How the Dead Dream Read Online Free Page A

invoked as an ideal, he felt, it merely reflected a childish desire for pure simplicity in matters of personal trade. Those who claimed shriekingly that honesty was a sovereign virtue were in fact merely fearful of the complex.
    No, honesty was useful chiefly within the confines of the self, where careful scrutiny of successes, failures, victories and losses was necessary for progress.
    He joined his father’s old fraternity—less out of enthusiasm than to be respectful of his father and ensure his continued goodwill—and there became treasurer and then vice president. He lost no time in making himself well-liked with the fraternity brothers, and while he did not reveal his dealings in the stock market to them he did include them now and then in other less significant undertakings. Quite soon they came to know him as a skillful card counter who graced the blackjack tables of Atlantic City and Foxwoods when he could find time to drive north for the weekend. Typically he invited a few brothers to accompany him, and they told tales of his acumen back at the frat house.
    Both men and women tended to admire him, for he practiced a kindly reserve that invited affection but discouraged any more intimate advance. Men were comfortable with this,
    relieved by how little he asked, and women deemed him enigmatic and sought out his favors. But he did not want a girlfriend, nor was he willing to engage in the forced aggression and later awkwardness of one-night stands. Instead he held himself apart.
    On evenings when his peers partook too liberally of spirits he alone remained sober, a reassuring presence on the edge of the revels. He was never too close for comfort nor too far away to spring into action, and so could always be looked to for the rapid solution of problems ranging from the merely distasteful (Ian Van Heysen’s dramatic episode of incontinence in the Kappa house dining room) to the outright felonious (Ian Van Heysen’s exuberant vandalism of townie cars during Pledge Week). It was T. who quietly confiscated the keys of brothers unfit to drive, who deftly staunched the flow of blood from flesh wounds caused by gleeful unrestraint; it was he who politicked behind the scenes to dissuade frivolous accusations of date rape, negotiated truces with disgruntled neighbors and bored campus police. It was he who took in hand forlorn and suddenly shameful users of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide who skulked in basement corners, scraping at their sturdy wrists with plastic knives from the dining room and posturing self-murder.
    On one occasion Van Heysen, whose father was a tobacco mogul and major donor to the cancer ward of the university hospital, became fleetingly convinced of his own lack of worth and threatened to dispatch himself by jumping off the roof of the university’s observatory. This was in the small hours of a mild spring morning, following a laser light show set to music. During the show—chiefly intersecting colored lines projected onto the dome of the observatory, which at other times displayed the constellations of the northern night sky—Ian had drunk a fifth of whiskey and chased it
    with unspecified pills. T. sat with him on the edge of the roof as he mulled over the decision, keeping a firm hand on his shoulder. Even the fact that the roof of the observatory was a mere twenty feet off the ground, above an oleander hedge, did not completely dispel the urgency of the situation.
    After the worst had passed Ian dried his eyes and spoke of philosophy.
    “It’s like, the world is awesome? And also it sucks.”
    “I know exactly what you mean,” said T., nodding and consulting his watch. The Tokyo markets were already closing.
    “Sometimes I wish I was like a peasant or a farmer. Like in Guatemala.”
    “Trust me, Ian. You don’t wish that.”
    “But it’s like, things would be way easier. You just get up and eat beans and then you work all day, like, hoeing shit. Whatever. Then at the end of the day you’re