How the Dead Dream Read online

  Praise for Oh Pure & Radiant Heart

  [A] superb, memorable novel”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[An] extremely smart … resonant fantasy.”—New York Times Book

  Review

  “Millet … boldly fuses lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-out-ness to achieve a unique energy and perspicacity, the ideal approach to the most confounding reality of our era: the atomic bomb.”

  —Booklist (starred review), Best Books of 2005

  “Lydia Millet is da bomb. Literally … Though Oh Pure and Radiant Heart possesses the nervy irreverence of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, Millet makes the subject matter her own, capturing the essence of these geniuses in a way that can only be described as, well, genius.”—Vanity Fair

  “In her brilliant and fearless new novel Lydia Millet takes a headlong run at the subject of nuclear annihilation, weaving together black comedy, science, history, and time travel to produce, against stiff odds, a shattering and beautiful work.”—Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (lead review, A–)

  “Thanks to Millet’s evocative rendering and impeccable scholarship, the physicists feel real, convincing and even moving.”—Time Out NY

  “An entirely original novel: equal parts funny and chilling, accurate and bizarre.”—Philadelphia Weekly

  “[A] wonderful flight of the imagination, funny and thoughtful and richly imagined”—Hartford Courant

  “A Molotov cocktail comprised of dreams, history, philosophy and wit, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart explodes the rationale for nuclear armament along with any claims of its rationality.”—Oregonian

  “Millet deftly manages this dangerously high-concept conceit with generous, precise, and funny prose. A born storyteller”—Flavorpill

  “[Millet]does an exquisite job of deploying moments of reason despite

  its unlikely plot, and, conversely, it excels in evoking intense feeling despite its preoccupation with science and reason … In its smallest moments and its most expansive ideas, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is a beautiful and fiercely intelligent novel, and it provides us with some very important advice: pretend the world is real.”—Ottawa Citizen

  “[A] unique and wide-reaching book … [I]ts head soars into philosophical inquiry about love and peace and creative ambition; its heart is planted in the emotional and psychological landscape of its characters and those who have been terrorized by the bomb; and its feet are sunk firmly into the political reality of greed, manipulation, and opportunism.”—Bloomsbury Review

  “Millet is a ferocious writer with a sense of humor that is as dark as it is funny … [She] has written a novel with the intellectual heft of Pynchon and DeLillo—only a lot more fun to read.”—Tucson Weekly

  “The creators of the atomic bomb are mysteriously transported to modern-day Santa Fe, where they encounter confusion, celebrity, and infamy. Millet manages this dangerously high-concept conceit with generous, precise, and funny prose.”—Boldtype, Best Books of 2005

  Praise for Everyone’s Pretty

  “With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations, Everyone’s Pretty is both prism and truth.”—Sarah Weinman, Washington Post Book World

  “A kaleidoscopic new satire of America’s quietly freakish office workers … gives voice to a wide variety of life’s unbeautiful losers—and makes them sing for us.”—Boston Globe

  “Beating through the pages of this strange little book is a lonely heart searching for intimacy in a crazy world.”—Entertainment Weekly

  “At the still point of its lurid absurdity is a story about America. Like a sobering radio broadcast playing unattended in the midst of a party run amok … ”—Globe & Mail

  “A biting send-up of vapid Americana wrapped up in a hilarious novel about five desperate Angelenos in search of redemption.”—Boldtype

  “Juggling an enormous cast of psychos, Everyone’s Pretty revels in its own religious chaos, the sexually crazed repeatedly clashing with the sexually pure … The book impressively teeters on the edge of total inanity, each scene becoming increasingly uncomfortable, then unraveling out of control.”—Village Voice

  “[F]unny, dark and surprisingly tender in unexpected places … Millet has many talents as a writer, but one of her greatest is creating scraps of dialogue that sound like the accidentally significant and funny stuff that is the reason people watch reality TV.”—Montreal Mirror

  “Absolutely captivating … I picked it up, read it almost in one day— and I was pissed when I had to stop. Everyone’s Pretty is fast & furious reading that nearly hypnotizes.”—Sex Kitten

  “Millet … treats her characters without condescension and with surprising tenderness and respect as they wind their way toward a sort of tattered redemption.”—Elegant Variation

  “Everyone’s Pretty is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it’s like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment overrun with too-clever postmodernists.”—Tucson Weekly

  Praise for My Happy Life

  Winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction “A prodigious feat”—New York Times Book Review “Strange and lovely”—Village Voice

  “If there were any justice in the world, My Happy Life would become not merely a cult book, devoured by a few astonished readers every year, but an exemplar, ‘This,’ we would say, ‘is how to write a novel that is impossible to forget.’”—Commercial Appeal

  “A heart-rending novel”—Boston Herald

  “Sad and infinitely touching … A courageous and memorable achievement”—Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

  “A nightmare limned in gold”—Entertainment Weekly

  “Same breath with Raising Arizona.”—Palm Beach Post

  “A biting critique of the Bush years with all their ghastly blandness and deceit.”—St. Petersburg Times

  “Hilarious and sure to make its mark.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “The most sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny satire I’ve read in years.”—Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “Smart and funny.”—Village Voice

  Praise for Omnivores (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1996) “American appetites—for sex, power, and possessions—are darkly

  lampooned in this strange, very funny debut.”—Entertainment Weekly

  “Omnivores reads like a cartoon with soul.”—Los Angeles Times

  “A world where absurdity reigns and reality fluctuates from the mundane one second to the surreal the next.”—Voice Literary Supplement

  “A hilariously bizarre novel that centers around one teenage girl and the voracious appetites of the three men in her life. Just what you’d hope a young copy editor at Hustler would write in her spare time.”

