How the Dead Dream

The novel traces the life of a character known only as T., from his boyhood obsession with money through a slow transformation brought on by loss, grief, and an unexpected reckoning with the extinction of animal species.

As a child, T. idolizes the faces on American currency. He keeps bills under his pillow, tucks coins in his mouth, and runs money-making schemes throughout the neighborhood. His mother, Angela, is warm, attentive, and Catholic. His father, David, is peripheral, always turning away. T. remembers mainly the sight of his father's back.

In college in North Carolina, T. joins his father's old fraternity, becomes its vice president, and secretly day-trades stocks. He becomes the sober caretaker of his fraternity brothers and avoids romantic entanglements, earning nicknames like "monk" and "eunuch." His parents visit twice a year: His mother walks the Botanical Gardens with wistful longing, while his father makes forced attempts to relive his fraternity days. T. senses his mother's fierce love fading as he grows into adulthood, a loss he cannot name or reverse.

After graduation, T. brokers a Florida real estate deal that earns his first six-figure profit. He moves to southern California, incorporates a real estate firm, and hires assistants, including Susan, a married woman in her fifties whose daughter uses a wheelchair. At an exclusive racquet club, he meets Fulton, a blustering investor with family money who becomes his primary backer. T. lives in deliberate solitude, maintaining a controlled public persona.

Driving to Las Vegas, T. hits a coyote on the freeway on-ramp. He pulls over and sits beside the dying animal, overwhelmed by a sympathy he has never experienced. He trades in his car and adopts a thin, frightened dog from the Humane Society, a creature clearly beaten by a previous owner. For the first time, T. looks forward to going home.

Angela appears unannounced at his office to say David left three weeks earlier without explanation, taking half their joint accounts. She moves into T.'s guest bedroom and begins compulsively cleaning and redecorating. David calls to explain that his entire married life felt like a dream lived by a stranger. T. is devastated, recalling his father reading him a picture book about beavers at bedtime, a memory now emptied of meaning. He persuades Angela to take a cruise to Mexico.

Beth, an investor's assistant, arrives at a cocktail meeting, and T. falls for her instantly. They begin dating. Angela returns from her travels with a companion named Terry. When David sends divorce papers from Reno, Angela takes an overdose of Terry's tranquilizers in T.'s bathtub. T. finds her and performs CPR until paramedics arrive. She survives but has a stroke, emerging from a coma convinced she died and went to the International House of Pancakes rather than heaven. She interprets this as a divine warning and becomes obsessively devout, pressuring T. into charitable giving. T. finds her a small apartment nearby.

Through fraternity connections, T. learns his father now tends bar at a gay establishment in Key West. He flies down and confronts David, who is physically transformed, emotionally closed off, and barely reacts when told about Angela's stroke. T. runs along the beach until his feet are raw.

T.'s first major development, a retirement community in the Mojave Desert, moves forward after winning a lawsuit. Beth speaks with Angela about David's departure, and Angela gradually comes to accept the situation. Then, while driving with Angela, Beth collapses at the wheel. A doctor tells T. she died of sudden cardiac death caused by arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia (ARVD), a rarely diagnosed heart condition. T.'s jaw chatters uncontrollably as he views her body.

T. retreats to his bed for weeks, unable to eat or speak. He drives to the desert city where Beth is buried, visits her grave daily, and on the seventh night builds a small pyre on the mound of dirt and lights it. Watching cinders rise into the dark sky, he touches the ashes to his lips and feels something released.

As T. recovers, he begins purchasing a jungle island in Belize for a resort development. Angela's mental health deteriorates; she fixates on jigsaw puzzles and neglects her hygiene. A surveyor informs T. that his desert subdivision displaced a group of kangaroo rats, the last of their kind. He visits a biological field station and sees the baby rats alongside their mother, feeling unexpected tenderness. When the biologist reports the babies died during relocation and the species faces extinction, T. finds his throat closing.

At a zoo in Arizona, T. confronts a family throwing garbage at a sleeping black bear and feels an elation at his own fury he has never known. That night he climbs the fence into the pen of an aging Mexican gray wolf, which retreats and refuses to approach. T. begins breaking into accredited zoos across the country, spending nights with endangered animals: a Sumatran rhinoceros in the Bronx, Devil's Hole pupfish in Nevada, elephants retired from circus life. He sits in the dark with these creatures and recognizes they are not waiting for food but waiting to go home.

T. befriends Casey, Susan's daughter, a sharp-tongued young woman paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident at 17. Casey begins meeting Angela daily for jigsaw puzzles. When Fulton makes crude remarks about Casey, T. reveals Fulton's affair in front of Fulton's wife and daughter. Fulton retaliates by taking T.'s dog and claiming it ran away. Casey declares her love for T., and they spend a single evening together before she leaves the next morning without meeting his eyes. T. finds his dog at his front steps with a broken, infected leg requiring amputation, bearing wounds consistent with abuse by Fulton. Casey cuts off all contact, and T. realizes he had patronized her by believing he was doing her a favor.

Angela's mental deterioration accelerates. One evening she fails to recognize T., calling him a criminal and confusing him with television characters. She forgets which room is her bedroom and goes outside in only underwear.

T. flies to Belize, where a hurricane destroys both the nearby town and his island buildings. He calls Angela on a satellite phone, but she does not recognize his voice. He hires Delonn, a knowledgeable local guide, to take him upriver toward a jaguar preserve. On their second morning, T. finds Delonn dead in his tent from an apparent heart attack. Entirely alone for the first time in his life, he wraps the body and drags it five miles to the riverboat. When the propeller shears off on submerged rocks, T. abandons the boat and continues on foot.

Over days of walking along the river, blistered and starving, T. reflects that his lifelong faith in cities and institutions described a narrow, small life. Camped on a sand bar one night, he wakes to find an animal lying on his outstretched arm, a mammal he cannot identify, possibly a young tapir or paca (a ground-dwelling herbivore) of a species perhaps soon to vanish. Drifting between sleep and waking, he enters a visionary state in which he inhabits the animal's perspective: the warmth of a den with a mother and sibling, the mother's disappearance, the coldness of being last. He understands the animal has mistaken him for its lost mother and recognizes that mammals are made to be close, that home is flesh and nearness. He resolves that in the morning he will get up and walk to the sea.