Lydia Millet: How the Dead Dream

No, honesty was useful chiefly within the confines of the self, where careful scrutiny of successes, failures, victories and losses was necessary for progress.

He joined his father's old fraternity-less out of enthusiasm than to be respectful of his father and ensure his continued goodwill-and there became treasurer and then vice president. He lost no time in making himself well-liked with the fraternity brothers, and while he did not reveal his dealings in the stock market to them he did include them now and then in other less significant undertakings. Quite soon they came to know him as a skillful card counter who graced the blackjack tables of Atlantic City and Foxwoods when he could find time to drive north for the weekend. Typically he invited a few brothers to accompany him, and they told tales of his acumen back at the frat house.

Both men and women tended to admire him, for he practiced a kindly reserve that invited affection but discouraged any more intimate advance. Men were comfortable with this, relieved by how little he asked, and women deemed him enigmatic and sought out his favors. But he did not want a girlfriend, nor was he willing to engage in the forced aggression and later awkwardness of one-night stands. Instead he held himself apart.

On evenings when his peers partook too liberally of spirits he alone remained sober, a reassuring presence on the edge of the revels. He was never too close for comfort nor too far away to spring into action, and so could always be looked to for the rapid solution of problems ranging from the merely distasteful (Ian Van Heysen's dramatic episode of incontinence in the Kappa house dining room) to the outright felonious (Ian Van Heysen's exuberant vandalism of townie cars during Pledge Week). It was T. who quietly confiscated the keys of brothers unfit to drive, who deftly staunched the flow of blood from flesh wounds caused by gleeful unrestraint; it was he who politicked behind the scenes to dissuade frivolous accusations of date rape, negotiated truces with disgruntled neighbors and bored campus police. It was he who took in hand forlorn and suddenly shameful users of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide who skulked in basement corners, scraping at their sturdy wrists with plastic knives from the dining room and posturing self-murder.

On one occasion Van Heysen, whose father was a tobacco mogul and major donor to the cancer ward of the university hospital, became fleetingly convinced of his own lack of worth and threatened to dispatch himself by jumping off the roof of the university's observatory. This was in the small hours of a mild spring morning, following a laser light show set to music. During the show-chiefly intersecting colored lines projected onto the dome of the observatory, which at other times displayed the constellations of the northern night sky-Ian had drunk a fifth of whiskey and chased it with unspecified pills. T. sat with him on the edge of the roof as he mulled over the decision, keeping a firm hand on his shoulder. Even the fact that the roof of the observatory was a mere twenty feet off the ground, above an oleander hedge, did not completely dispel the urgency of the situation.

After the worst had passed Ian dried his eyes and spoke of philosophy.

"It's like, the world is awesome? And also it sucks."

"I know exactly what you mean," said T., nodding and consulting his watch. The Tokyo markets were already closing.

"Sometimes I wish I was like a peasant or a farmer. Like in Guatemala."

"Trust me, Ian. You don't wish that."

"But it's like, things would be way easier. You just get up and eat beans and then you work all day, like, hoeing shit. Whatever. Then at the end of the day you're all tired and sweaty and you just take a hot shower and crash."

"I'm not sure you'd like the part in the middle there, Ian."

"I'm just like so tired of, I don't know. Everything."

"It's tough sometimes. Isn't it."

"I have this one dream where my father is a gigantic building? It doesn't look like him but it is. It's all gray and gigantic. He's like a skyscraper in Manhattan. And in the corner of the dream, where no one ever sees it, is this tiny, like, shining mouse. And the mouse, T., get this. The mouse is actually Jesus Christ."

"Whoa. Slow down there, Mr. Deep."

"I wrote a song about it. It's called `Jesus Squeaks.'

When they left the roof they were applauded by brothers in the parking lot below. Ian went drinking with them and T. went to sleep.

He was useful to his small society, and few fraternity brothers who had benefited from his clear thinking could forget it quickly. Sorority girls whose soft, still-shaking hands he had held gently as he persuaded them not to file charges remembered him not with resentment but with tender respect, and Ian Van Heysen, Sr. had been known to show his gratitude to T. with gifts of cognac and Cubans sent by courier.

That he was mature beyond his years was obvious; and while they placed their trust in him they also knew he stood apart from them, too rigidly controlled to mix his solemn molecules with theirs. He was a father their own age, claiming the loyalty of all and the passion of none.

But while others looked to the present for their pleasuresholding these four years to be both their first and their last gasp of freedom-he looked to the life beyond, past the confines of the fraternity house with its dusty oak wainscoting, the campus buildings with their wide lawns and white porticos, and the small college town with its crowded hilly streets and dogwoods that bloomed so cloudily in spring.

He saw beyond what there was, and in the not-yet-existent imagined a great acceleration.

His parents visited one weekend in October and once in April, always at the same time. His father liked to attend an annual old boys' fundraiser for the fraternity and his mother liked to pick up an iced tea at the cafeteria and then wander at a leisurely pace through the campus's Botanical Gardens, holding her purse and gazing at the magnolia trees. She would point at the small, old-fashioned signs on their tidy stakes in the earth, which bore in careful lettering the names of tropical and subtropical plants-Ricinus communis (Christ's Palm), Alonsoa incisifolia (Devil's Rattle)-and say how gracious were the stalks, how beautiful the leaves and languid the flowers. As she said this she would bend her head and a wishful tone would come into her voice. Watching her he saw how she envied the plants, so peaceful in the shade, so smooth and green and cool. They grew there and they died there.

And while his father, as he aged, grew stiffer and more pointed, almost an exaggeration of his younger self, his mother quietly faded. Her warmth rose like vapor and left a still surface; and later, when she had forgotten everyone she knew and even her own name, he would think back to these college gardens and how she had loved them. "I could live here," she would say, as he walked beside her in the dappled shade and they looked down at irises and lazily floating wasps. "Here, right here, in the waterfalls and the ferns." She had grown up in a southern climate and the winters were long in Connecticut.

He endured the visits only to see her, to know how she was faring and to try to elicit from her some spark of vigor. For her sake he would stand awkwardly by while his father toured the fraternity, always with a jocular handshake for the sons of old peers, always with what seemed to T. like a desperate and transparent need to be one of the boys again. But the chill of his mother's absence was steadily deepening. Stepping out of the rental car after the drive from the airport she had a measure of distraction in her gaze, as though her true allegiance was elsewhere while she kept this trivial but mandatory appointment.

And yet she had nothing else; she had no other appointments.