Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

He recalled all these people as an elegy, since he was removed from them. Not only now, he thought, but forever. He might still seek people out, talk to them-of course he would, they were part of him-but his eyes would be fixed on a point beyond them. His craftiness in boyhood, his singleminded enterprise-all was for the sake of gain, for gain was his religion, simple and stunning. No grown man could love accumulation as fully as a boy did. Indeed he never recaptured the joy of that love, and it passed out of his grasp.

And the infrastructure: he had drawn cities, first, and plastered his walls with them; he had built cities of Legos and lined the shelves of his room with their red platforms, their blue and yellow rectangular monoliths. There were Lego helipads, gas stations. Then he made his parents buy him miniature trees, tiny street signs, other items that architects used to build their dioramas, and built his own replicas from kits-the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore. He had hastily disassembled the babyish Lego structures in favor of these, had enlisted his father's help in lighting them so that the buildings of state cast long shadows, and as he slept they towered over him.

With the sun setting at his back he dropped his pack on a rippled hump of sand that rose out of the river. The river must be low: at times the sand bar was underwater, he could see from the dark contours. Now it was dry. It had not rained since Delonn was alive, since he became alone. Even the rain had forsaken him. Maybe he could tempt it; he would use only the mosquito net for shelter instead of his tent. Let the rain come, he would welcome it. He draped it over a jutting tree limb and propped it up from beneath with four long sticks. Fit for a dignitary, he thought. He could sit underneath and watch the flow of the river as the sun went down.

Before he retired into the shelter he took a bath and stood in shallow water in sunlight until he dripped dry. His cut legs stung but he was pleased to be washed. Dusk fell over the river with him sitting on his sleeping pad behind the translucent white screen, his pack and the rest of his meager belongings arrayed around him. He had not wanted to put his clean self back into the filthy army pants; instead he had washed them and hung them on the tree limb beside his netting. He sat wrapped in the sheet. It was a balmy night. He flipped the switch on the flashlight and saw the bulb dim away to nothing.

Scrounging in the pack he found a packet of soup powder, which he tipped into his mouth; stale crackers, which he gobbled. And then: the plastic flask of whiskey! He shook it: still an ounce or two left. He had forgotten it completely. Thanksgiving.

He drank and watched the light of the sky change. If he were not so hungry, he thought, he could almost be happy here. He had left the settlements now, all the old geographies. For so many years they had been the only thing; you did what you did and whatever it was consumed you, as though your actions were the heart of experience. As though without a series of actions there would be no story of your life.

Those who loved stories also loved the human, to live in cities where there was nothing but men and their actions as far as the eye could see. Once it had been believed that the sun revolved around the earth; now this was ridiculed as myopic, yet almost the same belief persisted. The sun might be the center of the planets and then the sun might be only one star among galaxies of them: but when it came to meaning, when it came to being, in fact, all the constellations still revolved around men.

He had been drawn to cities, had considered no alternatives-cities and buildings, buildings and institutions. The lights across the continent. But what if, from his childhood on, he had imagined not the lights but the spaces between them? He would do so now, to make up for all the years behind him.

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan-it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution-tiger, tiger, burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will… they could never be known in every detail and they never should be.

When time moved, mountains rose from the plains and the miracles multiplied, infinitely lovely. The miracles were the beasts.

Lying on his back, gazing up past the tip of the bough at the spectrum from blue to black in the sky, he heard a clinking and scraping off to his right.

He sat up abruptly. White in the dimness, white bearing down on him. It was the boat. It floated downriver.

His bad knots.

He dropped the flask and tussled with the mosquito net: the boat was approaching rapidly. It was almost already there, almost at the sand bar. Was it not his duty to scramble aboard? Was it not what he was supposed to do?

He pulled the netting up and ducked through, the sheet falling around him; naked and tottering he stood on the edge of the sand bar, his feet sinking. The prow loomed past him: he splashed out into the water and grabbed the side, tried to heave himself up: he was clinging, legs thrashing, looking down into the boat, halfway over the side. His feet trailed in the water. He could not get in: the boat was still moving fast: over the side he could see.

Delonn was not inside. The yellow bundle was not there at all.

Then something sharp hit his back and the shock made his fingers slip off the gunnel. He fell and sank under, nose full of water: he had bashed into a tree. Splashing and choking he retreated onto his sand bar, the boat a light wraith as it moved off down the river, faint and fainter, glowing in the darkness and fading away. He was breathing hard. The branch had gouged his back. And he was being bitten savagely by insects: he shook himself off and ducked back under the net.

How could Delonn have been moved?

Something must have moved him.

Now the boat would sail into the delta like a ghost ship; the boat would arrive and be empty of both of them. He had missed it.

He sat back down beneath the net; he brushed the wet sand off his calves and ankles. The boat was out of his reach for good, he knew, trembling with the suddenness of it: but it was all right, actually. It was right. Delonn had loved the river and the forest. Delonn would not have minded staying there, disseminated among the elements that he knew. Let the vessel float, let it vanish quietly. He was leaving all that; he was letting it go.

He thought of his mother. She let things go, he thought, but not because she chose to. And yet there was something right in her devotions, despite their idiosyncrasies. Despite the fact that the origin story was all about people and their passion and their sex, a tale in which animals and the rest of creation were window dressing at best… her story was a romance. But at least she had a love interest other than herself.

And the mother of God knew how to put herself second. Not second to men, though some might see it that way, but second to everything.

He had begun by idolizing the men, he saw now. Not so much his own father, who had been of limited interest to him, but the fathers of nations. It had been natural to begin with these men, wanting to emulate them, wanting to walk, as they did, wearing the luminous cloaks of their authority… no boy wanted to imitate his mother. No boy aspired to that yielding, self-effacing kindness, that quality of service. Boys wanted either to break things or to build them. But now it was his mother who stayed with him, not for what she was to others but for what she had always been to him alone, one small being where all her affection was concentrated-for how she had loved when it mattered most.