How the Dead Dream

3

His first houses went up almost overnight-slab, frame, roof, electrical and plumbing, drywall, finish and landscapingfast 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, dogowners 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 fall 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 Judie. "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 highspeed 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 fall 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.

He heard his mother explain her condition to him. Once or twice she described the minor accident that had occurred when Beth had lost consciousness. He could not stand to listen.

She sat on the bed and felt concerned-he knew this, though he closed his eyes and could not bring himself to say anything-and twice a day she made him food and brought it in to him on a tray. It rested on the nightstand beside the Mass cards that piled up there, which she also brought to him: apparently Masses were being said for Beth. Then the food was cold and limp and she took it away again. He drank water from time to time, finding a glass in his hand with ice cubes that clicked against it thinly, but nothing else entered him. He had the suspicion that cogs were spinning, the universe beyond his walls was functioning and he was not, but he had no choice. His dog lay on the bed alongside, jumping down periodically to eat from her bowl or when his mother offered to walk her.

His mother filled and refilled the dog's bowl; it had been moved from the kitchen to the bedroom and sat dirtily in the corner, brown pebbles of food scattered on newspaper on the floor around it. He stared at the grimy bowl as he stared at all of it.

Presently the cleaning woman came and his mother talked to her softly in a faraway room. Was she even using words? It was as though the women were speaking in hums, tonal variations with no alphabet.

When he broke from the weight that held him down, rarely, he was conscious of resentment. Anger rose through him and was trapped at his throat, unable to exit. Once he thought: It should have been her! and pulsed irritation in his mother's direction, silently. She was older. She had lived more and anyway now she was mostly a shadow; in a bathtub she had forfeited all her rights, all her rights with that stupid gesture. He did not tell her this only because his tongue would not move in his mouth. But sometimes he wished to lash out. She had forgotten the crucifix, she had brought it on them. She might as well have killed her.

Then the coldness of this and its meanness struck him and pressed him even further down, now in a well of shame as well as self-pity. Sorry sorry sorry, he thought pathetically to his mother in a cracked-open beg of a thought. He forgave her for everything and wished that she would forgive him.

He sank and he struggled, felt his body lighten when the tear ducts were empty. Then he grew heavy again and collapsed into the mattress, a sinking gray heft. He slept and slept on and learned to despise the surfaces of his room, the walls and the ceiling and the curtains: and his room was only a substitute for the rest of it, which he loathed even more.

Finally his mother brought in a doctor and the doctor forced him to eat. The doctor gave him a shot, a pill. He shook his head when the doctor first sat with him but gave in when his stomach began to ache with a new ferocity. At first he could not get the food down his throat but with repetition he was able to swallow it. He had to sit up against the pillows to eat, and sitting up he saw his legs and feet extending below his torso and his underwear and barely recognized them. They had lost muscle, he thought, they were pale.

When the doctor had left, and his mother after, he scanned his room languidly and noticed his wallet on the nightstand. He opened it with a dull lassitude, removed a single and traced his fingers over its minuscule ridges. The lines on Washington's brow impressed him particularly, the curved precision of their alignment. Washington was well presentedbetter, surely, than he had been in life, with greater authority. T. felt a wash of nostalgia.

He did not possess a lithograph of Beth, of course. But this was what he needed, a dollar bill that preserved a particular aspect, that enshrined a moment of bearing… photographs would present a problem. He could not control them, her expressions in them-how casual they had been, flippant almost, his quick shots, few and far between. All he had was these thoughtless snapshots now, when what he needed was a definitive image, an image that spoke to posterity. An image that embodied acceptance, contentment. If he looked through the photographs for such a representation he would be at the gravest risk. What if the expression was unsure, frightened? This could not be allowed. He could not stand to see that. He had to see her one way and one way only: smiling ruefully and shaking her head.

