How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet Page B

to homophobia,” said his father, and patted his
    mouth with his napkin again. “I’ve been exposed to it all my life.”
    “Jesus Christ,” said T. wearily.
    He gazed down at his refried beans congealing beneath a dollop of sour cream. He felt disinclined to touch them.
    “I have to protect myself from people who are full of hate,” said his father.
    “Dad, listen to me,” said T. “So you’re gay? Great. Whatever feels right. You look good, you look healthy. But do you have to be cruel to her?”
    “I don’t have to listen to this, Thomas.”
    He felt a buzz in his ears, a wall of deafness rising within him. He was hot; he had to get out of the restaurant. He took
    a card out of his wallet and laid it down. “Her new telephone number. Please at least call her. Please at least tell her why you left. That you’re not coming back. Do her that small favor.”
    He rose, his father half-swiveled away from him in his chair, and tossed down a twenty; passed Carol and the morbidly obese man named Boolie, who glared at him with bulging eyes. He felt tamped down into fury, the tension of his rage making him want to burst into a run. As soon as he was away from the restaurant, enough distance behind him, he turned off the road down to the beach again and took off his shoes.
    He did run then, along the cool tidal sand: he pounded the wet grit with the tender soles of his feet, a shoe clutched in each hand, until the bottoms of his feet were raw and he was winded and gasping. Then he slowed to a stop.

    By nightfall he was on the West Coast again, curled warmly around Beth’s smooth back and listening to the whir of his own ceiling fan. There he drifted back to the sand, the beach beside the pink stucco building.
    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