Brown peers up at him from where he sits. “Of course,” he ventures calmly, “given the attitudes some of these men are raised with about such things, it is torture, isn’t it.”
“Sincerely,” Zan says, “maybe that says more about some fucked-up attitudes about women and sex than it does about what can objectively be called torture.” He’s abashed at his lapse. “Sorry,” he snaps at the kids, “you know you’re not supposed to say that word.”
“Sex?” says Parker.
“The other one.”
“Fucked-up,” volunteers Sheba.
“We’ve heard you say that before,” Parker observes.
“You say it all the fucked-up time,” Sheba agrees.
“Thank you, children,” says Zan, “for that authoritative consensus. Sheba, don’t say it again.” He sighs. “The waterboarding was horrific,” he quietly gathers their things, “a disgrace to everything we’re supposed to stand for. Let’s leave it at that. Listen,” he says, uncertain if he’s disappointed in himself or has discovered something new, “I’ve got to get them back . . . ”
“We’ll carry on next week,” says the other man, “catch the train out to the college together, if that’s agreeable.”
“How far is it?”
“Twenty minutes from Waterloo. Longer if we miss the express.”
“James,” Zan says, “if Viv isn’t back by then, I may need to line up a nanny of some sort. Sorry, I know this isn’t what you signed up for. It’s not what I had in mind either.”
Images of Sheba’s havoc receding in his eyes, Brown emanates unmistakable relief. “I’ll look into it,” he says.
Zan writes to Viv as breezy an email as he can muster, though he doesn’t do breezy in even the breeziest of circumstances. He writes about the city, kids, what they’ve been doing, concluding, Assume you’re not returning to London w/in nxt 48 hrs so looking into childcare prospects for when residency begins next week.
When there’s no answer, Zan sends another email, then phones Viv on her cell, though he knows she has no connection where she is. He phones the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa. The weekend passes; Zan, Parker and Sheba spend Saturday afternoon at Leicester Square eating a surprisingly excellent pizza and poking around an old-fashioned Covent Garden toy shop where the manager—a young guy from Vermont who wants to be a fantasy writer and has been in England long enough to pick up an accent—plays with the kids a game involving small toy creatures locked in epic battles. Sheba keeps knocking over the creatures she isn’t supposed to, to her brother’s growing rage.
Parker is so enthralled with the game that Zan can’t resist paying £80 for it that they can’t afford. Back in the room, the boy puts on hold the pending fourth issue of Shrimpy Comix to spend the night gluing little creatures and painting them; for Sheba, Zan buys a smaller preassembled set that she complains is smaller than Parker’s and preassembled. The only thing the father can find on the hotel television is news.
When he goes online and learns the house has been scheduled for foreclosure in three weeks, only then does he realize how numb to everything he’s become.
Foolishly, Zan convinced himself the bank forgot them. Now he imagines them all stranded in London, with nowhere to return. In the background on the television, the BBC reports that back home a bizarre new phenomenon has taken hold by which some segments of the public suggest the president is an impostor. They contend he was born in a secret african veldt and, as a newborn, smuggled into the country under the cover of a false birth certificate and false birth announcement in a hawaiian newspaper so that forty-seven years later he could seize the presidency. Some propose that this is God’s warning of the end of time.
For a while Zan half listens to a woman in South Dakota who’s interviewed about the pending Rapture and end of the world. What finally gets his full attention is her glee, which isn’t so much about going to heaven as it is about everyone who will be left behind; finally this woman will be superior to all the smart-alecks on television and those in their high stations who thought they were superior to her. The End Time constitutes its own kind of revolutionary politics. The woman counts down the hours until she’ll get to see the looks on the faces of the secular elite as she ascends and they’re below with the flames licking their feet. Among the crosses and pictures of Jesus is an image of the president as something not unlike a creature that Parker glues and paints at this moment; underneath the image is the word ANTICHRIST. “Is he a spaceman?” Sheba cries enthusiastically.
Of course Zan and Viv have told their son and daughter nothing about their financial problems and, as with the Talk, Zan suspects they don’t need to. He’s insisted to Parker that things are all right and feels certain the boy isn’t having it, has picked up on too many signs. Zan is meditating on a house lost to the bank and rats, being in a foreign country with two kids and credit cards that don’t work and a missing wife and no babysitter that he can’t afford anyway, when there comes a knock on the hotel room door, unheard at first over the clap of thunder outside. “Sheba,” he warns uselessly for the hundredth time in both their lives, “don’t answer without knowing who it is,” as she bolts for the door, for the hundredth time ignoring him. “Who is it?” Zan says, but when the girl stands in the open doorway transfixed and unanswering, he knows.
On the afternoon forty years ago when he was a university freshman and went to see the small frail man running for president, Zan got close to where he stood just as the moment exploded, the event spilling beyond the bounds of control. The thing that was bigger than everyone, candidate and crowd alike, took over, and the frenzy that this man incited in the crowd lifted Zan off his feet, catching him in the undertow. When it threatened to pull him down where he would be crushed, trampled or both, a young female black hand reached to Zan from the sky and he took it.
An aide to the candidate, she discarded her clipboard, grabbed his arm with her other hand and pulled him from the crowd. He saw the young woman’s face only half a minute, maybe less, long enough to register her eyes so gray as to be a glint short of silver, before the candidate’s bodyguards removed him and deposited him back at the crowd’s edge.