Because this attitude, her smiling and shaking her headalmost shrugging-was a powerful reassurance. In a lithograph, of course, the motion of the headshake could not be conveyed, and he would have to settle for a knowing smile, a smile at once wise and playful. It would serve to project her contentment over time, her self-containment, not unlike, for example, the Mona Lisa's.

Thinking of her as she shook her head, smiling ruefully, he saw that she accepted and even embraced the great levelness of all things.

One morning his mother told him the burial had already taken place. Beth's mother had flown in and flown out again; she had taken her daughter's body back to the desert, where the family came from, and had a funeral there. He would never attend the funeral. He had missed it.

"It was just a few people," she said. "Very simple, very brief. The mother was heavily sedated."

He thought he would snap. He had the sense of a white snap above his head, the air cracking. He tilted, then was steady again. She was gone. He would have to get up.

He asked his mother to leave so that he could get dressed. She smiled brightly, her face infused with relief. He was surprised that he noticed it. When she closed the bedroom door behind her he could not move at first, but then he remembered the shoulders and the arms and the hands and saw Beth put her hand on her hip and shake her head ruefully, resigned but temperate. She let all of it pass, the wide well of grief was subsumed in her rueful acceptance.

She even laughed!-.

He stood unsteadily, dizzy, beside the bed. He tottered to the bathroom on wavering knees. The dog stood at the bathroom door, head cocked quizzically. He was sorry the dog had been so neglected. He put out a hand to pet her but she did not move quite near enough for him to reach without stretching. Later, he thought. He dropped his shirt and bent to peel off his pants. Hot water fell on his head.

Even the clean clothing was heavy when he dressed-he could not choose the elements, only put on what was nearest. He opened a drawer and found the topmost shirt where it lay, and the first pair of pants beside it. Walking too was a slog through thickness. Still he persisted, down the stairs to face his mother in the living room, who smiled uncertainly.

"Well," she said. "Be safe and come right home. I'll make you a sandwich."

All sandwiches everywhere were absurd; the very idea of a sandwich was ludicrous. How was it that people did not laugh at them?

But he did not mention this.

"It's OK," he said with difficulty, pushing the words forward. "I'm OK. You don't need to wait here. You can go home and rest. I will eat."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

He waited till she left to go out of the apartment himself. He closed the door on the dog's expectant face.

"And I'll walk you later," he said, when the door was already closed.

He was overcome by inertia. He turned away from the door without locking it; let anyone steal anything they wanted. If he walked in on the thieves he would only stare at them.

In the elevator he gazed at the floor buttons, SB B L 2 3 4. Where his car was he did not know. Was his car even here? Tentatively he reached a finger out and touched B.

A small nudge with the pad of his finger, that was all, but Beth could not do it.

He sobbed once and then caught it. Someone was getting on, an alert little girl with a backpack slung over one shoulder.

"Hi," she said, and he nodded. "Lobby, please."

He raised his hand to hit L but the arm, crooked and immobile, would not move fast enough. It was almost frozen.

The elevator began to descend, down through 2, and the girl, impatient, reached out beneath his hand and tapped the button herself.

"Are you physically handicapped?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Oh," said the girl, and nodded wisely. "Retarded."

He almost smiled but his face would not obey. The girl looked at him with sympathy, then quickly reached out and took his hand. She had a light, sweaty touch.

"It's OK," she said. "My cousin's a retard too."

Then the doors opened and she let go and got off.

He was giddy for a second as the doors closed after her. He could almost take the sensation for happiness. He kept his eyes on the fine horizontal score marks along the stainless steel surface. Out of his sight behind the elevator doors the little girl walked across the lobby; she went out the front door.

She would have loved you, he thought. Would she have loved you?

First she was here, then it could never be known.

At the office a well-dressed young man with wavy hair stood in front of him. He considered turning away again, but even that was too hard. Susan was out of sight. He walked past the young man at the front desk without speaking.

"Excuse me," said the man. "Excuse me. You can't go in there!"

"My office."

"What? Sir, you can't just go in there."

The young man got up and hovered beside him. He wore a strong aftershave.

