He repeats emphatically, “The gist.”
“Did you have the Talk with your father?” says Viv.
“My father was appalled by the whole subject. He gave me a book that I barely looked at. Everything I know about sex I learned from James Bond movies.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, that explains a few things.” After a while she falls asleep and Zan turns on his laptop and reads the news on the airplane WiFi that he had to pay for. Soon a woman in the seat next to him strikes up a conversation that Zan immediately realizes is intended to be political.
Zan never has picked a political argument with a stranger before. Actually he doesn’t pick political arguments with anyone; he’s so averse to confrontation that when people talk politics, he’s as likely to sink into even greater silences. It’s hard to tell what age the woman is. She could be an older-looking thirty-eight or a younger-looking fifty-one. She looks older than Viv, who looks ten years younger than she is.
The woman is wearing a new ring that she’s shown off to the flight attendants. Zan decides she’s just gotten engaged—maybe, to put it cruelly, in the nick of time. He isn’t sure what leads the woman to draw conclusions about Zan’s political views, which are less predictable than the woman assumes; maybe it’s something she’s seen Zan reading on his laptop. Later he’ll wonder—though this might be unfair—if she saw Zan with his black daughter. In any case she immediately means to straighten him out on some things. After some back and forth that Zan wants no part of, she blurts, “The big difference between us is that I believe in personal responsibility and you don’t.”
He says in disbelief, “I don’t?” He looks back to his wife’s seat to see if she’s catching any of this, but Viv sleeps. Zan doesn’t understand Viv’s sleeping habits, how the slightest thing at home keeps her awake but she can sleep upright on a plane in a seat smaller than a coffin. “No,” the woman says emphatically, and Zan, visions of foreclosure in his head, wonders if she’s right. But she doesn’t know me, he thinks, doesn’t know my life; in fact—and there it is right on the edge of his brain—if she’s just getting engaged then in all likelihood she doesn’t have kids, and he hears himself snarling at her, “Do you even have kids? and if you don’t, then you have no clue what responsibility is.” Finally having gotten some guy to give her a ring, her chance of having children now, at either thirty-eight or fifty-one, is as far from her as the ground below them is now; and she looks stricken, her sense of power suddenly shattered, and bursts into tears . . .
Except she doesn’t, “because,” Zan later relates to Viv, “I didn’t say that. It was there on the edge of my brain and there it stayed, because as much as I would have liked to let her have it, with her I’m-all-about-personal-responsibility-and-you-aren’t, as much as she asked for it, as much as she deserved it—”
“—you couldn’t bring yourself to,” says Viv.
He knows it’s the way a woman can be most profoundly hurt, “and maybe that’s my fucking problem,” he mutters, more to himself, maybe it’s the problem with all of us (whoever we are) when it comes to dealing with them (whoever . . . ), a softness, no killer instinct, mush for fortitude. “She didn’t have any problem telling me I have no sense of responsibility.”
“I know,” Viv says, and takes his hand.
The flight is half an hour late into London, eating into Viv’s connection time that’s precious to begin with. In the midst of the mindboggling bazaar of Heathrow’s duty-free shops, Viv has only the time to say, “I’ll email,” then, “I’ll call,” then she and Zan seem to realize they’ve no idea when they’ll next see each other and have spent most of what time there was bickering.
Viv grabs the kids goodbye then kisses Zan, and “O.K.” is all he can say. Shaking off the Benadryl stupor, Sheba begins to wail and Viv is slightly stricken. “It will be O.K.,” Zan says to Viv as he scoops up Sheba, nodding in a way that means, Go. Both will remember how quickly all this happened.
In her usual manner, Sheba begins making her presence known to London as soon as she, Zan and Parker are in the car that’s been arranged to take them from the airport. “I WANT MAMA!” she screams, and the driver jumps in his seat, eyes filling the rearview mirror. “How long is Viv going to be gone?” asks Parker.
