These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  Arriving in Paris on the Eurostar after its unscheduled pause in the Chunnel, leaving the Gare du Nord and crossing the rue Dunkerque on their way to the Gare de l’Est, Parker sees the taxicab heading toward him not at all in that slow-motion way that everyone says things like this happen. There’s nothing slow-motion about it; it all happens faster than the boy can compute before his father grabs him hard by the hand, so hard his hand crunches, and yanks him from the cab’s path. His father says, “Are you all right?” and Parker nods as stoically as if he were four; but he’s not all right. It’s not just that his hand throbs. It’s not even just the spectacle of the cab that nearly hit him flying into the limousine before it, then throwing the gear into reverse, then shifting into drive and slamming into the limo again.

  Everyone on the sidewalks watches the cab reversing and crashing into the limo over and over. Dimly through the back window, the cab’s passenger grabs her head when she flies into the seat in front of her. At the age of twelve, Parker feels his first grown-up cognition of the fact that sometimes there is no exerting control. Sometimes everything loses control and there’s nothing to be done about it, and things have been out of control for a while now—since before the Chunnel or London, maybe before Sheba.

  Though he doesn’t understand the details, Parker knows about the house. He knows about the money. He remembers one afternoon, back in the canyon, the panic in his father’s voice when he hustled the kids into the car to drive down to the bank because Zan just had gone online to discover no money in their account, so he needed to make a deposit before checks started bouncing. Now his mother is missing, his little sister is missing, and though of course Sheba drives him crazy he can’t help being upset that she’s disappeared, as upset in his adolescent way as his father, and it’s annoying, to be upset about Sheba. It just would be better if Sheba weren’t missing because then things wouldn’t be quite so out of control. Everything got harder in all their lives when Sheba came, the boy thinks—why wasn’t I enough, why wasn’t it enough for my mother and father to have me? Why was I so not enough that they had to go halfway around the world to bring Sheba to their house? and it will be half a lifetime before he understands it’s never been that he wasn’t enough, it’s that his parents’ love for him was so great as to set loose within them a terror more than they could bear.

  Flippin’ little jerkwad. He remembers back in London, the nanny accusing him of losing his sister on purpose in the maze, and his blood boils. Now Sheba’s gone and his mom is gone and he’s far from home, everything out of control, and there it all is before him now in the scene of this cab crashing into the same limo over and over. As people watch, the cab’s passenger finally throws open her back door on the other side and flees—and the boy and his father have walked another quarter block down the rue Dunkerque when something occurs to Parker and he stops to look back, to look for her among the crowd in the twilight before his father pulls him on, as though they have any hope in hell of catching the next train tonight.

  Zan and Viv each have a different dynamic with Parker. Zan is steady, calming. Viv and Parker clash, especially over how he treats Sheba; not so long ago the mother posted a sign in the house that read PARKER BE NICE TO YOUR SISTER OR FEEL MY WRATH. But the two also have an intimacy that father and son don’t. The boy will confide in his mother what he won’t in his father: Let them have the Talk, Zan has thought more than once. Zan is ballast, Viv is sail. They’ve both noticed that Parker is at his best when the parents have had an argument concerning some point of child-rearing; Parker has enough friends whose parents are split that when his own parents fight, it’s a shot fired over the bow of the family, chastening him into doing whatever he can to set right the ship of domesticity.

  There’s never been a doubt in Zan’s mind that when Sheba first became part of the family, it was hardest of all on Parker. In the two years since Sheba’s arrival, Parker has turned more volatile, explosive. This has coincided with the onset of adolescence, a time when every affront listed on the ledger of his still brief life takes on a scope worthy of tribunals in The Hague. It bugs the twelve-year-old as much as it pleases him that, among his friends, his parents are considered the cool ones—the mom who’s turquoise and the dad who plays music on the radio; and now Parker’s salutations, cordialities and exchanges are spoken in the language of estrangement. Though the boy has been calling his mother and father “Viv” and “Zan” since he was Sheba’s age, the implicit remove of a first-name basis, which between children and their parents is tantamount to last-name basis, becomes all the more meaningful.

  Testosterone abides. Lately there have been eruptions of violence. Years of sensitive parenting early on, strict supervision over what the boy watched or was exposed to in movies or on television, aimed at cultivating the next Dalai Lama, vanished in a flash of hormones around his eighth birthday. Soon the house was a paramilitary compound, fully stocked with any kind of weapon of any ballistic—air pellets, paint balls, small BBs—that wasn’t actual bullets. “Shall I shoot it?” Zan heard Parker say one afternoon back in the family room of their house, and when the father turned to look, there on the wall was a small rat.

  Immediately enflamed, Zan said, “Yes,” and Parker pulled the trigger. With a squeak, the rodent fell. Half an hour later, Zan was in the office upstairs when Parker came in, tentative, as close to weepy as his age allowed anymore. “What’s the matter?” said Zan. Softly Parker said, “I feel bad about it. It was a little one. It made a noise when I hit it.” After a moment Zan said, “I told you to shoot it, it’s not your fault. Listen, I can’t say I’m sorry about killing the rats. But it’s right that you have feelings about it.” They went downstairs and Zan looked for the body of the mouse behind the sofa where it fell; it wasn’t there and, for his son’s sake, Zan was relieved. “You didn’t kill it,” he told Parker, “it would be here if you did. Must have winged it.”

