How the Dead Dream (11 page)

The sand was full of fathers in bathing suits, sleeping; he was the only one awake, with fathers all around him. He did not wear a bathing suit but a body cast, and none of the sun or the sand reached his skin. In the cast he was cool. He felt no need for movement.

The tide was so far out that the low white line of the waves breaking was barely visible on the horizon. Between him and the sea the sand was hilly with dunes, and yet past it he could still see the wide flat ocean. Everywhere fathers were dreaming in the warm sun, the fathers who

had once been little boys, running; the sun that made them gleam. Crabs sidled up to them and wasps landed on their lax bodies.

No, wait. Were the fathers asleep?

Their eyes were wide open. They were there, gold and massive, but they saw nothing.

The fathers lay still, their faces toward the sky: until the wind passed a hand over all of their eyes, closing them.

3

His first houses went up almost overnight—slab, frame, roof, electrical and plumbing, drywall, finish and landscaping— fast and cheap, designed not to last but to become obsolete. Retired people moved in, gathering in the desert from cold northern suburbs. In his downtime he presided.

He strolled alongside the tennis courts, watching the vigorous play of sweating players through the green mesh and idly calculating the probability of atrial fibrillation. When she did not have other obligations Beth accompanied him, and together they sat in the Mercedes and purred along the newly minted neighborhoods as the sun rose, observing the early risers—a gawky racewalker in headphones, dog-owners with scoops and bags, brightly dressed matrons walking in twos as they chatted nasally. Beth liked to ride with him, either because she was captured, as he was, by the completion of this beginning, this forecast of greater growth, or because she was content to be in his company. She gazed out her rolled-down window, idly drumming her French-manicured

fingers on the shining wood panel of the car door, the breeze slightly moving stray tendrils of her black hair. Pulling around the bottom of a cul-de-sac he admired the smooth action of garage doors rolling upward to disgorge shining sedans; he cast his eyes over sculpted xeriscape bushes in the rock gardens, the well-hidden spigots that watered them. There was no better way to behold this neatly emerging landscape than from behind the clean windshield of the 190, which framed external scenes and kept them at a perfect distance.

There was a tidiness to his circuit, and satisfaction filled him from bottom to top like liquid. His profit was projected and beyond even that profit—the perfect and curtained margin that made liberty—here was a good settlement; here was a small country, planned step by step and now filled with citizens. It was a modest piece in a patchwork, stitched into the vast fabric by roads and cables and aqueducts, by cheap gasoline and abundant rubber and lumber from the northwest, by the dominance of car companies, the willingness to drain lakes and dam rivers, the invention of Freon and computers and urea formaldehyde. This was the apogee of civilization.

And he was, in part, a designer of the lives that would wind down and likely end here—strange position, insignificant he knew to anyone but him. But out of his intention had sprung the last rooms, the final gardens.

If he was harried he liked to force a pause in his day and sit down in the dimness of the community center weight room, seldom used, where he could look through the glass wall at the older women in their water aerobics class. The angle of their swim-capped heads above the water’s surface brought him a sense of calm. He thought how the world would feel if it were populated solely by elderly women—a

world of forbearance, where all touches were careful. Once they had given birth, raised children, worked, but now all of that was behind them. Now they swam. Their heads cocked, they waited patiently for instructions.

His father never called and finally it was Beth who took his mother aside. He was not there but he heard about it later: the two of them walked together on the cliffs over the beach, on the emerald-green grass that grew under the palms. Beth held his mother’s arm, as she often did when they walked, and spoke clearly and carefully. Did she want to sit down? Here was a bench, and it was clean. Sit down. There. Now. This was going to be difficult; this was not easy.

His mother looked at Beth, searching her face for something, then turned away and nodded absently. She came to acceptance slowly: the worst had already passed. In the ensuing months the only sign that she knew the facts of the case was the occasional vague reference, in her speech, to
your father’s new lifestyle
, his
new identity
.

His father’s defection was more forgivable now, in fact, for now his mother was no longer a failed wife and therefore a failed woman but merely a woman who had once been married to a failed man.