  —Buzz Magazine

  “Millet’s heroine and her plight draw you in and gnaw at you until you’re bloodied, but enjoying the pain.”—Paper Magazine

  “Richly imaginative, acidly absurd, medievally creepy, weirdly delightful.”—Quill & Quire

  How the Dead Dream

  A NOVEL

  Lydia Millet

  Counterpoint Berkeley

  Copyright © 2008 Lydia Millet

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Millet, Lydia, 1968–

  How the dead dream / Lydia Millet.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59376-184-4

  ISBN-10: 1-59376-184-8

  1. Real estate developers
—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. 5. Endangered species—Fiction. 6. Extinction (Biology)—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.I42175H69 2008

  813’.54—dc22 2007035242

  Jacket design by David Janik Interior design by Anne Horowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  Counterpoint 2117 Fourth St Suite D

  Berkeley CA 94710 www.counterpointpress.com Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  How the Dead Dream

  1

  His first idol was Andrew Jackson. He knew the vertical dart between the brows, the jutting chin, the narrow mouth; he knew the windblown coif that perched atop the great man’s forehead like a bird’s nest on a lonesome crag. Jackson’s face was fixed in a somewhat neutral expression and T. spent long hours trying to decide if it suggested idle speculation or a slight annoyance.

  Running his fingers over the faded gray lithograph he imagined the once-president, a moment before the portraitist captured his aspect, being taken aback by a gently unpleasant sight: a horse dropping slow, deliberate pats in front of a government building, for instance, or a manservant picking his nose. But his opinion of Jackson was not diminished by this vision; rather he admired the great man for his composure in the face of the trivial. No passing insult could compel him to emote.

  Jackson’s grave and finely etched countenance came to him in moments of anxiety and calmed his heart. And from Jackson he moved on to Hamilton, whose face was fraught

  with nobility and feminine grace despite a nose that was far from small. Hamilton had a homosexual way about him that lent an air of refinement to the ten-dollar bill. Jackson, on the more valuable twenty, nonetheless became a ruffian by comparison; Jackson was a more primitive version of the American statesman, a rudimentary model waiting to be superceded by gayer men with cleaner fingernails.

  When he finally learned that Hamilton had, in fact, predeceased Jackson he was still not dissuaded in this. History often stumbled.

  His allegiance to Hamilton lasted for several months. At times he found himself ranking the girls in his class on a scale of one to ten in terms of their resemblance to the former soldier of the Republic. None came close, he lamented; still he saw a trace of Hamilton’s light eyes in the plump face of Becky Spivak and his well-turned mouth on Gina Grosz, a victim of rosacea.

  He needed a trace of the venerable and the upright close to him, in the grainy and familiar everyday. If he could detect an edge of arrogant pride in a skinny girl at a swim meet, say, jiggling a bare foot in the bleachers as she stared coolly at the other swimmers, he was pleased; he was reminded of the potential for all shackled beasts to break from their bonds and rise, their ragged wings beating, into the stratosphere. He clung to a vision of forward motion, the breath of hope that could lift individuals into posterity. He told himself every day of this latent capacity for eminence among humans, to the untrained eye so often hard to see. Rise, my sister! Rise, my brother! Soar.

  Great institutions and the tall columns and white soaring domes that stood for them—these seemed to him the crowning achievement of his kind. Authority inspired him, resting along the eyelines and in the closed mouths of the

  long-deceased statesmen. The bills themselves he preferred soft and worn, for when they were freshly pressed they seemed nearly counterfeit. He kept the proceeds from his paper route under his pillow and would touch them before he went to sleep and check for them first thing in the morning when he awoke, sliding a hand between the cool mattress and the weight of his head.

  His mother knew the currency was sacrosanct and after she changed the sheets would replace the pile of bills with care precisely where she had found it. He was six when he started hiding the stash there at night, and at first there had been misunderstandings; once she left the cash on a bookshelf, open to the elements. Upon its discovery T. was horrified. The bills were naked as babes.

  Their confrontation ended in bitter tears and his father was summoned.

  “I get to keep it under there. I get to keep it right there! She tried to put it out there by itself! She can’t take it!”

  “But honey,” said his mother, “I’m not trying …” “Angela, let the boy keep his money wherever he likes.”

  As a younger boy, when his allowance was a mere five a week—a single Lincoln, deformed giant with heavy brows and long ears, or five Washingtons with their sly sideways glance— he had a habit of secreting coins on his person, a thick and powerful quarter lodged under his tongue or discreet dimes tucked into the cheek pouches. He never swallowed and he never choked.