  “Good,” said Parker.

  Flickers of conscience aside, lately the boy puts his fist through the thin walls of his room. No wonder, thinks Zan, his hand hurts all the time. “You have a right to get angry,” Viv rails at their son, “but you don’t have the right to destroy the walls!” though Zan wonders if Parker knows about the foreclosure and finds a certain justice in taking out his anger on the house. Zan and Viv buy for Parker a punching bag in the form of a man whom the boy names Alejandro.

  More alarming have been Parker’s plots to escape. After one blow-up, Zan caught him trying to go through the two-story window: “You care more about Sheba than you do me!” the boy yelled at his father. “You’re better off without me!” and though Zan realized some of this was drama engendered by too much reality TV and internet posturing, Parker shook with a fury that wasn’t faked. One time he actually left. Forty minutes later he was back, but not soon enough to undo the trauma; and since then, every time Zan hears the slam of a door or finds a window agape, he wonders if his son has gone. Of course Zan and Viv don’t feel remotely ready for any of it. Zan still is recovering from his son casually using the word “orgasm” in conversation with his buddies in the back of the car on the way home from school.

  He’s twelve. It’s part of his job description as a twelve-year-old to believe the modern age began the day he was born. To the extent that it was about anything to Parker, the recent election wasn’t about history, it wasn’t about politics, it was about one candidate being cool and the other one not; if there was a single kid in Parker’s school who was for the other guy, he or she kept quiet about it. Parker is the mindless embodiment of the oldest liberal cliché: Some of his best friends are black, particularly Thomas, the son of a black mother from the Bahamas and a white German body-builder who scandalized Parker’s school by showing up at a Halloween festival as an SS officer. Turning stereotypes on their heads, in the election the black born-again Christian mother voted for the white conservative and the white German with SS fantasies voted for the black liberal. “No more old men,” Thomas’ father
scowled. Like any kid who instinctively understands he’s a resident of the future and already has his young eye on his true home in time, Parker is bored by the past, so it means nothing to Parker now that the city where they arrive the next evening, after spending a night in Paris and taking the long eleven-hour train, again and again has been at the crux of the past century.

  But Zoo Station, where once Zan came into Berlin fourteen years before, right after the fall of the Wall, has given up to the new Hauptbahnhof its gateway to the rest of the world. As their train approaches over water—the surrounding lakes overrunning their shores in the rain to form a moat—the sight of the new trainport, emblazoned on the outside with neon stars, and the windowless future-city of globes, with its panoramas of graffiti and passages in the sky mirroring the hundreds built underground half a modern era go, perk Parker up for a moment.

  In the Hauptbahnhof, Zan stares at the U-Bahn map in mute and utter confusion. He never understood the city the first time he was here; it had a hole in the middle, and Zan has learned from Los Angeles that it takes a lifetime to navigate such cities. He leads Parker to several hotels off the Kurfürstendamm, with its dark clotted shadows of the trees that line it and the display windows of the shops that shine like gold boxes. At every front desk Zan asks if by some chance someone with Viv’s name or description is checked in, and then asks for a room, always concluding to his son, “We’re not staying here.” One hotel, he explains to Parker, “has no WiFi.” Another “has no room-service.”

  At midnight, when they check into an inn at the southern end of the Wall where an old recording studio used to be, Parker looks at the room and then his father in disbelief. It’s bare, cold, damp; there drifts through the window languages unlike any the boy has heard. The tiny television has something Parker has never seen: antennae, which makes it look like a monstrous bug. “Here?” Parker howls in disbelief. “They don’t have WiFi! They don’t have room service!”

  Zan returns his son’s livid gaze in crestfallen silence.

  “This is horrible,” says Parker. “The other hotels at least spoke English.”

  Zan is tired of every single decision being about money. He doesn’t flatter any sense of his own victimization by believing they’re exactly poor; Zan understands that a crummy hotel isn’t a serious definition of poverty. Poverty, he knows, is not only having no money or resources but no hope; and though he has no idea what hope they might reasonably entertain at this point, he hasn’t yet given up assuming that it exists or someday will. “Parker,” he answers his son quietly, “we couldn’t afford the other places. I’m sorry.”

  To Parker, the endless survey and rejection of hotels this evening—it wasn’t really endless, only four or five, but seemed endless to the boy—wasn’t unlike watching a cab crash into the same limo over and over. It’s an old part of town where they are now, and the dreariness he feels is compounded by the sight not so far away of the Potsdamer Platz at its most ultra-modern; once the no-man’s land of the Wall before monied victors of the Cold War like Sony and Mercedes moved in, it hovers in their room’s window taunting them.

  Parker feels the future snatched back from him again. He feels like someone who’s been sentenced to a penal colony on another world, or like the astronaut he sees in science-fiction movies always floating in space, with that single fragile line the only thing that connects him to home, or something with the name of home—the line you know is bound to break.

