Copyright

Copyright © Andrew Miller 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

All characters in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

First published in England by Hodder and Stoughton.

From Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by David Young.
Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Inc.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Miller, Andrew, 1961–
Oxygen/Andrew Miller.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-15-100721-7
ISBN 0-15-602740 -2 (pbk.)
1. Terminally ill parents—Fiction. 2. Hungarians—France—Fiction. 3. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 4. Paris (France)—Fiction. 5. Translators—Fiction. 6. Dramatists—Fiction. 7. England—Fiction. 8. Actors—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.13564 099 2002
823'.914—dc21 2001051459

eISBN 978-0-544-12799-9
v1.1112

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my old teachers,
Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage.

Introduction

The Dream Catcher, an artifact made on the reservations of Native Americans and sold in the souvenir shops there for little money, was a circle the size of a man’s palm, formed from some pliant wood and then banded with a leather thong. Across the centre of the circle was a weave of plastic thread like a spider’s web, and at the heart, like the spider itself, a single green bead. Larry Valentine had bought one for his daughter Ella at a place called the Indian Bear Meat Den while filming in North Carolina on what turned out to be one of his last shows with Sun Valley General. It hung now at the window of her bedroom where, according to the explanatory leaflet, it would snag the bad dreams in its web, while the good ones, dreams of cloudless mornings, of days out at Muir beach, of friendly doctors and loving fathers, would reach the bed where she slept.

He gazed down at her, feeling enormous in this room of little things. She had a single cotton sheet over her and lay beneath it in a hot sprawl, her mouth partly open, pulling the summer-night air in a hiss over her tongue. Wisps of hair were scattered like cuttings around her face, and her eyes were shut tight as though sleep were something to be concentrated on, like colouring and not going over the black lines, or the sums she did with an unwieldy pencil in her school book.