  “Such a dirty habit,” said his mother regularly. “Do you realize how many strangers have touched those coins? Bacteria!”

  He did not dignify this with a response.

  Many times she tried to engage him in more serious

  discussions, for clearly his fascination with the coin of the realm struck her as unhealthy—though not, strictly speaking, un-American. Both she and his father had extolled the virtues of financial institutions since he first started sucking on nickels, but it was only around his eighth birthday, during a brief early flirtation with Grover Cleveland, that he saw for the first time there might be a percentage in it for him.

  She broached the subject in the kitchen, leaning across the table to inspect a stack of pennies beside his cereal bowl as he spooned up puffed wheat, then sitting back to cock her neat, honey-blond head and smile at him.

  Beside her his father sat gazing absently out the window, twirling a toothpick between thumb and index finger.

  “I just wonder, sweetie, why you feel the need to have the money with you all the time. On your person. I mean no one’s going to steal it from you, T., if you put it away somewhere. You could keep it all in a piggybank, or something.”

  “A piggybank? Are you kidding me?” “What, T.?”

  “Talk about sitting ducks.”

  “No one’s going to break in, T. We have a security system! So it’s just your father and me. Don’t you know you can trust us? Why would I steal from my own little boy?”

  “It’s money,” said T.

  “I would never steal from you, honey. Neither would your daddy.”

  “That’s right, T. I’ve got way richer guys than you to steal from.”

  T. fixed on his father a stern and unwavering eye. “Just kidding, son.”

  “How about this: your dad can open a savings account just

  for you, at the bank. How about that, T.? Your money will be perfectly safe there.”

  “What if I put all my savings in the bank and a robber comes in?”

  His father placed the toothpick carefully on the beige tabletop and reached over to grasp him firmly by the shoulder.

  “Banks are insured against theft, buddy. It’s called the FDIC. So Bonnie and Clyde or not, you’re guaranteed to get your money back. The one damn thing the feds are good for, by God.”

  “David! Language.”

  His father rolled his eyes.

  “Well …” He eyed them both sidelong. “Maybe if you put some in there for me and it doesn’t all get stolen? Then maybe I’ll put mine in too.”

  They exchanged knowing glances that said: such sweet and see-through attempts at extortion! But they did not have the last laugh, for in subsequent weeks T. made several appearances at his mother’s book club meetings, hosted in the sitting room, where the ladies sipped daintily at rose hip tea leaving their freshly bought copies of Brideshead Revisited uncracked upon the coffee table. When he was called upon to return a greeting from one of them—“Well T.! Aren’t you a big man now!”—he would carefully, with a few gagging head pokes like a cat vomiting, open his mouth and rain a wet spew of coins into his cupped hands.

  Soon afterward his father made a modest deposit in his name. The account grew steadily as he tucked away the proceeds from lemonade stands, p
et-sitting assignments, driveway car washes, charity walkathons, and occasionally the lowball resale of items appropriated from neighbors or

  relatives who had incurred his displeasure. His father tolerated his commercial dealings; his mother was more suspicious.

  “You told Mrs. Hitchens you were doing a March for Hunger,” she said once. “She told me after Mass. She said she pledged twenty cents a mile.”

  “Hitchens, Hitchens …” he mused, stalling. “It was either a March for Hunger or it wasn’t.” “It was definitely a March for Hunger.”

  “She said you billed her for ten dollars. Fifty miles, T.?” “It was over a period of several days.”

  “When did you walk fifty miles?”

  “Over, you know. A period of several days. There was a bunch of us from school. We did laps on the track.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Well, we kind of counted gym class. For a couple of weeks. Double-tasking made it more efficient.”

  “I see. And how much money did you raise, T.?” “Like a hundred forty.”

  “All of you, T.? Or just you?” “Just me.”

  “For hunger, T.? Who’s so hungry suddenly?” “Children, Mom. OK? In Africa. Just for one example.

  What is this, now you don’t like giving to the needy? You’re supposed to be a Catholic!”

  “So you’re telling me that all one hundred and forty dollars went to a group that helps starving children? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “All the funds went to children. Yes. They did.”

  Cheerful and popular, he was also cocky. He did not hesitate to punish adults as he saw fit; he remembered slights and took particular exception to condescension. His youth was no reason to presume him stupid, for stupidity was not the

  province of the young alone, as he himself had observed through careful study. Indeed there were millions of frail elderly gentlemen, slope-shouldered, weary, and brimful of gravitas, who despite their dignified appearance were dumb as a shot put.

  His own grandfather on his mother’s side struck him as one of these: the poor old fellow was a half-deaf Ukrainian who had immigrated to Florida not long after the war but never mastered English, and who, when he visited them, struggled around the neighborhood feebly waving his walking stick at fast-moving children and cursing at cars in his incomprehensible native tongue. T. tried to treat him with kindness, if not exactly the respect his mother said he deserved; but the codger constantly stymied his attempts at pretend deference, be it through glaringly obvious pee stains on his tan corduroys, a chronic inability to count out change, or the total opacity of the old man’s blithering rage, which delivered itself in seemingly random outbursts of strange syllables.