Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

"Good. You don't deserve it."

She pushed his head under, holding the rim of the pool with the other arm. Submerged-he stayed because he wanted to: the lights on the sides of the pool were bright and hypnotic-he thought that he admired her. He looked at her ribcage, her flat, lean abdomen, his eyes smarting from the chlorine; her shirt floated above her belly. Behind her the pool lights wavered and dazzled him. Hard to keep his eyes wide; the eyeballs smarted. But he was busy seeing. He admired her bravery. She was a heroine.

In the water beneath them her legs receded, white and tapering to a distant point of feet; but here any legs would recede that way, pale and disappearing. Other legs would be moving in the water, that was all.

He saw his own legs; he could barely keep them down. They were not white because he was wearing pants and shoes. They were big and heavy. They wanted to be floating.

It did not matter how proud she was; still he had to admit to pity. No matter what, there was always pity, however her defiance might reject it… and yet the water was turquoise, flooded with white, and they were here within it like two parts of a whole-connected by liquid, only the membranes of their skin between them. What were legs, anyway? She could swim without them.

How specific each thing was to the need for it.

In the pool someone might see her and not know. Someone might catch sight of her floating and believe she had legs that walked; they might believe she was whole.

He could almost believe it himself.

He thought he was happy, for a second, but then how could he be? — he must be missing something.

In a haze he burst out, dripping. His shirt around his shoulders felt cold instantly in the air and he wanted to be submerged again. She was a sacrificial lamb; she was both great and small. He adored her. Dear friend.

She could hold him under; he would not protest.

Instead she studied him with a serious expression, frowning.

"I can, you know," she said.

"You can?" he asked stupidly.

He carried her upstairs, and only later went back for her chair.

It was the emotion of it that was piercing, a thing he could not have known. He would have guessed it would be difficult, the rawness of what was missing. Instead he was suffused by a sharp, rending emotion, unidentifiable to him. With Beth there had been warmth, but not this extremeness, tearing and erotic. Was it the effect of the pills? Afterward sleep together was like being in the water, where there was hardly a line between them. But then daylight was bleak. He raised himself on an elbow and gazed down. She was lovely at the top, fresh: down and down further she was sleek and firm: then she wasted into pale angles and bone. He felt sad and furtive. He should not be seeing this.

She was awake and studying his expression.

"I need to get out of here," she said. "Right away."

He helped her to her chair and waited while she used the bathroom; they rode down in the elevator, saying little. Her car was parked a block away and he walked beside her, glancing down at the top of her head. She never raised her face to look at him; even as he loaded the chair into the car he could not catch her eye. He watched her drive away standing where her car had been, on a grease stain.

It was barely dawn. The grass was dewy and the sky over the sea lavender. The skin on his arms pricked and chilled; he hugged himself and rubbed his tipper arms with his hands.

Regret was nagging at him, even shame.

He was walking along the sidewalk back to his building, choked and empty, when he saw his dog.

She sat beside the front steps, waiting-thin and mangy, but alive. Alive!

He was floored by relief. He felt a splinter of pained love for Casey, shot through with remorse, as though his dog's return was her doing somehow. He knelt down on the grass and laid his cheek against the dog's flank.

When he stood again and she rose off her haunches to walk with him he saw she was reluctant to move; she held up one of her back legs. She was lame.

The leg, it turned out, was broken and fusing incorrectly, and also badly infected.

"How did it happen?" he asked. He was still so grateful it was hard to be upset. She was alive.

"Can't really say. Some kind of blunt-force trauma; maybe a car hit"

"Are you sure?"

"Wait a second," said the veterinarian. "Oh… take a look. You see this wound at the ankle, with the pus and scabbing? The hair's gone. Looks like it was rubbed raw by a cuff or a chain. Same thing on this leg here. Let's see. She has wounds here too, under the hair. And there's tenderness here. We should do X-rays. She might have other injuries."

"What happened?"

"She was chained at the ankle, maybe jabbed and hit or beaten. She worried the chain with her teeth, trying to get it off. From the angle here I can tell the injury predated the chaining. Someone kept her chained up when she was already injured."

He felt a wave of faintness, bitter taste in his mouth. He saw Fulton's wine cellar.

A course of antibiotics could be tried, said the vet, but there was significant necrosis. He advised T. to let him amputate right away.

"You'd be surprised," said the vet, "how well they do on three legs."

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?

Such a house could even be the whole world.

It was days afterward that he went to see Casey. She was not answering his phone calls and he felt increasingly nervous about this. He gave his dog a strip of rawhide before he left, pulled on his running gear and went down to the beach. He ran south. Beachgoers were out in force; some of them wore very small swimsuits, though the air was only mild. The surf was low but still kids on boogie boards paddled frantically.

When he got to her building the sun was setting. Standing in the foyer he pushed the call button once, then again; he peered into the camera lens. She had a monitor in her apartment, though she seldom looked at the screen-only listened, said nothing, and used the remote to buzz people in. But lately she had not been in bed as she used to; lately she was active.

After a few seconds of waiting he turned to leave, let down. One of her neighbors, a man with a prosthetic foot, was hobbling along the sidewalk. He lived two doors down on her floor and they sometimes nodded at each other in the elevator.

"You seen Casey around?" he asked on impulse, as the man came up the walkway.

"She was out here earlier. She was watching a couple of kids carry boxes for her."

"Boxes?"

"Moving."

"Moving?"

"Yeah. She gave me a plant. I don't even like them."

T. stared at him.

"But I just saw her a couple of days ago. She didn't say anything about it."

"What can I tell you."

The man was past, fumbling at his mailbox.

He would call Susan.

Running back north he wanted to know; he swerved inland off the beach and found a payphone.

Susan picked up coughing.

"She's moving?" he asked, when the coughing trailed off. No preamble. He felt agitated, even anxious. "Where to?"

"Thanks for your concern about my health, T. And in case you're wondering, it's pneumonia."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I thought it was just the flu."

"Walking pneumonia."

"Walking? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means you need to get a temp."

"Sure. Of course. Take good care of yourself."