beside him on the path, and halfmarathons by himself on Saturdays and Sundays, along the firm sand near the waterline. Part of him still resisted running, and when he started he doubted he would persist; but then he ran longer distances, and by the time he went eight or nine miles he was often filled with euphoria. It flamed up through his calves and his chest and along his jaw to what felt like a trembling membrane beneath his skull, a rush of adrenaline that delivered him to elation.

Sometimes he ran down the beach from Santa Monica to Venice to the peninsula and stopped in at a convenience store to buy a small token for Casey, a newspaper or a bag of chips. Sometimes he stopped at a neighborhood pet store to pick up a plant or a new snail for her tank. He could not purchase anything but snails, for hers was a male fighting fish and would fight other fish to the death.

He was amused by her pugnacity. She was only a couple of years younger than he was but she seemed like a teenager. She did not mind that he showed tip with sweat stains in the armpits of his T-shirt; she was not reminded by this, as he feared at first, of her own debilitation.

"Are you kidding?" she said when he asked her this. "I hated that shit. Sports and jocks. Only time I ever ran was to catch a bus."

Her mother had persuaded her to attend support group meetings and she liked to mock these; but she also knew they were helpful, and attended them faithfully. T. sometimes drove her there in her car, which was modified for hand operation and to hold her wheelchair. She taught him to drive it. At the third meeting to which he drove her, in late November, she confessed there was a man at the meetings who intrigued her; he was an ex-policeman, shot in the back by a rookie.

"You can't tell my mother. She wouldn't approve of him," she said. "He obsesses about CIA covert operations and collects weapons. He buys some of them on the black market. They're not even legal. Also he drinks malt liquor, and on special occasions he does crystal meth."

"But you like that about him," said T.

"Sure, hell," said Casey, looking out the window. "I don't care. Whatever works, right?"

"It's not enough for you to have a paralyzed boyfriend, you want an addict too."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it."

Waiting to pick her up afterward, leaning against the window of her car, he watched the wheelchair-access door for her emergence and felt like an elder brother, waiting to take his sister home from a school dance. Yet Casey had a family already, her mother and her father, a soft-spoken, kindly man. He was a bureaucrat of some kind who liked to discuss taxes. Whenever Congress attempted to reform the income tax code he shook his head sadly, as though heathens were trampling on hallowed ground. Despite the fact that T. reserved his reverence, such as it still was, for other agenciesthe Department of State, for instance, and the Library of Congress-he felt a certain kinship.

The door cranked back on its circuit and a gray-haired woman in a wheelchair appeared; behind her was Casey, followed closely by a gaunt, grizzled man in a filthy peasant shirt with an old army blanket covering his lap.