Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

A few feet away, through the rough arch, the rain began to fall faster. The sound of it filled his ears and the smell of it filled his throat. As he crossed the floor toward the foreman he had a sense of tenuousness: there was a roof over their heads and there were walls, but there was no finishing. It was finishing that imbued buildings with their capacity to give comfort. Here there was no comfort yet; bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and burned with searing imprints.

They were practically outside. The rain fell harder.

T. stuck out his hand for a shake but Mario embraced him. "Tomas," he said fondly. "We're just finishing. A storm is coming. A big storm, Tomas. What we do now is, we make sure we protect what we can. Stop the water damage. Then we go home. We got to go help the wife, you know? Help before the storm comes. Most of the men stayed home today. To help the wife and children."

"Go ahead," said T. "Please. Get home."

"High winds," said Mario, nodding. "High winds."

He motioned to the others, preoccupied.

"You stay at the Grove, Tomas?"

"Always."

"Safe there. Very good."

They ran out then, Marlo with a plastic poncho on, the workers bareheaded and carrying between them a heavy toolbox. T. noticed they had brought their radio out with them, the cord wrapped carefully around it. They ran to their boats and got in. The palms were dipping and the canvas shelters on the boats whipped and flapped; the water was choppy and opaque.

Mario stepped into T.'s boat and the captain started the motor. They huddled on a bench seat beneath the canvas. The deck was slick.

"Three generators," said Mario, nodding, and patted T.'s knee. "Three backups. At the Grove."

"I'm not worried," said T.

Marto nodded and said something to the boatman. Soon the two of them were yelling over the motor and T. heard nothing but noise; the prow of the boat lifted high and crashed down again over each wave, jolting him. He held tightly to the wet gunnel.

At the hotel dock he clambered out and watched them throttle away. When the boat vanished into the gray humid air over the waves he stayed where he was, his soaked feet planted firmly on the wood of the dock. He should have gone with them, should have helped them prepare for the storm. But likely it would pass, and tomorrow would be back to business. Still he was reluctant to go back into the hotel. Better he should stand here, wind-battered and shaking; better to feel this lassitude.. his skin and clothes were waterlogged. Water ran down his neck and his nose and the thin windbreaker glued chilly to his arm skin.

The ocean and sky were one heavy mass without a line between them. His island was nowhere visible.

Soon he found himself retreating to the restaurant with the other guests, the restaurant with its gleaming coppertrimmed oak bar and rows of glittering bottles and large windows crisscrossed with tape to guard against shattering. Waiters moved among the tables, reassuring; they were used to hurricanes, which battered the coast year after year.

Rain flooded the swimming pool beyond the windows until water spread out over the pool deck and the lawn beyond. He put his face up to a triangle of taped glass, beside a long row of children who did the same until their parents pulled them back. The pool water was a muddy yellow, afloat with red flowers and brown palm litter and even a few lounge chairs, swirling and hitting each other. Nearby the trees moved and moved, bent low. Loose bark and fronds skittered over the ground and caught on trellises and hedges, collecting at the base of low walls. Guests watched warily but tended to sit stiffly at their tables, as though the tables would protect them.

The televisions showed a weather map and at first the steadiness of the signal kept everything normal. Children ran and capered, restless; they hunched down by the windows until their parents noticed, twirled away from the windows laughing and shrieking. They played hide-and-seek, dashing back and forth across the room to conceal themselves behind potted plants and furniture.

Presently the signal was lost and the screens went snowy. In the moments afterward there was a pause in the room, almost a pause of fear. Quickly a waiter popped a movie into the VCR, and on every screen ran a movie about American astronauts with square shoulders and piercing blue eyes. Wind shuddered the walls as a great silver moon rose into the blackness of space; the elements outside and the space inside the capsule converged. On went the storm, and with pictures of wives and babies taped to the dashboards of their ship the handsome astronauts gazed out portholes in wonder, beholding an American universe.

In the late afternoon the wind abated and the rain slowed. Talk rose and there were a few barks of laughter, but then someone pointed out that the wait staff were all behind the bar, pretending to look busy there.

"The eye," whispered a woman at the table next to him. "We're in the eye."

In the quiet the wind shrilled and thudded again until it alarmed the children, who stood near their anxious parents holding onto their arms or legs, the small ones settling on laps. He heard glass shatter but did not see it. The taped windows let a white static of water sweep past; it pounded the walls and the roof with new force and the windows shook in their frames.

How was his shell faring, the empty husks on the island?

Do not think, he told himself. Useless.

Anyway he was well insured.

Everyone else had at least a wife or a husband with them. Only he sat alone. Here was a whole life Beth had missed, a hole where a life should have been. But then, he thought, the universe was made up of holes-was it so terrible to be swept into one? After all. The holes were the black between stars, between constellations. It was holes that were the fabric of the galaxy.

At the thought he was calm, though someone nearby whimpered at the sounds of breakage and impact and a man in a light pink polo shirt sweated dark stains tinder his arms.

The storm blew itself out in the late afternoon and finally the guests wandered out of the restaurant, dispersing; they emerged into the half-light, into a patter of light rain. In twos and threes they walked quietly over the wet tiles and paved paths to their rooms and their cabins.

He smelled soil and humus and warmth made the air heavy over his shoulders. A few trees were down and lay across tennis courts but most of the buildings looked the same. He kicked a sodden raft of palm fronds from a doorway of a scuba shack near the beach and saw the basement had been inundated; above the thatch roof was in tatters, nothing left but the frame.

Only the gardens had fared poorly. They were flooded and muddy, bushes uprooted, flowerbeds flattened or washed out. And without its sculpted gardens the resort lost its stateliness, its reserve, even its authority. It was a victim now, a shabby and disordered outpost that was barely secure.

He went back to the crowded lobby to ask about the telephone. Waiters and cleaning staff were leaving in droves, piling into beat-up vans and buses and jeeps to ride the rutted roads home, even to walk. The manager threatened them. But there were reports of devastation in the nearby town of huts and shanties where most of them lived. They had to go.

"We will be understaffed throughout the rest of the dinner hour," said the receptionist to T. "We regret this deeply."

The power was out, which they said was temporary; the generator would soon come online again. At the door to the lobby a waiter handed out candles.

No one was available to ferry him to his island; no one could be reached by telephone because the lines were down. He went to his room with his candle and his opened bottle of wine; he lay on the bed with the door open to the wet dusk, the candle guttering. He heard the other guests traipsing by, the snatches of their conversation and the drip of palm fronds.