Zan says, “A few days,” and turns his gaze outside in a way meant to preclude further explanation. It’s been more than twenty-five years since Zan last was in London, and as has become true with so many things, it doesn’t seem so long ago at all, and even as it doesn’t seem so long ago, it seems another lifetime, before Sheba, before Parker, before Viv. At the time he just had finished what would become his first published novel and still was more than a year from selling it and nearly three years from publication. Turning in the backseat of the car and craning his neck to take in this and that, he realizes he’s seeing less what he’s looking at than whatever memory it marks in some mental almanac that’s already begun to crumble.
The driver of the car clears his throat and ventures into something that Zan guesses he’s been considering since Heathrow. “Well done, then,” he says, “you Yanks.”
“Sorry?” says Zan.
“Well done,” the driver nods in the rearview mirror, a tentative smile, “the new top man. You did it!”
Zan looks at Parker, and Parker looks back at his father and shrugs. It’s a few seconds before Zan understands; everyone wants to talk politics these days. I should introduce this guy to the woman who harangued me on the plane, he thinks. See how “well done” she thinks it is. “Oh,” Zan says, “yeah, it’s . . . kind of unbelievable, really.”
“Think he’ll turn it all around, then?” says the driver.
“Everyone hopes so. Almost everyone, anyway.” Zan realizes that, seeing Sheba, the driver assumes he knows how Zan voted: Is this cause for indignation? An assumption made solely on the basis of Sheba’s color? On the other hand, well, the assumption happens to be correct, if not the reasoning. “She was for the other guy,” Zan jokes to the rearview mirror, pointing at Sheba in his lap.
The driver laughs, maybe with some relief that he hasn’t given offense. After a pause he says, “Funny place, the States. Given the bloke you had before, I mean.”
“Yeah,” says Zan, “funny place.”
Politics, such as it is, doesn’t come up again until the car nears the hotel in Bloomsbury, where Zan and his children have been put up by the university. The driver has taken the long way to show off the city, turning south to come into London by way of Hammersmith, then cutting through St. John’s Wood to Regent’s Park where he slows and points to a distant, grand red-brick mansion with white columns. “Winfield House,” the driver says.
Zan says, “I don’t think that’s our hotel.”
The driver chortles. “Your ambassador lives there. Or used to,” he adds, suddenly a bit unsure.
“Really,” Zan says with all the enthusiasm that politeness can muster. He looks at his kids to get a more accurate reading of just how boring this is; Parker’s expression confirms that it’s somewhere around Def-Con Two. Sheba has fallen asleep again. The inventor of Benadryl, Zan thinks, should get the Nobel Peace Prize. “I heard your President Kennedy lived there, didn’t he?” says the driver. “That’s what someone told me.”
Zan realizes the driver might be correct. “I believe so. As a boy.”
The driver does a double-take. “He was ambassador as a boy?”
“No, of course not. He wasn’t ambassador, his father was ambassador.”
The driver gazes at the red mansion. “They say the new man is like him, then?”
“Who?”
“President Kennedy?”
“Uh,” Zan shrugs, “maybe.” He says, “The campaign was more like his brother’s.”
“Was he the one shot?” Parker says.
“Both of them were shot.”
“The heck?”
Zan is shocked by the tactlessness of the conversation, but it’s history that’s been
tactless. “The father was ambassador,” he says, looking at the house, “before World War II. One of his sons became president. He was shot. A few years later his brother ran for president and he was shot too. Some people think the new president’s campaign was more like the brother’s.”
“Would the brother have become president,” says Parker as the driver starts up the car, “if he hadn’t been shot?”
“Hard to know. Some people think so.” Zan says, “I’m not so sure.”
The driver pulls out into traffic. “Funny place, the States.”
In the small Bloomsbury hotel, Zan and his children have a room on the third floor. The woman at the front desk says, “Are you Alexander Nordhoc, the author?” An international warrant must be out for my arrest, he thinks. WORLD’S MOST OBSCURE AUTHOR FLEES DEBT COLLECTORS reads the headline in his mind, INTERPOL ON THE HUNT. On their first day the father and children wander the neighborhood, submitting to fish and chips at a corner stand; twice Zan yanks Sheba from the path of oncoming taxis. “We’re not in the canyon,” he admonishes the kids, “this is a big city, a real city. Not like L.A.”