"Mine. My office."

"Oh. Oh, I-sorry."

He could not wait; he passed by. He opened his door and closed it in the young man's face. The young man was doglike. For some reason neither people nor dogs expected you to close doors in their faces.

He did not intend rudeness, but it was crucial to raise the barrier speedily. With utmost speed.

"I'm very sorry for your loss," said the young man from the other side. The muffled voice trailed off.

Blinds were down on the windows. He walked over and raised one. Ocean in front, desk behind. Sturdy. The last time he had sat in the chair, behind the flat expanse of wood, she was living. He had not known the future; now he did. He was different in the full knowledge. He was different but the desk was the same.

Susan was there. She stood looking at him, her eyes filling.

"T.," she said, and came and put her arms around him.

He stood woodenly.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It must make it worse when people do this," and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Are you actually here to work? Or are you just checking in?"

"In," he said, and nodded.

"OK. Everything's fine. I needed help, so I hired Robert for Julie's position."

"OK," he said, nodding again.

He went toward the door again.

"You already leaving? You want me to walk with you?"

He shrugged but she took his arm anyway and gently led him.

He went back to work, faded and listless but with the rudiments of function. His mother's psychiatrist had prescribed him antidepressants, which he was directed not to combine with alcohol. The pills took effect slowly and as a result the days stayed thick for too long, his limbs hard to move.

But he worked in order to keep up the pace and the focus, worked hard and steadily, and gradually the usual texture of rooms crept back-rooms, buildings, streets and the sky. In the office he watched as elements of the lobby lost their alien particularity. Turning to background again were the file cabinet, the phone, the television with ticker tape running across the bottom. In his own office was a relief map of the Mojave project; he put his hands on the hollow ridges of the mountains and felt the plastic peaks digging into his palms. He closed his eyes and pretended he had a bird's-eye view. There was no longer excitement in it, it was a dull extension of the already dull routine, but of course he would continue.

A few weeks later her mother left a message. There were still some of his possessions in her daughter's apartment and the lease would run out at the end of the month. He did not wish to go-whatever remained there of his he would gladly forget-but he had to, because the mother asked.

He went over at nighttime, because though night was more difficult than daytime it was also, if he could fall asleep early, more quickly done. In the dark the hardwood floor shone from a streetlamp outside the window; standing in the doorway he flipped a switch and saw there was nothing there but a pile of white cardboard boxes, neatly stacked.

He was flattened; he did not want to do anything. He stood waiting for the inertia to pass. He waited to be changed but nothing arrived to change him. He felt only restlessness, increasing. Finally he went inside, because time was slow without movement. There was nothing else to be done.

At the back of an empty closet shelf in her bedroom, his fingers scrabbling in the film of dust over the cracked wood, he found something. He pulled it out to look at it: a white tennis sock, half-tucked into itself. It had the shape of being peeled off in haste, tossed aside. He sniffed it-a very slight smell, maybe worn for a single hour, for one run on the beach. She ran beside the water, where the sand was damp. He breathed in the scent. This was what he had left.

He held it close to his chest as he left the bedroom. He placed his key with deliberate care on the kitchen counter; he laid the sock gently atop a box and lifted them up.

His mother liked to walk the narrow residential streets to her new church, the streets with their small overgrown gardens. Sometimes when it was late she asked him to go with her. Once she asked on a mild night; as soon as he stepped out his door he could smell the ocean.

Both of them were silent as they walked. His mother let her hands trail along the trumpet-shaped flowers that grew on vines along so many picket fences, so many gates. She said in a low voice how she loved the flowers here, the flowers and the trees. Los Angeles was a paradise of exotics, wild with succulents and shrubs and flowers, cornucopias. She gazed down into a bed of twisted aloe and it occurred to him that she had been close to Beth too, yet he had never acknowledged this.

"You took care of me," he said. "But no one took care of you."

"Of course they did, dear," said his mother, and reached up to touch the cross at her neck.