At the office, over coffee and donuts, Julie announced she was leaving to work on a worm farm in Guatemala. She had been accepted by the Peace Corps.

“Congratulations,” said T. “Good for you!” said Susan.

“I didn’t know you had an interest in worms,” said T. “It’s more the people,” said Julie. “They’re underprivileged.

It’s about helping them to realize their full development potential.”

“Will you actually be touching them?” asked Susan.

“The people?” asked Julie. “The worms,” said Susan.

“I think you wear rubber gloves,” said Julie. “And a dust mask. There can be airborne illnesses, like Legionnaires’ disease.”

“Isn’t that the one where you cough up blood and die?” asked Susan.

“Hardly ever,” said Julie. “Still,” said Susan.

T. handed her a coffee made the way she liked it, almost white with cream. “Better you than me.”

And yet he thought of her, after she left his employ, recalled her with an impulse that was almost paternal.

•

Beth took his mother out shopping on a Saturday afternoon. He watched them leave from the steps of his building’s lobby. Beth led the older woman carefully to her car—his mother, for some reason, walking unsteadily. He felt grateful, felt pulled toward them, but stayed where he was.

At the time his mother was freshly withdrawn from the driving economy. Upon receiving a citation for weaving across the median—applying lipstick, as it turned out, while gazing into the rearview mirror—she had been forced to attend traffic school, where a drill-sergeant type showed videotapes of the gruesome aftermath of high-speed collisions.

He looked at Beth steadily across the lawn and the light around them was nearly solid, the air immaculate: he felt his arms rising toward her, although he was not moving.

After they pulled away from the curb he realized Angela had forgotten her crucifix. It was a small wooden crucifix that usually hung from his own rearview mirror; she had affixed it there over his protest, because she often rode with him and insisted on having it with her when she did. He did not like his car decorated with such talismans; a car interior should be smooth and well-ordered, not festooned with hopeful signals of the driver’s personality. Because then the two went to war, car and driver, and the car always won, with its seamless factory complexion. The driver looked like a child trying desperately to adorn.

He plucked a beer from the refrigerator, uncapped it and tipped it up; when he recalled this afterward it was as though he was still frozen there, fingertips poised against the cool condensation on the bottle’s shoulder. The afternoon unfurled before him in an air-conditioned calm. He had research laid out on his coffee table: a small jungle island off the Central American coast. It was a short boat trip from one of the longest coral reefs in the ocean, where lemon sharks cruised in the shallows to the delight of tourists. The water off the beach was warm, clear and shallow for hundreds of feet, and on the mainland nearby were lagoons and rainforests, ancient ruins and a burgeoning service industry.

This perusal, this moment of early planning in serenity when a project was unrealized, had always been delightful to him.

Then the ring of the telephone interrupted his speculation and he heard his mother’s voice, faint and shaky. The tone of it made his stomach cramp as he ran out to the lobby and slammed down the stairs to the parking garage, fumbled with the car door. He drove with pins pricking behind his eyelids and his palms slipping against the steering wheel cover, sweating. When he got to the hospital he ran across the

parking lot, and out of breath and coughing said their names to a clerk. Finally someone led him to a room, or maybe he got there alone.

His mother sat up in a bed, a bandage on her forehead, one of her arms in a sling. She said a word he could not distinguish and he saw she was fine; he reached out a hand for her, stopped and dazzled by the white light from the window. He was unable to make out her facial expression then and he let his hand drop.

“But you’re OK, but how about her?” he asked, turning to the nurse who had led him in. “Where is she?”

The nurse took his arm and led him out again and he forgot everything as he walked behind her: as he followed her back it felt dutiful, though at the same time he was enslaved. He grabbed his hands together and felt their clammy pressure. Nothing was true except the white back with the vertical seam down the middle and the wall beside him. Was she in traction, her eyes bruised and fearing in a bandaged face?

