These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  No, she concludes, she can’t go back. The book is one of life’s markers now, one of experience’s receipts destined to disappear one day, and now on this night it has, in this way. So she steps onto the train and is swept to the sanctuary of Berlin’s tunnels, before the last five minutes overwhelm her like a wave.

  She’s black, Zan decides once and for all, pushing the laptop away. Fuck whether I have the right to make her so. My imagination gives me the right. Hearing a Ray Charles record when I was Parker’s age may not mean I know anything but it means that I can imagine something I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise. It’s a little like what Descartes said about God, that the fact men can imagine a god proves there must be one.

  Viv receives an email from the Ethiopian journalist she hired. Hello Viv, it reads, this is to inform you that I have at once uncovered a most tantalizing lead and also confronted an unexpected obstacle in our search for Zema’s mother. Since we believe she was Muslim it narrows my investigation to suggest one of two different women, the first with family heritage in Oromia to the south and the other with no family in Ethiopia and who in fact may have grown up not in this country but somewhere in Eastern Europe and then immigrated. Of course few people who I meet are very willing to talk and the closer I come to answers then the more silent that people become but I persist and press on and hope to have more news soon.

  For months the new president is the only thing that makes Zan happy, the only thing that interrupts the billowing gloom of his life. At the moment it doesn’t matter if this is delusion. By now Zan knows better than to place hope in any one thing or person; it may be that the fact of this particular presidency rather than its occupant is what cheers him, because it signals the existence of the politically miraculous. Zan also has identified the connection between the candidate of forty years ago whom he saw in the campus quad, whose presence ripped the fabric of the collective rationale to reveal behind it a national delirium, and this current man with so many parts of the country making up his form.

  There has followed the new president’s election a mini-Era of Good Feelings, remarkable for the overwhelming sense of national crisis with which the feeling coexists. Zan finds the hysteria for the new president at once inspiring and unsettling, since it’s as unsustainable by the public as it is by the man himself.

  Not everyone shares such sentiment. Skepticism crosses political and philosophical lines. I heartily dislike him, writes a good friend, an anarcho-syndicalist who lives in the Texas Pan­handle. I never did and never can trust him. A prima donna with that damned smile I can’t look at and all his round-the-world photo ops who nonetheless is unwilling to make people afraid of him—the worst of both worlds. He’ll never be worth a shit.

  Viv receives another email that is both exciting and disconcerting. Hello Viv, it reads, I am writing to alert you in regards to the search for Zema’s mother that the trail of the woman in Oromia has led to nothing but that I believe I draw closer to the other woman who is indicated to originally be from Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany—perhaps you might contact the aunt and grandmother to see if at least they will confirm this?—and now may be here in Addis closer than we ever suspected, within a mere few kilometers of Zema’s orphanage. I hope to deliver good news soon.

  In front of her laptop, staring at the email astounded, Viv says, “Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany? Good lord. Sheba might not even be Ethiopian?”

  “We are all Ethiopians!” Zan declares grandly and his wife glares at him. “Well, Sheba’s half Ethiopian anyway,” he points out.

  “How can she not be Ethiopian?”

  “The father is Ethiopian,” Zan persists. “In Muslim cultures, that counts.”

  “The father isn’t Muslim,” she says. “Ethiopia isn’t a Muslim culture.”

  “There are lots of Muslims in Ethiopia.”

  “Twice as many Christians.”

  “O.K.”

  “Well.”

  “Sheba is half Muslim. In the Muslim culture, the father counts and he’s Ethiopian.”

  “But he’s not the half that’s Muslim,” she says.

  “So he would count only if he were Muslim?” though Zan admits to himself that this discussion, his half in particular, doesn’t make sense to him anymore. “Why don’t you write to Sheba’s grandmother, like he suggests?”

  Viv writes the email and sits before the laptop waiting as though an answer will appear immediately. I chose you to be her mother, is the answer when it comes from the grandmother, as translated by Sheba’s aunt, through God, almost exactly as she said to Viv two years ago.

  The night before Viv receives the message that changes everything, Piranha disappears, having braved and broken through his high-voltage corral once and for all. Viv stands on the deck of the house calling, but only when Sheba howls her half of their duet does the dog howl back in the distance. It’s a howl that defies interpretation. Maybe it means goodbye, maybe it means so long, suckers, maybe it means help I’m being pursued by coyotes, maybe it means you try wearing one of these fucking electric collars and see how you like it. In any case, he’s gone.

  Returning home from the radio station the next afternoon, Zan finds Viv fetally curled up on the couch in the family room. She buries her head in the cushion.

  He sits next to her, puts his hand on her thigh. She doesn’t move; on the white cloud-shaped formica table that Parker always leaps over, her laptop is open. “Hey,” says Zan.

