How the Dead Dream (5 page)

The two were quiet and kept to themselves, though on occasions such as holidays or his birthday they would step forward with small tokens. Further they sent a rare orchid on

his behalf for Mother’s Day, without needing to ask; on Angela’s birthday and Christmas they delivered Bonsai trees and shiitake mushroom logs. This seemed to please her and made T. feel, for his part, that he was treating her well. He kept Susan’s and Julie’s birthdays and anniversaries of hire on record and made sure never to overlook them. He knew Susan was married and had a daughter who was in a wheelchair; he knew Julie had an old and incontinent cat named Bookchin and shunned Christmas in favor of a holiday called Kwanzaa. He had never heard of this holiday before he met her.

“It’s a Swahili word. It celebrates the African-American community,” she told him.

“I see,” he nodded, though he was confused since Julie was a Caucasian Protestant from Milwaukee.

“I personally observe it as a gesture of solidarity.”

“Very thoughtful,” he said. “Are there, uh, certain special days? Rituals?”

“Basically it’s a harvest festival. To celebrate the crops.” “African-American harvest,” he said, nodding.

She and Susan were his only intimates in the city; he trusted them, in part for their capable hands and in part for the puzzle of their willingness to labor indefinitely in menial positions, which linked them to him in a pact of loyalty.

What wings lifted him then, what banks shored him up along the river of work? Not the mechanics of the deal: rather it was the faces and the words of those he moved through and past and with in seeking his object, the nuance of his own approach in knowing and predicting the impulses and calculations behind them, that captured his interest. In pitching his company’s plans or services it fell to him to read the tics and quirks of investors as he sat across from them in restaurants, county commissioners as he rode the elevator beside them, urban planners across tables in well-lit rooms.

He caught the small tells that accompanied a lie, the fluster and the cover-up that followed an inadvertent truth, the way these varied among persons: but he was most astute in that he gave the appearance of being caught up in his own velocity when in fact his mind was carefully fixed on the other.

Although always watchful, always wedded to the close observation of detail, he pretended otherwise. He projected a confident nonchalance, an air of serene neutrality, and with this attitude would casually make reference to vast sums. The rules for his own comportment were few and simple, and first among them was, always speak as though unimpressed by large figures; always convey the impression that the grandiose is commonplace.

And so it will be.

In time he planned to leave development and begin to forge a path elsewhere. It wasn’t that he needed to be well-known—he would be happy to be the gray eminence behind a publicly traded logo—more that he wanted to have a hand in the revolutions of the market itself, in the ebb and the flow. But he needed to make connections. That other people found a community easily struck him as mysterious; the city was a wide network of generic streets and buildings, among which small figures were suspended in casual segregation. The space between them was air and metal. Mainly it was air, though also concrete and sheetrock and glass.

How was this air to be bridged?

Finally he joined an exclusive racquet club whose monthly membership dues would have paid the rent on a small mansion; a dully middle-class clientele would be no use to him. He hired a racquetball instructor and went to the courts four or five times a week; when he was competent he wrote his name down on lists. His games were played with

older men mostly, who shook his hand with a too-firm grip beforehand and afterward wore their white towels around their necks and talked to him at their lockers while they sprayed their armpits for too long with powerful deodorants. He averted his eyes from their stocky and hairy bodies as they changed, the deep tans that looked like plum-colored bruises in the hollows of their sagging chests. He walked with them out to the parking lot. One showed him a motorcycle; another tried to interest him in sex. Most had wives and girlfriends and business cards, and some of them had capital to invest.

One of the younger players, name of Fulton, was blustering and arrogant and tried hard to impress. He spoke in jocular terms of his wife’s intimacies and wanted T. to be aware of the dimensions of his new power yacht, anchored over in the Marina, which had platinum bathroom fixtures; he made sure that T. knew the cost of his redwood cabin in Tahoe.

“What the hell do you do for fun, man?” asked Fulton, after a game T. had played neatly but without much vigor. “All work and no play.”