That night in exhaustion Zan and Parker try to sleep, only to pay the price for all the peace Benadryl bought on the flight over. Sheba is fully awake and on California time. The next day Zan drags them onto a double-decker bus, the four-year-old snarling, “Out of my way, old man,” and then a boat that sails up the Thames, finally crossing Millennium Bridge to ride one of the glass pods of the Eye, the revolving wheel on the river’s other side. That night in the hotel, Zan’s laptop finally hitches a ride on some unsuspecting wireless network nearby to find an email from Viv. Reading it to the kids, he tries to feign cheer.
Hey u 3 I made it, am safe in Addis. Flights went smoothly & I feel O.K., no jet lag yet. Already miss you guys, P&Sh are u seeing London or just watching TV in the hotel? u must be thrilled I’m not there to bug you. hey I know u miss me you scamps. Internet service is 30. per day & since I only really email you maybe I’ll skip tomorrow. Miss u a whole lot &look at your picture and kiss it and of daddy too. xoxoxomom
On the third day Zan takes the kids to the Tower of London. What kid doesn’t love the Tower of London, he wonders, with its lopped queenly heads once bounding down the stone steps? Nonetheless neither Parker nor Sheba wants to go into that part of the tower, which makes the excursion seem beside the point, so Zan takes them to what supposedly was the bunker from which Churchill addressed London during the Blitz and plotted the salvation of civilization. The three Nordhocs enter a large lift that lowers them underground, and before the door slides open and the father and children step into the bunker, Parker’s dread of dark closed places takes over.
In an attempt to replicate the war experience, the bunker has been appointed with mannequins sleeping on surrounding cots. Parker takes one look at the fake people and it’s the final straw: “I want to leave,” he says firmly, fighting to remain calm. “I want to leave too,” Sheba says, her own fear overwhelming the usual obstinacy that would insist on doing whatever her brother doesn’t want to.
Zan has to admit it’s creepy. “O.K., we’re leaving,” he assures them, but Parker doesn’t want to go back on the lift so the father dashes from door to door until rashly he flings open the emergency exit—only to find himself on the street, out on the sidewalk, traffic rushing past him. He realizes that the “lift” is a ruse. They haven’t been underground at all. “I don’t know,” he says to the silent kids on the Tube back to the hotel, “if that’s really where Winston Churchill was during the Blitz.”
At two in the London morning, still fully in the thrall of jetlag after the kids have begun to readjust, Zan tries to compose his lecture on the Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century. Instead he peeks at the fitful story he began back in the canyon; his main character, the washed-up, middle-aged L.A. writer left for dead in the Berlin street by both skinhead murderers and their witness—the black teenage girl who dropped her book by his body—stirs and opens his eyes.
The writer rolls over in the road with a groan and only notices the dropped book because he’s lying on top of it. He grabs it from under him and pulls it away; cognizant enough to realize he should get out of the street, he crawls toward the U-Bahn entrance where the girl ran half an hour before. In the entrance, he collapses and once again passes out.
When Zan’s character wakes in the morning, a couple stands over him and says something in German. The writer stares at a gentleman, in a bowler hat with an umbrella on his arm, and the woman beside him, dressed fashionably if rather in the style of Old Europe.
The German gentleman offers his hand to pull him up. Repeating something, he looks at the woman, tips his hat to the man on the ground and passes on. It’s not until the writer is on his feet that he registers the book he’s held all night.
He stumbles into the morning light, and the fog of pain gives way to clarity. Disoriented, he tries to think where he was last night before the attack, but as he gazes around, nothing of the cityscape is familiar even as something about the terrain is. He realizes he should be looking at the topographical scar that is Potsdamer Platz, occupying where the Wall was a few years before; but now not even an echo of the Wall can be glimpsed, there among all the antique cars that fill the road and the passersby who dress quaintly. Not until he resorts to the tradition of the unwittingly time-traveled and picks up a discarded newspaper does he realize that, somehow, he’s found himself in March 1919, four months after Germany’s defeat in what’s still called the Great War and will be known as World War I only once history trespasses the vicinity of another, greater war.