  He looks at the laptop and an open email: Hello Viv. I write to you with troubling news and that is the woman who I believe might be Zema’s mother appears to have disappeared under suspicious circumstances related to my questions about her. It is not clear if she has run afoul of the law and is in jail or something more ominous has taken place. It also is possible that she has fled the city or even the country. In any case if indeed there ever was someone at the end of the trail, now she has vanished. For reasons and by means too complicated to explain here, it would seem to have come to the attention of the authorities that you have been sending money to Zema’s grandmother and family which has raised suspicions of child-trafficking and the possibility that Zema was sold to you by the mother, though it is difficult to be certain how seriously they take this. It all is most unfortunate I know but is becoming a common concern as adoptions are on the rise. The police are not answering any questions but ask many and it is all most confusing I am afraid. For the moment nothing has happened to Zema’s family but an investigation seems under way and no one is saying anything and strongly I would suggest that whatever contact you have cease for a while and that any inquiries as to Zema’s mother stop as well. It also is possible that the woman in question is not Zema’s mother at all, this has not been established. I now must be careful with my investigations and perhaps go “undercover” awhile but should I learn more information I will attempt to send it along in as discreet a fashion as I can. I am sorry for this news.

  Viv says something and he leans over to her, his ear in her turquoise hair. “Everyone told me to leave it alone,” he hears her mutter, “everyone told me and I wouldn’t.

  Zan is furious at the email and all its vague implications. “You don’t know what’s happened,” he argues. “We don’t know that this mystery person, whoever she is, is Sheba’s mother. I mean, we can’t tell that there even is such a person.”

  Viv doesn’t answer.

  “All we know,” says Zan, “is that some woman he thought he was looking for and that he never found might have . . . left the country, or . . . ”

  “ . . . or been thrown in jail, or worse,” she finally turns to him. Her face is red.

  “The odds are she isn’t even Sheba’s mother,” but as soon as he’s said it, he knows what she’ll say.

  “So? I still got an innocent woman thrown in jail. Or worse.” Every time she says “or worse,” it becomes worse.

  “You don’t know that. We don’t know anything.”

  She searches his eyes and whispe
rs, “Zan, they think we bought Sheba.”

  It’s hard to know how long she’s been thinking it when she says, “I have to go.” Later he feels sure she’s been considering it awhile, maybe before the email.

  “Go?” he says, at first genuinely confused. They’re upstairs sitting on their bed. She’s been distraught all day, more than any time since her art was stolen two years ago, succumbing to an unshakeable silence, and only does her voice find its usual spiritedness when she says, “To Addis Ababa.”

  When she was in her late twenties, Viv returned to Africa for the first time since she lived there as a girl, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Immediately following this successful ascent—a framed certificate on the wall attests to the achievement—she sat for some hours at Kilimanjaro’s nearest airport drinking with a number of other overly exuberant western adventurers who at some point realized they had drunk their way through the week’s one and only flight to Europe.

  This discovery was followed by a mad drive through the night to the next airport, across hundreds of kilometers of revolution-beset african desert in an outlandish episode that involved no gas and “borrowed” cars and armed soldiers and herds of zebra crashing into them. The story always has summed up for Zan what he loves and admires about Viv, and the ways in which they’re different. On the one hand, Zan’s soul will pass through many lives before one of them steps foot on Mount Kilimanjaro. On the other hand, there’s not the remotest possibility that Zan ever would have missed that flight.

  It’s possible, Zan believes, that this now almost legendary chapter in Viv’s life imbued her with a . . . unique sense of life’s odds and risks. Interestingly, motherhood threw life into the gear of fear, in which Viv worries about things that Zan takes in stride, maybe too much so.

  In any case Zan has come to understand well enough his dynamic with Viv that he knows to fully express what he feels about her returning to Ethiopia would be counter-productive. Rather he takes a deep breath and attempts to modulate his agitation. “Baby,” he says, “it’s not a good idea.”

  For a moment she sinks back into the afternoon’s abyss.

  “If nothing has happened, if this woman doesn’t even exist let alone is in jail, then it’s a waste of time. If something has happened and the police are arresting people, it’s all the more reason you shouldn’t go.”

  “We could all travel with you to London,” she urges, and now it’s clear this indeed has been going around in her head awhile, “for your lecture, or residency, or whatever it is . . . the kids can stay with you and I can go onto Addis and you’ll wait for me in London.” She says, “I know it’s a lot to ask but we talked about it anyway.”

  “Talked about what?”

  “Going to London with you.”

  More harshly than he intends, he says, “We never talked about that,” then, “sometimes you think about telling me some­thing and once you’ve thought it, then you think you’ve done it.”

  “Sometimes,” she answers, “maybe you just don’t remember me telling you,” and bursts into tears.

  She cries in bed while Zan holds her, until both hear the creak of the bedroom floor. They look up to see Sheba in her Avengers underpants, thumb in mouth, watching, frightened. “Mama?” she says, “Poppy?” and Zan and Viv know the girl believes every drama is a signal that life is about to leave her behind or hand her off to someone else.

  “It’s O.K.,” Viv says, “Mama’s O.K.,” and opens her arms and the child falls into them. No one speaks for a while and after a minute Zan says, “We’ll do what you want.”