He slung his arm around her shoulders as they walked.

"But T., when I'm gone you'll be all alone," she said, and looked up at him from the crook of his arm.

"What are you talking about?"

"When I'm gone."

"You think I'll never meet another woman, huh?" he asked lightly, and jerked his arm minutely as though threatening a headlock. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"It's not that, honey. You're very good-looking. The girls have always run after you, even if you didn't notice. I'm talking about your soul, T. I'm afraid you'll always be lonely in your soul. In the core of your being."

"Isn't everyone?"

"T.! Of course not. That's why we have Our Lady."

"I'm glad you have the Lady."

"But I want to know, T., when I go, that you're under her protection too. That you're not outside. In the cold."

"You don't need to worry."

"I don't think it's enough to be confirmed. I think you have to stay close to the Lady. You have to love her, T."

"You want me to go to confession?"

"I'm not talking about tonight. I'm talking about eternity."

"You worried about the IHOP again?"

She stopped and looked at him, her face very small. Behind her was a window into a brightly lit kitchen, ducks and chicks in a porcelain row.

"I want you to be with the angels, T. I want you to be with the saints."

He studied her face, the furrowed brow. Without him, he thought-the thought hurt-she had nothing.

"When I can't be here anymore, honey… it worries me. I mean I lie awake about this. I want you to be with the Holy Family."

"OK. OK. I'll do my best. You don't need to worry about me. Please, OK?"

She consented to turn and resume walking. They moved out of the window light.

At the church he released her as they went in; she genuflected and he followed suit. He could see no one else save a teenager seated at the far end of a rear pew reading something. His mother lit a votive candle and prayed; T. sat down near the front and leaned forward, his arms on the back of the pew in front of him, resting his forehead. He was tired; he almost dozed, and when he raised his head again another woman had come out of the confessional and walked past him and was speaking sharply to the teenage boy. They left with him gazing idly at them, the boy trailing behind sulkily.

As a child he had rarely been able to think of sins to confess; in his own view he had committed none. Often he had made up a sin, knowing it was expected of him. And penance was a fairly easy punishment, a good bargain.

The church felt Latino, he reflected, whereas Angela's home church back east had a certain Anglo-Saxon reserve, a certain genteel repression. Here the walls were crowded with paintings of the saints, flowers strewn at their feet; deep colors surrounded them, animals and children, and the blood of the martyrs flowed crimson. He rose from the pew and walked the perimeter, gazing at them. The Virgin of Guadalupe, in green and red; St. Francis, preaching to the birds; St. Michael, St. Elena, St. Jude. On the windows, again and again, the Madonna and child and in the background the light of God, rays emanating from the disk of the sun.

This was what made it what it was, made it clutch the hearts of women and ennobled their silent men in armchairs. This was what made it the first world religion, with its two billion adherents, and rendered dull by comparison the merits of the too-serene Buddhists, the Moslems without graven images, the secularists like him. Of all the stories it alone offered a drama morbid and luscious and sentimentalwounding that suffered in silence, cuckolds and miracles and sadism and murder, forgiving spirits who rose from the tomb and shimmered on through the years. It was a bestselling love story, beautiful sad mother and perfect child, and in the background the absent father, pure energy, who was apparently benevolent despite appearances to the contrary, who was present despite his apparent absence, good despite his apparent cruelty, right despite his apparent wrongness, and beyond that all-knowing.

What a vast permission.

His mother emerged from the confessional, walked in front of the altar and came toward him, her face lightened. From the beginning so little had been asked of his father, he thought, so little asked and even less given.

Beth had wished to be wrapped in a simple cotton shroud. She had not wanted a coffin. He knew this from a conversation they once had in passing, whose relevance he had dismissed out of hand-a conversation that had seemed at the time like a morbid fancy. Her family, he assumed, would not have known of this preference; no doubt she lay embalmed in cherry and velvet.