“I’m a dull boy,” said T. “Granted. But if you’ve got cash sitting around you’re not doing much with, I can make you more than a ten percent return on your money. Far more.”

“Color me hooked,” said Fulton. “Wanna pick up a beer?”

Over the beers T. pulled out a copy of his business plan and prospectus, at which Fulton barely glanced. He pitched the current project steadily—the purchase and renovation of an industrial park on a Superfund site—and Fulton nodded generously, though in fact, T. suspected, he understood almost nothing. But he liked to use words that implied he was in the know, and to be treated as though he was not faking it.

Still, T. assumed it was a waste of time until three beers in.

“Get your lawyer to write up the whole deal and fax it to my guy,” said Fulton. “But we gotta go in slow till I see what you’re made of. Few hundred K to start.”

They stayed at the bar for some hours. T. had the nagging suspicion there was still something to be secured, details to hammer out. It had been so easy it seemed impossible. Likely the man had no money, finally, and was playing him.

At last the drinks trailed off and it was time to go, and it dawned on T., as they walked along the sidewalk back to the parking lot, that though Fulton had almost nothing to say, what he chiefly wanted was someone to listen.

When they reached a white Cadillac, one of a fleet of personal vehicles Fulton apparently owned, he turned the key in the ignition to show T. the dashboard in the dark, a vast expanse of red and indigo lights. Rap music blared: it turned out that Fulton, despite several racist remarks at the bar, enjoyed gangsta rap. “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off. Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,” he recited loudly, tapping the steering wheel.

T. tried to take his leave with a handshake, but Fulton insisted on a high-five.

He spent his evenings and his sleep alone and was satisfied: what he loved was to ride in after these quiet nights, these black nights of deaf and solitary thought, into the world of day, where sound enfolded him and he could scramble over chaos to order again. He liked to be away from people and then suddenly face-to-face: all in a rush they would converge, burning with self-interest like pillars of fire. He listened to them and learned to know the difference between what was said and what was meant, and—save with men like Fulton, who had no interest in concealing themselves—this was the key to all lesser insights. What

people valued and professed to value were quite different objects, and he made constant note of this, always refining his study.

There was variation, of course, but there were many common replacements. When they said they wanted passion, they meant the feeling of novelty; instead of what was beautiful, they wanted what affirmed; instead of a challenge, an easy victory that others believed to be hard-won. Instead of God, a father who showed his love; instead of Jesus, a friend who proved his love; instead of faith, a mother who loved them with a love that never changed.

2

He killed her driving to Las Vegas, after a truck stop and a few bites of a turkey club served by a waitress with lurid curling fingernails; after a dingy restroom whose yellow urinal mints made him turn away in disgust. He was still in a state of repulsion when he emerged from the diner into twilight. Then the feeling fled: there was a dusky earthshadow in the east, a dim violet light that made even the asphalt look soft.

Driving up the freeway on-ramp he turned the radio on and knew the smoothness of his buttery seat leather against the backs of his thighs. He was satisfied; he was easing in. Then a shape, blurred and fast from the right, and he hit it. The car bumped over it and veered off the road onto the shoulder. He jammed the brake pedal to the floor and sat shaking.

Dust rose behind and beside him, and his two right wheels were off the shoulder pavement. He looked out the window behind him to see if there were other cars coming. What was that on the road? What was hit?

He could see a mound on its side, legs outstretched. His own legs shook with delayed fear but there was already a stream of headlights behind the animal. No time. He pushed his door open and ran back toward it, stomach weak and face hot. He tasted dust and iron on his tongue.

A coyote. People said they were pests. They took pets out of yards in the suburbs, ran off with children’s kittens.

He was briefly relieved: no one to be angry at him, no owner. But everything was too fast. The cars were closer, the headlights brighter, and the whine of a horn made him lurch sideways in alarm. A truck swerved around him. He closed his eyes and slowed his breath. Its back legs were pulp. Jesus! He winced looking at them. But he had to move it. It could not stay in the road. It could cause another accident.