  Over the coming days Viv rides a roller coast of highs and lows. Every new twenty-four-hour cycle brings a new email resolving nothing, and adamantly she won’t be dissuaded by circumstance or Zan that she is directly responsible for what’s transpired and setting in motion a chain of events, even as it’s unclear what that chain is or what’s the consequence of the motion that is its result. With this, Zan realizes that, whatever the risk, Viv’s trip to Ethiopia is inevitable. No one will be able to live with Viv otherwise, least of all Viv herself.

  Lying in bed in the dark, she says, “What if the bank takes the house while we’re gone?” It’s the night before they leave for London. Zan is encouraged by the question not because he believes Viv will abandon her plan to go—at this point he’s no longer sure she should—but because, in what quickly has become the all-consuming Ethiopian drama, she hasn’t forgotten other realities.

  “Well?” she says.

  “I guess whether we’re here when they take it isn’t going to matter.”

  “When?”

  “If.”

  “You said when.”

  The flight for London departs at seven the next evening. Leaving for the airport that afternoon, Zan and Viv gaze around at the house before locking the door behind them.

  As they wait at their gate for the flight, Zan watches a news cable channel on the television. Parker listens to the fluorescent-green music player around his neck and Sheba climbs over all the furniture in the terminal.

  Watching her, Viv says to Zan, “In London you’ll need to find a salon for her. Some place where they can do her hair.”

  “All right,” Zan says absently, watching the news.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes. Sheba’s hair.” Ever since the girl came to live with them, Viv has been confounded by Sheba’s hair. Once in a shopping mall, a black woman approached Viv and pointed out that the hair was different and couldn’t be neglected and demanded constant attention.

  “You never should have started calling her Sheba,” says Viv.

  After this has sunk in a moment, Zan turns his attention from the television. “What?”

  “You shouldn’t have called her Sheba. It sounds like a B-movie,” she protests. “Queen of the Jungle.”

  Zan says, “That’s Sheena.” Coming almost two years after the fact, this is an unforeseen point of contention. “What should we call her?”

  “Not so loud.” Viv glances the girl’s way. “Her real name, maybe?”

  “Do we know that ‘Zema’ is her real name?”

  “Well, we know it’s no less real than Sheba,” says Viv.

  “We have no idea what it means. ‘Zema.’ It sounds like a power drink.”

  “It means ‘hymn’.”

  “That’s kind of what it means.”

  “It’s close enough.”

  “People have been as vague about her name as they have about everything else,” including, he wants to point out but doesn’t, her mother. “It means different things depending on how the stars are aligned that day, or the given meteorology. A fog happens to roll in, and for all we know suddenly it means ‘Death to the Great Satan’ or something.”

  “Sheba sounds silly.”

  “Won’t it seriously mess with her sense of self if now we go back to calling her something else?”

  “Her sense of self is going to be O.K.,” Viv answers firmly.

  “Yeah, if we don’t start calling her Death to the Great Satan.”

  Zan would like to note that Viv has been calling the girl Sheba too but decides it’s best to accept the full brunt of the accusation. “It’s a cool name,” he says. “She can be a rocker with that name.”

  “Or a stripper,” Viv retorts. For a while they don’t say anything. Zan gets up and crosses the lobby to the television. On the cable news, a black man argues against the new president’s foreign policy; he looks unhappy, sour, and Zan isn’t sure he would have recognized him—certainly given the political viewpoint he now expresses—if he weren’t identified at the bottom of the screen where it reads RONALD J. FLOWERS and, beneath that, “Los Angeles Director, Civic Organizers Network.” Zan listens for a while and returns to his seat next to Viv. “Ever tell you my Ronnie Jack Flowers story?” he says.

  “Yes. It’s why you don’t write novels anymore—I’ve heard it.” She says, “Sorry. That came out crabbier than I
intended.”

  After a moment Zan says, “You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything.” He means to offer it as, in part, a rapprochement.

  “That story’s about you,” she answers, “not me.”

  The mother, father, son and daughter checker coach, only two of the assigned seats together, which means that Zan and Viv take turns with Sheba while Parker has his own seat across the aisle. On Zan’s shift, scruples waver and soon he has the four-year-old swilling Benadryl; as the plane flies into darkness, Sheba sleeps on her father’s lap with Parker slumped two rows ahead.

  Viv says to Zan, “While you’re in London, you need to have the Talk with Parker.” Trying not to look as glum about it as he feels, Zan nods. “He’s twelve,” Viv insists, and Zan says, “All right,” realizing it sounds snappish. “I know he’s twelve.”

  “He’s going to start wondering,” says Viv.

  “He’s beyond wondering. He’s already figured stuff out.”

  “He doesn’t know anything.”

  “He knows all of it.”

  “Did you? At twelve?”

  “I don’t remember how much I knew or exactly what, but I had gotten the gist of it.”

  “The gist?”

  “Yes, the gist.”

  “Shhh,” she says, looking at everyone around them sleeping.