In the early morning he ushered his dog through his mother's front door and woke her up by mistake; she was sleeping on the living room couch, having taken a sudden dislike to her bed. He apologized for waking her and whispered to her bleary, sleep-dug face that he was leaving on a road trip. He did not say where.

He drove and slept and drove; he reached the desert city shortly before sunset. Even at dusk the air was hot, and to the east he could already see an orange moon rising over the mountains. The cemetery was a flat field with rows of gaudy flowers dotting the brown grass under palm trees and eucalyptus. It took him a long time to find her, and there was no grass or stone yet. Hers was one in a row of new mounds, each with a small nametag on a stake at one end.

Someone had left a bunch of plastic roses near the stake that bore her nametag, bright magenta with a dull green stem protruding, and beside them a small plastic Jesus on a cross. It was a garish Jesus with huge imploring eyes and light-blue tears flowing from them like prison tattoos. Roughly he grabbed the plastic Jesus and the roses and clamped them tinder his arm. All around him were corpses with plastic flowers: would the people buried here want these ugly tokens? Fake flowers defeated the purpose of remembering-fake flowers that lasted forever, making the effort of further visits unnecessary. The field of thousands of them….

On the other hand, plastic was eternal.

Most of these people had died of old age; they might not mind the shorthand of plastic. But she had not been old and so she was not the same as the old, who more deserved to be dead.

He looked around him once, swiftly. There was no one, only a man with a lawnmower in the far distance and the rush of traffic along the road beside him. He strode with the Jesus and roses toward a chain-link fence that marked the sides of a ditch. He hurled them both into it, toward the cavernous mouth of a pipe.

"There," he said aloud.

Now the Jesus lay at the edge of the pipe, face down.

He was about to turn but could not. The sight of the Jesus face-down was abject; it was wrong. He had to get it back.

He would have climbed the fence, but it was too high to step over and too weak to hold his weight if he climbed. Instead he ran along the fence, seeking an opening. There was a desperate urgency to him: every second the Jesus lay in the mud was pressing on him unbearably. He found a tear in the fence and stepped through into the ditch, where his feet went over candy wrappers and bottles until he could lean down and grab the Jesus out of the pipe. Saved! A save.

He held the Jesus tightly. Despite its garishness, or possibly because of it, he was terribly sorry. He would keep the Jesus close, where nothing bad could happen to it.

He was breathing hard and felt afraid of being caught there, someone emerging from the darkness of the pipe and seizing him.

He walked back to the grave and looked at the plastic stake, looked at the ground, barely believing her body was there. He was stepping on it… he would pretend she was not here at all. He could not think of her decomposing. He wished she was thin air. That was what she should be.

The base of the Jesus said MADE IN CHINA.

He took it back to the car with him.

Later at the motel he read a newspaper in bed, the same sentence four or five times before he realized he was failing to read it. What would she say, watching him here? She would see his newspaper open to the business pages; she would think he had already forgotten her; but even as he had this nagging thought he also registered, in the long smallprint columns, a P/E ratio of 45. He had been holding the stock far too long and it was grossly overvalued. Her death had diverted his attention from its meteoric rise-fortunate, since he would have already sold elsewise, having guessed it was peaking long before this.

She would be so injured! — to follow this train of thought. As consolation you thought of the dead and liked to assume them with you in some sense, present in the ether or the fiber of the mind. But then you had to admit that if they were in fact present, abstractly present as you wished to believe, if they were there in the molecules, their spirit in everything… what fresh horrors would they find? If the dead could be spirit must they also read minds?

They must be revered, must be felt in the air; at the same time they could not be let in.

He still relied on the vision of her-shaking her head ruefully, dismissing with her competent assurance the suggestion of a grief that might be inconsolable. Only she could consign her own death to the tumult and natural flurry of event. He could not do it alone. It was crucial to the maintenance of his steadiness. All things were reconcilable, she said; all things had been accounted for.

