How the Dead Dream Read Online Free Page B

all tired and sweaty and you just take a hot shower and crash.”
    “I’m not sure you’d like the part in the middle there, Ian.” “I’m just like so tired of, I don’t know. Everything.”
    “It’s tough sometimes. Isn’t it.”
    “I have this one dream where my father is a gigantic building? It doesn’t look like him but it is. It’s all gray and gigantic. He’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan. And in the corner of the dream, where no one ever sees it, is this tiny, like, shining mouse. And the mouse, T., get this. The mouse is actually Jesus Christ.”
    “Whoa. Slow down there, Mr. Deep.”
    “I wrote a song about it. It’s called ‘Jesus Squeaks.’ ”
    When they left the roof they were applauded by brothers in the parking lot below. Ian went drinking with them and T. went to sleep.
    He was useful to his small society, and few fraternity
    brothers who had benefited from his clear thinking could forget it quickly. Sorority girls whose soft, still-shaking hands he had held gently as he persuaded them not to file charges remembered him not with resentment but with tender respect, and Ian Van Heysen, Sr. had been known to show his gratitude to T. with gifts of cognac and Cubans sent by courier.
    That he was mature beyond his years was obvious; and while they placed their trust in him they also knew he stood apart from them, too rigidly controlled to mix his solemn molecules with theirs. He was a father their own age, claiming the loyalty of all and the passion of none.
    But while others looked to the present for their pleasures— holding these four years to be both their first and their last gasp of freedom—he looked to the life beyond, past the confines of the fraternity house with its dusty oak wainscoting, the campus buildings with their wide lawns and white porticos, and the small college town with its crowded hilly streets and dogwoods that bloomed so cloudily in spring.
    He saw beyond what there was, and in the not-yet-existent imagined a great acceleration.

    His parents visited one weekend in October and once in April, always at the same time. His father liked to attend an annual old boys’ fundraiser for the fraternity and his mother liked to pick up an iced tea at the cafeteria and then wander at a leisurely pace through the campus’s Botanical Gardens, holding her purse and gazing at the magnolia trees. She would point at the small, old-fashioned signs on their tidy stakes in the earth, which bore in careful lettering the names of tropical and subtropical plants— Ricinus communis (Christ’s Palm), Alonsoa incisifolia (Devil’s Rattle)—and say how gracious were the stalks, how beautiful the leaves and
    languid the flowers. As she said this she would bend her head and a wishful tone would come into her voice. Watching her he saw how she envied the plants, so peaceful in the shade, so smooth and green and cool. They grew there and they died there.
    And while his father, as he aged, grew stiffer and more pointed, almost an exaggeration of his younger self, his mother quietly faded. Her warmth rose like vapor and left a still surface; and later, when she had forgotten everyone she knew and even her own name, he would think back to these college gardens and how she had loved them. “I could live here,” she would say, as he walked beside her in the dappled shade and they looked down at irises and lazily floating wasps. “Here, right here, in the waterfalls and the ferns.” She had grown up in a southern climate and the winters were long in Connecticut.
    He endured the visits only to see her, to know how she was faring and to try to elicit from her some spark of vigor. For her sake he would stand awkwardly by while his father toured the fraternity, always with a jocular handshake for the sons of old peers, always with what seemed to T. like a desperate and transparent need to be one of the boys again. But the chill of his mother’s absence was steadily deepening. Stepping out of the