Lydia Millet: How the Dead Dream

Whenever his mother was visiting he took her to the town's only Catholic church for Sunday Mass, and for her devotions every evening when the church was empty. She went to church more now that he was gone, she told him. Once they sat in a pew near the front, and he watched her face as she looked up at the stained glass, where Jesus was pictured in a triptych. On one side he was an infant in the arms of his mother; on the other he was greeting Mary again in his thirty-fourth year, on the way to Golgotha bowed down under the weight of the cross.

In the tall, central window he was crucified and dying. His crown of thorns had been jauntily fashioned, thought T., bored and ruminating. His knees bled in perfect symmetry.

"Look at the Blessed Virgin," whispered his mother. "Look at her eyes. Her face is sad even when he's a baby. You see? It's just as sad as it is in the fourth station, when she meets him going to be crucified. She's always sad, sad and wise. The sadness on the Via Dolorosa is the part I've never believed."

"You don't believe she was sad?"

"A mother wouldn't be sad if she saw her son in the street like that. On the way to his death at the hands of tyrants, and suffering? With blood running down his face from the terrible thorns? Even if she knew it was for the glory of God and for the salvation of every soul the heavens could ever hold. A mother would never be sad, T. A mother would be screaming."

"But she wasn't any mother. She was the mother of God. Wasn't she?"

"Even the mother of God. There's only one explanation, dear. The Blessed Mother was serene because she was gone. The second she saw him like that she was gone forever."

The next morning his parents left for the airport, his mother clutching her purse close to her side. She kissed him quickly on both cheeks before she got into the rental car, her lips cool.

When he was a toddler, a young boy, even an adolescent she had fastened to his every act: how urgent her love had been, how full. There had been no difference between them, his mother and a refuge.

But in the past few years her interest had diminished until it seemed almost to equal her interest in other persons, until he was merely another among them. In ceasing to be a child, he thought, he had disappointed her so fully that she came to believe he was someone else entirely. With this new person she could have civil conversations; with this person she could walk, eat, or drive. But he was no longer hers and due to that she was no longer his either.

Falling asleep at night or walking down a deserted street, craning his neck to look up at the dizzying stars, he made his mind busy by leaving the present behind and situating himself in a moment that was yet to be. As a child he had lived in the present; now he lived in the future; soon, how soon he would live in the past, an older man nostalgic and nodding.

And yet each was its own delight, each relation to time. In the first long moment of life nothing was recognized beyond the present; there was no past to look back to and no idea of the future yet. In the second moment the present was shed in favor of a future that hovered but never arrived, the promise of a realized self; and then that moment passed too. In the third moment, as life declined, the future disappeared, the present was diminished, and all that remained was the past. He was now in the lucky moment of forwardness-this time now-where seeing the future dawn was how he was sustained.

Step forward, he told himself, step, step, step, daily into the night, nightly into the day! The unknown shimmers there. There was a paradise still to come.

He might wonder how much velocity should guide him and how much calculation; he might wonder this with deliberation, a delicious mulling. It was part of the reward to dwell on strategy. Then, for a moment, it would strike him that the future was sad.

He had already lost something, and in any future it would still be missing-if not his mother's love, then the fierceness of it. It could not be called back.

But by the square light of day he did not dwell on this or even recall it. Fleetingly it would come to him, as he did something else: not all things could be perfectly arranged; not all things were correctible.

This gave him a start of recognition. Then it passed.

During his four years in college-his only vices coffee, a stiff scotch and soda some evenings before dinner, and the occasional cigar-he produced the results he desired, and was gratified to see how effort and control could yield steady returns. This was no myth; it was a law of nature.

He studied the words of Adam Smith and William Jennings Bryan and even J. Paul Getty, the parent of such phrases as "The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights." He read old texts with great pleasure, particularly those written by certain stalwart Puritans whose parsimony seemed born of a voluptuous and secret greed. He combed through the texts for signs of this sinful covetousness-a pornography of spirit, for nothing was more of a guilty pleasure than the greed of those who believed themselves righteous. He enjoyed the sermons of clergymen like John Wesley, whom he understood to have advised his flock it was by definition quite impossible to serve their God and mammon both-much as no color could be at once pure black and white-and thus no qualms of ethics should stand in the way of a good Christian man who wished to amass great wealth.

Surely little remained of the Puritan legacy of prudish rectitude, he thought: surely this was now a country of excess, gluttony, lust, and sloth; surely this had grown into a land where obesity reigned and even the poor moved ponderously down the street on big thighs that rubbed fatly together. What had become of the pilgrims' gaunt and stingy oversight? He knew in part it was the visionary genius of enterprising men, but such entrepreneurs were only the tools of a hungry culture. For the descendants of those gray, upright pioneers had cherished cravings for beef patties with ketchup, deep-fried chicken and vats of ice cream, chemically scented and dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and billions upon billions of gallons of soda. Their thirst had never been quite slaked and so they never finished drinking; and this was the market in all its streamlined functionality-which, precisely where the supply and the demand curves crossed, had swiftly produced a nation of paralyzed giants, fallen across their couches much as soldiers on the field of battle, their arteries hard, their softened hearts failing.

The market made a fool of you by giving you what you wanted. But this did not make him resent it; it merely earned his respect. From the day you were born you were called upon to discern what to choose.

If Ian Van Heysen and the other brothers did not often show him that capacity he had so treasured a mere ten years before-namely the tending of all people toward the enigmatic greatness suggested by a dollar bill-they could not be blamed for it. There were times when he stooped to irritation; that he should be the steward of such a wayward flock was occasionally a burden.

But they were children with handicaps, though these handicaps were not always visible: ease, abundance, overstimulation. He thought of their tendencies toward indolence and abuse as a temporary run through the gauntlet of privilege; they would grow out of their puckishness all too soon. For they were correct in believing this was their last hurrah, and most of them would age fast once the halls of the university pulled away behind them. He himself was disposed to a persistent cheerfulness that flew in the face of his rationality; he knew how fortunate he was. He had always been purposeful. But he could see in the faces of others how many were not so disposed, and likely never would be.