He leaned down and put his arms around the front, picked up the body with its head lolling against his chest, the rear half sagging. It was curiously light for its size and left a sweep of blood on the blacktop when he dragged it.

He let it go as quickly as he could, safely out of traffic. He stood there gazing down, his chest clutching. But then he saw its flank moving. It breathed. It was still alive. It could have bitten him. Did coyotes bite people? They were always shrinking away; they slunk along the roadside and veered off into brush as the headlights swept over them. He looked into its face, the muzzle sharp at the nose like a fox but somehow humble-mouthed like a dog; the light eyes, which were open and seemed to see him.

“Oh,” he said, and knelt down. It would not bite. It was dying. And if it did, he thought, that meant it was planning to live.

It made a sound from its throat—a growl, maybe. If he had a gun he could shoot it. Because Jesus: the legs! Nothing should have to bear that.

“Good boy. Quiet there, boy,” he said uncertainly. It probably did not want him near; he should back off. Better to die alone if you were an animal like this one, a loner that avoided any contact with humans. He looked past the flank to the underbelly; nothing there. The poor thing was a bitch. “Steady, girl,” he said. “It’s OK.”

He stood creakily and stepped back, but somehow he could not leave. He went to sit in his car. He waited, listening to a country music station.

But he was restless and anxious and soon he got out again to see if she was dead yet. He had an idea he should move her, once she was gone; he should carry her into the brush, where she could go to ground.

He willed himself not to look at her legs, to try to ignore what was back there bleeding, the cracked bone tapering into nothing. He looked only at her face and her side to see if she was still breathing. But despite the fact that he was not looking, as he sat beside her, he imagined the shock from the ruined legs coursing though her body, what must be the blind surge of the pain as the end closed in. A loud end—the rush of cars still distant punctuated by the searing noise and glare of those approaching, bearing down viciously and then fading again. She was dying in the smells of asphalt, exhaust, and gasoline, no doubt also the smell of her own blood, and him, and other smells he could not know himself.

The fullness, the terrible sympathy!

Had he felt this before, he wondered? Maybe when he was a boy? Animals died by the road and you saw that all the time, everyone did. You saw them lying there, so obvious in their deadness, sad lumps of dirty meat; you saw their limp furry masses thrown up like flowers along the yellow stripes, the tumbly asphalt edges. You saw the red insides all exposed. You thought: that is the difference between them and me. My insides are firmly contained.

And were
I
to lie on the side of the road dying, it would be nothing like that. No one would drive around
me
: the cars would stop, tens upon hundreds of them; there would be lines of stopped traffic for miles as they removed my body, flashing their red and blue lights of crisis and competence.

Presently he realized her flank had ceased to rise and fall. He was relieved but oddly disoriented. Where was the ambulance? No: he was all that she had. All her lights, all her rescue workers.

It was just a coyote. No one would fault him for leaving. And yet he felt confused.

“Good girl,” he whispered.

•

Back in Los Angeles he traded in the S-Class, chose a modest 190 to replace it and drove off the lot quickly. Irrational, but he had to get rid of it.

We all kill sooner or later, he said to himself, fine. Was she maybe half-blind? Maybe when they got old they went blind and could not hunt anymore, as birds died by starving. Maybe she had been feeble and exhausted and thought, trotting onto the blacktop for the last time: welcome, friend. All the times she must have seen the cars fly by, in their hundreds and hundreds of thousands.

But no. A coyote might want relief from suffering, but to plan for her own end seemed human.

Still a particular moment recurred within him, the sense of a rising pity he could not repress, in which he sank like a stone and could not get to the surface again. He saw the coyote’s face as she lay in the dirt of the road, eyes half-closed,

the long humble line of her mouth. He thought of the crushed legs. He asked the pain if it was sharp or dull and throbbing; he asked pain, he asked the coyote, he was left in silence.

Any animal could be gentle while it was busy dying, he told himself. That was hardly a mark of distinction. But the sorrow persisted, as though he was worrying an open cut.