Free How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

to develop fall-back strategies. He must multiply his options, not wait for the court to decide his future—for when had he ever made of institutions his own enemy? They were his bulwarks, his cathedrals. It was for
    him only to move on steadily on the assumption that the case and the development were already lost. Plainly nothing could be forfeited through such anticipation, everything gained. He instigated an aggressive search for high-margin properties and stocks and while immersed in the search let other matters gratefully fall away: his mother weeping on the toilet seat abjectly as she stroked the porcelain tresses of the shepherdess, his father who took no pains to hide his lack of conscience.
    Setting himself to research he also ignored small matters at the office, failing to notice when Julie the paralegal, absent several days, returned from her sick leave with red-rimmed eyes and a white mark where her engagement ring had been; failing to return a call on his answering machine until the caller called again—his mother’s next-door neighbor at the house she had vacated in Darien. A squirrel had become trapped inside and gnawed on the wooden window grilles until it died of starvation.
    When his father left a stiff message on the machine, stating that he had completed a mandatory period of residency in Reno, Nevada, and subsequently secured a divorce, he erased the message impatiently.
    Some mornings he woke with a nervous premonition of imminence: an event lay in wait. On the day his case was finally decided he had been up half the night researching a stock and even considered cocaine, increasingly popular with the upwardly mobile and visible everywhere. But he was not fully tempted. And then he heard. He had won. The project could move ahead.
    That night, exhausted but jubilant after drinks at a bar, he lay back and watched a news segment featuring politicians. The faces on the small screen were interchangeable, not only with each other but with his own: quite possibly they were
    not only his representatives but his representations. What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these electronic faces but the realignment of line and color to shift among symbols? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he would course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold. That near! He moved in impulse and in fret; shot through with glowing nerves he willed himself on to the rest of what was. The tides shifted beneath him but he was holding fast.
    That was what they didn’t have, those men of state and industry, he thought before he fell asleep in the flickering blue light. They were hard vectors of self, undisturbed by the vestigial presence of others who were less powerful and therefore eternally unlike them. They did not have what those others had, the softness and the whimsy, the coasting— the others far outside their sphere who imagined and felt and enjoyed everything and ended up going nowhere because they needed nothing more than to be.
    Fortunately he was not one of them.

    •

    She came with an investor to a cocktail-hour meeting one Friday and in minutes he was converted. Like all conversions his own was sudden. The lights of the restaurant bar bathed them in browns and reds and he watched her laugh. Where there should have been the awkwardness of strangers there was fluency. The investor went home to his wife after a short while, leaving the two of them at the counter, where they stayed and stayed on.
    Beth, she had said. She was the investor’s assistant. She did not give him her last name. She had erect posture, an effortless dignity and perfect light-brown skin. It was her self-possession that got him, though her features were also lovely. They drank too much as the evening wore on, became lightheaded and carefree: life was an arc in the air, ascending. Everything smaller was treated with