Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

Mastery was only a moment in the mind-of other men, of yourself. Like the stock market, a consensus of opinion, a pure abstraction; nothing to the tsunamis, the boiling sun, the plate tectonics. The social compact was abstractionroads, buildings, and a temporary agreement about behavior. That was it. The matter beneath it all was what lasted, and meanwhile, always, the world of people was on the edge of dissolution.

Soon, on a flimsy bed between thin walls, he had drained the whole bottle of wine.

In the morning he waited in line in front of the hotel. It was hard to press himself through the crowds; there was a second wave of staff leaving, those who had worked through the night and were now desperate. Vans and trucks left without him again and again. Finally money talked, and he joined a cook and two maids in a beat-up four-wheel-drive taxi.

The dirt roads were deeply braided with new ditches. Cables lay across them, cars were mired deep in the drying mud, and the taxi driver careened off the road at high speed whenever there was an obstacle, splattering mud that browned out the rear windows and the windshield. T. had to get out and wipe the windshield for him whenever they achieved dry ground and could stop the car without sinking. Then they started up again and the taxi lurched over holes and debris, leaving deep gouges in lawns that were already swamped. When they got to their destination they were still nowhere, because the center of the town was only a series of piles in a field of mud. It looked like a landfill.

He glanced sidelong at the driver, who was stony. In the back one of the young chambermaids started to cry, and the other put an arm around her shoulders. The cook stared out the window and shook his head.

Huts were mostly collapsed, wood and plastic and metal piled on the wet ground. Here or there a lone stilt or two leaned forlornly where a building had been. Water ran across the road in what looked like a natural stream, it was so deep and wide. As he got out of the taxi he smelled sewage; people wandered wet and dirty, mothers with their babies on their backs, men shirtless and shoeless and carrying piles of belongings, shovels and jugs of water. Once the beach had been hidden from the road by dwellings but now he could see straight through where these buildings had been, straight out through a hole to the sea. There had been no trees among the shanties, no source of shade but the huts themselves, so now there was emptiness.

He set off on foot toward Marlo's house over piles of twisted rebar and cinderblock and streams of sewage, sinking into the mud past his ankles until his shoes and socks were boots of caked mud. He stopped to help a group of women lift a piece of cement wall off a chicken coop: the chickens inside were flattened, dirty white pads of feathers and beaks and talons. He wondered where the blood was.

After a while, a few false turns and circles, he saw the house ahead of him, intact. Everywhere else had been motion, the bustle and hurry of urgency: but Marlo's house seemed curiously still. In the yard beside it a black goat stood munching flowers, almost in slow motion. For a second he gazed at the goat as though both of them were similarly idle, similarly suspended. Then he broke the stare and started walking again. A fencepost had fallen down and the fence was sagging.

He knocked on the front door and waited and he knocked again. He was turning away when it finally opened, and a small girl in a red dress was looking tip at him.

"Hola. Yo soy Tomas," he said, in his rudimentary Spanish. It was hard to know what to speak: some of them preferred English, some Spanish, some spoke English Creole or Maya or a language called Garifuna. "Esta Mario aqui?"

"Papi," called the child, turning.

Mario stepped out from a door and picked her up; he held her as he spoke to T. He was different. For once he did not smile.

"Are you-are you OK here?"

"It is my son," said Marlo, in a monotone. "He was out on a boat. He has not returned."

"He might have had to put in somewhere," offered T. "Right? One of the atolls, or an island? Waiting till the storm passed?"

"He was at one of the atolls, where they take the tour boats," said Marlo. "They radioed in. They found his boat. But it was upside down. And he was not inside."

T. did not find words; he was inadequate.

"I don't want to intrude," he said.

"Come in. Please. Have coffee."

Marlo's wife sat with three teenage girls on the couch in their living room. They stood and smiled faintly when he entered, polite and miserable.

"The other boys, they are all looking for Javi," said Marlo.

"I'm very, very sorry for your situation today," said T., and Mario translated. His wife bowed her head slightly and went into the kitchen, where she busied herself at the stove. The girls stood and followed her save the toddler on Marlo's lap, who played with a necklace of red and orange beads.

"Is there anything I can do? To help the search?"

Mario shook his head.

"Let me know. The one thing I can offer is money. If that would help at all. To mobilize a larger search, anything. To help find him."

"That is generous, Tomas. But no, no thank you."

There was a glaze over Marlo's eyes; he was kind but not there.

"I just wanted you to know."

"Later, I will talk to Paolo," said Marlo, and nodded. "He will take you out in the boat. Maybe you want to leave after that, and come back other times. When the storm is cleaned up.

"What I want," said T., directly as he thought it, "is a guide. I want a guide with a good boat to take me up the river, to the preserve where the jaguars live."

"Jaguars?" asked Marlo, surprised.

His wife brought them small cups of coffee on an enamel tray. One of the girls in the kitchen burst into tears and the toddler turned in her father's lap to gaze at her sister.

"I am so sorry," he said again, awkwardly.

As the boat curved around the end of the island and his beach hove into view he saw the tall trees were down. He was looking at their root balls, straggly brown masses along the sand. He could see at least three thick trunks that had fallen across the white walls, caving them in.

The white sand was mixed with brown again.

"It's totaled," he said to Paolo the boatman. "I can see from here. I don't need to go there now. Go ahead, turn the boat. Turn the boat!"

They cut a wide U and headed back to the mainland. He could not force himself to look over his shoulder.

At the hotel he gathered his belongings; he had a couple of sweatshirts and a pair of good boots, but no tent or tarp or sleeping bag. He had very little. He lent his hotel room to the family of the maid who had cried in the taxi. Eight of them would stay in it-an old woman, five children, and the maid and her husband-along with the next-door suite, which he rented for them. They would stay there while the husband and the oldest son rebuilt their own two-room house; they would eat at the hotel restaurant on his tab, because they did not have transportation into town to buy groceries. It would help to assuage his conscience when he left the ruins.

He called his mother from a satellite phone at a medical clinic and got Vera, who went to look for her. There was a delay with the phone that made conversation desultory.

"Who is this?" came his mother's voice, wavering.

"It's T. Remember me?"

"— I can't hear them," he heard her complain to Vera. "It's staticky. It has an echo on it."

Vera took the phone again.

"She's having trouble hearing you," said Vera.

"We had a hurricane here," he said, enunciating. "I would have called sooner. There was a storm. It destroyed my new project."