  The “bathroom,” the boy is mortified to observe, isn’t separate but part of the same single room where the beds are. “You can sleep in the tub,” Zan tries to joke about the large white porcelain bowl that is the room’s most prominent furniture. Parker glares at him. He refuses to take a bath. When he goes to the bathroom he insists on turning out the room’s light, sitting on the toilet and finally managing to pee by pretending his father doesn’t exist.

  The next day, the two go to the eastern side of the Bran­denburg Gate, out on the Unter den Linden. To Parker, the massive boulevard is as wide as a river–and suddenly the idiocy of the entire journey becomes so evident that even a twelve-year-old can see it, maybe especially a twelve-year-old. The man and boy stand on the edge of the boulevard gazing across.

  Zan says, “Come on,” and the two traipse from one corner of the Gate’s shadow to the other. Zan tries to calculate angles from which the photo posted by Viv online was taken. “But is this the way it looked in the picture,” Zan keeps muttering to no conceivable response from his son, “maybe over there?” and then they relocate themselves to another place.

  This goes on for two hours. Afterward, with Parker in tow, Zan checks all the hotels in the area. They walk from one to the other, fumbling through English requests and German responses. Trying to ask himself why Viv would be in Berlin and what she would be doing here, Zan leads the boy to the Ethiopian embassy not far from the Gate, a relatively modest if distinguished two-story white house on Boothstrasse. From there they take the U-Bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof where they check the surrounding hotels. As darkness falls on a futile day, Parker concludes ruefully, My father is a moron.

  I’m a moron, Zan groans to himself, stealing a glance at his son’s face. Beyond the inexorable compulsion to respond to the SOS of his wife’s online photo, the man accepts what he’s put off knowing until this moment, that nothing about the decision to come here has made sense—as though Viv walks the city waiting for her family to show up.

  What do we do now? he wonders. Leave post-its on the Gate’s pillars? Viv, come home? Though the father barely can remember the ways in which twelve-year-old boys feel lonely, he remembers enough, and knows what the loneliness grows up into; and though he can’t be sure at which end on the scale of profundity is most profound the feeling of being lost and at loose ends—when you’re young, and closer to the beginning? or when you’re old and closer to the end—he knows the feelings are kin enough that no amount of resilience, seasoned or not, overcomes it. He’s wracked by the unstable existence to which his son has been delivered, when the guilt isn’t dislodged by how he’s abandoned his daughter back in London, in her little life of abandonments.

  On the U-Bahn back to their neighborhood, sitting side by side, Parker stares out the window. “I want you to write down my cell number,” Zan says. Not turning from the window, after a moment Parker says, “Why?”

  The father pulls from the boy’s coat pocket a blue marker. “Does this write?”

  Parker takes off the top and slashes the marker down the back of his father’s hand, leaving a hostile blue streak. “It writes,” he snarls.

  The father looks at his hand and the evidence of the boy’s assault. “O.K. So take down this number.”

  Parker says, “I don’t have anything to write it on.”

  “Write it on the palm of your hand,” says Zan, holding up his own hand.

  “My hand still hurts. From when you crushed it,” Parker says.

  The father takes a deep breath. “A taxi was about to run into you. Is it really going to hurt your hand to write on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Write on your other hand.”

  “Then I have to use the hand that hurts to write. Besides I’m right-handed,” though he has to stop and think, as he always does, which hand is right and which is left.

  “I’ll write it.”

  Parker says, “We don’t need to.”

  Zan says, “Just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “I don’t know. In case . . . something . . . ”

  “What?”

  “Something happens.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “We get separated or something.”

  “Why would we get separated?” the boy’s voice rises.

  “We won’t get separated,” the father assures him.

  “Then I don’t need to write it,” Parker declares and turns back to the window.

  Back in their neighborhood, they duck into a café cal
led the CyberHansa. Zan doles out the euros, buying his son a roll and a coffee drink. “We can get online here?” he asks the woman behind the counter, but Parker already has pulled the laptop from his father’s bag and logged on. “Can you find the page with Mom’s posting?” says the father, trying to nurture a conspiratorial bond with the boy.

  Parker is having none of it. “Of course,” he snaps.

  The father watches his son, giving him the full rein of his twelve-year-old attitude at its most merciless. After a moment Parker pulls back from the laptop as if studying it, his brows arched. “What?” says Zan.

  “It’s gone.”

  Zan says, “Gone?”

  “Mom’s photo,” says Parker.

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “I mean it’s gone.”

  It’s taking a moment for Zan to fully absorb what his son is saying. “No, wait. Gone?”

  “Zan,” Parker says evenly, “it’s gone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what gone means. It means it’s not there.”

  Befuddled, Zan says, “But it was there.”

  “Yeah,” Parker says. He adds, looking closer, “The weird thing is my comment is still . . . ” He shrugs.

  Zan has moved from his side of the table to Parker’s. He looks at the laptop. “What comment?”

  “You told me to post a comment? To send Mom a message.” Parker points at the screen: Were r u. “Were are you?” Zan reads back. “What does that mean, Were are you?”

  “Where are you,” corrects Parker.