Everyone who walks by stares at him, as much for how out of time he appears as for the dried blood on his face. He puts in his coat pocket the paperback dropped by the teenager. He’s still a day or two from the revelation that this battered book, which he knows well, which all of the Twentieth Century knows, its literature having begun with this book, in fact will not be published until 1922.
At a pub off Leicester Square, Zan isn’t certain whether he’s allowed to take Parker and Sheba in, except that the establishment serves food and it’s listed in the guide book. “Are you sure?” Parker asks in the road outside, wary, looking the pub over.
“The book doesn’t say you can’t go in,” Zan answers.
“What’s an ad-lip?” says Sheba, trying to conjure such a mutation in her head.
“Lib,” says Parker. To his father, “What’s so special about it anyway?”
“It was famous in the Sixties,” says Zan. He opens the door of what used to be called the Ad Lib and Sheba marches in assertively though Parker hangs back. No one tells them to leave. They get a table. “A lot of famous musicians came here. Actually the club was upstairs. It’s closed now.”
“So now,” Parker points out, “there’s nothing special about it at all.” Zan tries not to bore his children too much about the Sixties. His son will have none of it, and while Sheba might be more interested, and though certainly it’s not impossible, Zan can’t say for a fact that in his earlier career the androgynous spaceman whose music she loves ever actually was on the premises. “Stop singing,” Parker mutters to his sister, whose transmission frequency this afternoon is particularly high.
“I’m not,” she says.
Notwithstanding the ministrations of $3,000 dentists, Zan and Viv have given up trying to break Sheba of her thumb-sucking. Amid everything else, they’ve decided it’s a problem that will have to resolve itself; in the meantime they’ve not so much learned the rule of Sheba’s thumb but that there is one—such as in the way she now takes her thumb from her mouth in order to fix on what she sees outside the pub window.
Sheba has been looting her way across London all morning, from the shops of Piccadilly to Covent Garden—all of it boring for the kids because Zan can’t afford to buy anything—but now a calm overtakes her so sudden and extraordinary that the father feels accosted by it. When she slightl
y turns in her seat, Zan turns to look as well, following the girl’s line of sight; with a start, his attention is as seized as Sheba’s. “What is it?” says Parker.
What appears to be a young African woman stands across the street watching Sheba back.
On her second day in Addis Ababa, after the long flight from Heathrow, Viv still isn’t clear about her course of action. She’s rejected any idea of going to the authorities. If the sensory bombardment of a new place hasn’t so much dispelled her depression and sense of crisis as distracted from it, as well there’s a new apprehension that she herself has trouble gauging in terms of what’s real and what’s paranoia.
The words of the last email from the investigative journalist whom she hired to find Sheba’s mother— . . . suspicions of child-trafficking . . . possibility that Zema was sold to you...difficult to be certain how seriously they take this . . . —have gone through her head since she read them. Passing through customs at the airport, she braced herself. Checking into the hotel, again she waited for some polite invitation to a backroom from which she would never emerge. Once in her own small hotel room, she expected a knock at the door; opening her bags, she stared long and hard at the contents trying to remember exactly how she packed everything, if there’s a sign of anything out of place. She goes back and forth in her mind whether it’s best to keep out of sight or to keep in plain sight, and when she’s in plain sight, like the lounge or bar, she pays attention to whose sight she’s in, who lingers as long as she does, who leaves when she leaves.
The balcony of her room overlooks to one direction the other more upscale hotel in the distance. Its figure-eight drive circles two lush roundabouts before spilling out into a city impaled on a monumental broadcasting tower, time’s antenna; around a pool in the other direction, cabana umbrellas erupt like pale blue mushrooms. They’re nearly a color—a shade not quite green enough—to match Viv’s hair. Contrary to western impressions of Africa as hot, Addis is misty and cool. A mile and a half up, it’s closer to the sky than almost any city on earth, called by some of the locals Eucalyptopolis for the trees. Big thunderstorms roll in nightly, the clouds’ percussion to the chanting that Viv hears from the mosques.
These Dreams of You Page 6