It was not Beth he saw, however: it was a fat-stomached doctor who came at him from the side, seeming to materialize out of the blur of a door. The doctor took him by the shoulder and steered him into an alcove. There a plaster statue of Mary looked down on them with almond-shaped eyes; this was a Catholic hospital, he realized, a feature he had not noticed before despite the name of it, which was the name of a saint.

“I am very sorry to have to tell you,” said the doctor, a man with glasses and a receding chin, “that your wife did not make it. We did our best to resuscitate her but it was simply too late.”

He heard the doctor’s mistake: your wife. He did not correct it. His ears were ringing. He was choking and his knees buckled. His head was squeezed, itched and stung. The

doctor and the nurse had him; they led him to a cot in a room and sat him on it, his head bent between his bent legs. There was a rush of sound, dense walls around him but no support for his arms; then his bowels loosened and he had to find a toilet. He was not sure he could make it.

When he came out of the bathroom, hands wet and teeth chattering, they were both still waiting. The teeth chattered out of control; his jaw was not his own. He thought his eyeballs might be jarred loose. It was comical, probably; it was idiotic. He could not prevent it. They took him back to his mother’s room, where the nurse pulled up a chair beside her bed for him. But he could not sit down again. He stood holding the metal end of his mother’s bed, dizzy but insistent. He waited for his jaw to stop its manic trembling.

“Accident?” he heard himself say finally, part of him. He saw his mother shake her head.

“She collapsed,” said his mother, and began to cry again. “At the wheel. We ran up on the curb and we stopped . . .”

“We are not one-hundred percent certain yet,” said the doctor gently, a hand on his arm again, patting, “and we will have more to tell you later, but I believe the cardiac event may have been caused by a condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia.”

“But she’s healthy,” said T. faintly, without force. His mother nodded eagerly, as though together they could persuade the doctor to change his mind. “She goes to the gym.”

“This is a condition that sometimes afflicts young athletes, for instance,” said the doctor. “It causes fibrosis of the heart muscle and a susceptibility to fatal cardiac arrhythmias and is rarely diagnosed. Often the first sign we have of a patient’s condition, with ARVD, is sudden cardiac death.”

He was not sure where to keep his body. Where was it supposed to go? His arms felt very long, but with no hands: where were all the fingers? His cheeks tingled.

At the window was a tree and a wall, he saw, staring. They were several floors off the ground; it could be six, he thought, or two. He noticed the tree. That should be a clue . . . or maybe not. He imagined the tree floating.

“It’s instantaneous. She would not have been aware of what was happening,” went on the doctor. “It’s very, very rapid. You don’t have to worry about suffering. She was already gone by the time the paramedics got there. Probably by the time the car stopped. Would you like to see her? You can see her if you want to.”

“Oh,” said T. He shook his head, or maybe by accident he was nodding. He felt a chill spike through him, up from the soles of his feet. His face was hot but the middle of him felt icy. He shivered.

“Come with me,” said the nurse, and the doctor separated from them at the door.

He followed her white back again and thought he would never not be following it; almost hoped. It would guide him. Keep in line, he thought, stay in line . . . it was all he could do, all he would ever do.

They turned a corner and another one. People were shapeless as they passed him, wretched. The dreadful homeliness of the race. A laugh, another door opened, and there on the table was a covered woman, paper blanket all the way up to her neck. He moved closer without trying.

He was directly above the face now and something was unnatural about it—the skin was sallow, the full cheekbones too sharp. He had never seen them so sharp. And the jaw looked weak, as though it had collapsed toward the chest. Unhinged. The certainty came to him, almost as a

relief, that the face was shaped wrong, so it could not be her.

He leaned over and touched the cheek, which was not cool but tepid. Lukewarm. Then he felt squeezing and fluttering in his chest, and caved in.

•

He got home by himself, he never knew how, and lay there in the sheets. After the first night his mother came in, on the edge of his vision like a hair trembling at the corner of a projected screen. She had a broken arm and scraped face, but he barely saw them. Time was foreign for many days, the texture of time and all things alien in their existence, at once strange and dull. He was flattened, pinned on his bed.