Each day for the next week he rose at the same time and drove to a nearby diner; ate eggs and toast; then drove back to the hotel, as the heat of the day oppressed, and closeted himself with his television to watch the market, the telephone at his elbow. If he could not work his current projects while he was here at least he could speculate.

In the hour before sunset he always headed back to the cemetery. It was only then, at the close of day, that the desert air settled into gentleness; it was then that a warm wind blew over the sand lots and the baked pavement began to cool, paper and dust skittering in swirls along the roadsides. The sky turned sweet, fleshy colors of orange and pink and the moon rose over the dark line of trees and hills, vaster than it had ever seemed before. He could see the craters in fine detail, the gray hollow rounds where the eyes seemed to be. By the time the stin was finally sinking behind the mountains he was usually pulling slowly along the cemetery road, duncolored, half-visible birds swooping up from the dirt, flapping beside the front wheels of his car before they disappeared.

The desert had hard days but soft nights, he was learning. Nighttime was when it came into its own.

The third night he went to the grave he began to feel he had to bring something. Yet nothing came to mind, or what came to mind was wrong for her, wrong as the plastic Jesus. The fourth night he placed a small twig on the dirt, a twig with a living leaf, snapped off a hedge at the cemetery's perimeter. The fifth night he moved the twig and then added others, making a nest of them on the mound; the sixth night he dragged a broken branch across the dried grass to add to the clot of brush that was already there.

The seventh night he woke up at three a.m. It had struck him as he slept that her grave was surmounted by a pyre now, with tinder and kindling.

He pulled on his clothes and drove; he parked his car in an empty lot down the street, for they locked the cemetery gates soon after dark. Clouds crossed the moon, silver and streaming.

At the grave he knelt down with a match. It blew out and he lit another, stooped over the wood. He had never built a fire in the woods, never even built a fire in a fireplace since his parents always had a fake log. The tinder burned low without lighting the main fuel, and the sparks died. He gathered a few more twigs and found a bag of lawn litter beside a shed; with this extra kindling the fire crawled till it took.

He was pleased to see what a tall blaze the small pyre made. As it burned higher he breathed in the smell of the smoke and watched cinders rising and floating; after a while he dropped to the dirt and sat down, gazing into the fluid shift of the flames. It was lovely, he thought. He could almost think it was something she had said once, unloosed.

Personally he would choose cremation; he would have chosen it for her, if it had been up to him, for if you were burned then you could go anywhere. On the smoke your particles would be dispersed over foreign countries, the poles and the tropics; who knew where you might end?

He watched with orange searing his eyes and when the fire was embers he stood and stretched his cramped legs. He blinked up at the darkness until the fiery imprints faded; he bent to touch the ashes and lifted his fingers to his month.

On the way to his car he heard sirens in the distance but he was unalarmed. He did not hurry, did not change his pace. At the street the coast was still clear. No cars, only traffic lights in a long line into the distance, shifting silently from red to green.

That he had stood for some time beside the fire and no one had approached him while it burned, that he walked away at his leisure and got into his car, had an effect: he could not say what it was but suddenly he had room around him, as though he could move with lightness.

Authority was not all.

Was it she who had a new freedom, or him? He thought they might have burned off together.

But his hotel room was airless. He sat upright on the bed, alert between the four walls. Why should this city have been the place that produced her, dry and lusterless place? Wide streets and strip malls, flat shining acres of trucks for sale beneath the grueling sun. . but he would not see her mother, though she lived nearby and might have told him something. His was an inquiry into which no other persons could safely be admitted, because once others were let in there was always the risk of distortion. There would be no whole and single unity of remembrance if he went outside for knowledge; he wanted his own Beth to remain, the pillar of what she was.

He could see the dismal afternoon elapsing already, he and the mother seated gawkily on a couch, awkward in the knowledge that they might have been family but now would remain strangers. And her pathetic apartment-it would have to be so now, even if it had once been otherwisewould leave an impression on him that detracted from his other memories of her daughter. Instead he and the mother, in remote locations, would live on in complete separation. In time one would die and the other would never know the difference.