The woman wasn’t much older than Zan, four or five years, and wore dreadlocks that weren’t particularly typical yet in the late Sixties. She smiled at him but her gray eyes didn’t smile with her mouth; in her eyes were fear and the anticipation of the unspeakable thing that was on everyone’s mind. As she pulled him to safety, she leaned over and whispered in his ear a single word.
The following summer, Zan had a job delivering pizzas in his father’s car. This was when the valley at night just north of Hollywood was still a crater of caves, except the caves weren’t in hills but in the night-air and you could drive in one and emerge somewhere else. One evening an order was called in from one of the dorms at the same local college where Zan would teach more than thirty years later. As Zan parked the car, someone sang on the radio and Ray Charles was shot down, but got up to do his best and Zan pulled the portable pizza oven from the front seat and strolled into the dorm to find himself the only white boy in sight.
While the front desk called up to the room, Zan waited in the lobby, a dozen black faces studying him intently. One very stoned kid staggered up and peered into Zan’s eyes like they were an astronomer’s telescope trained on cosmic emptiness; he asked something that Zan didn’t understand and, before Zan could answer, drew back his arm like a slingshot and let go, bringing his hand across Zan’s face.
Zan reeled. The guy hit him again and then again. Later Zan would wonder if it was to his credit or something less admirable that he never had to suppress an instinct to strike back; in any event he was rational enough to know it wasn’t a good option. He felt more humiliation than pain or anger, which was the point, of course. As calmly as possible he leaned over, picked up the oven from the floor and walked from the lobby, back out the front door of the dorm with whatever dignity he could manage, which in this case meant not breaking i
nto an all-out sprint.
He almost reached his car when he heard the footsteps behind him. Years later, the middle-aged L.A. writer in Zan’s new novel will hear in the Berlin street footsteps much like these, preceding his doom. At last Zan was angry enough to turn and find himself confronted by a group larger than the one in Berlin but smaller than the one in the dorm lobby.
About half a dozen of the dorm’s residents, all black, had with them in some kind of vague captivity the guy who hit Zan. “Tell him,” one of them commanded. Weaving where he stood, too stoned to make sense, the assailant mumbled, “Sorry.”
“He’s sorry,” the other student translated to Zan.
“O.K.,” said Zan.
“Don’t call the police.”
“O.K.”
“Promise not to call the police.”
“I’m not calling the police. I am,” Zan pointed at the dorm in the distance, “going back inside and selling this person her pizza.”
Back at the pizza joint, the indignant Cuban owner reached for the phone to call the police. “Don’t,” said the eighteen-year-old.
“Bullshit,” said the owner.
“I told them we wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“The San Fernando Valley Riots, over a pizza? I’m O.K.” Reluctantly the Cuban put the phone back in the cradle. No further deliveries, however, were made to the dormitory. Two decades later there would be a famous movie by a black filmmaker about a pizza place at the center of a riot in Brooklyn one hot summer night. When Zan sees it, he’ll wonder if he thwarted history just long enough for someone else to make it up.
For a long time after the pizza incident, Zan told no one about it. He certainly didn’t tell his parents. Finally he wrote about it, showing what he wrote only to Logan Hale, who remarked on the young man’s detachment. “You were mugged,” Hale exhorted him, “you have a right to be enraged,” but the rage never came. For the most part Zan forgot about it, only for the memory to surface again years later still shorn of fury, as far as he can tell.
The day after she visits Sheba’s family, the driver takes Viv deeper into the city than she’s been. The Entoto Hills loom to the north. Taxis blue and white like the umbrellas around the hotel pool fill the roads, and a plume of smoke rises from the Meskel Square where Viv sees a burning pyramid. They’ve been driving half an hour when they park the car in a neighborhood at the city’s center. The driver leads Viv by foot down a series of winding, narrow stone steps into a labyrinth of tunnels and bridges, lined by high walls covered with moss, to the deepest root of the eucalyptopolis.
A sirocco blows in from the moon. Viv hears the mournful songs of the nearby mosques. As the woman with the turquoise hair follows the driver, watched by Ethiopians in the distance, the walls of the passages resonate with distant chants and the thunder of a gathering storm.
To the south, Viv glimpses an ancient underground church carved from rock, bubbling up out of an earth radiant with three thousand millennia, the oldest place that human-time remembers, barely. Around her, she feels the monsoon of the storm above and the Nile-saturated ground below yearn for each other; the woman and driver pass inviolate stone corners still smelling of the mustard gas with which Mussolini’s army massacred a million Ethiopians seventy years ago. The passage is crisscrossed by alleys where people in white gauze float in and out of the shadows.
The trip is so clandestine and mysterious that it can’t help seeming as though Sheba’s mother should be waiting at the end of wherever it leads; but finally Viv stops the driver. “No,” she says, “this isn’t right,” and looks over her shoulder behind her, with no idea where she’s come from.
Standing in the doorway of the Bloomsbury hotel room, the young African woman wears across her shoulders the same scarf that covered her head when they first saw her yesterday outside the pub. Otherwise, the jeans make her look like any contemporary western woman. “Hello,” says Zan.
“Hello,” the young woman nods, “I’m Molly,” pulling the scarf from her shoulders and rolling it and slipping it into the bag she carries under one arm. “I understand you are looking for a caretaker for the children.”
Startled, Zan says, “Come in.” Sheba has said nothing, the young woman locked in her focus, but now blurts, “Have you ever had any little girls in your tummy?”
“I think she wants to know,” says Zan, “if you have children of your own. A daughter she can be friends with, maybe,” but he’s not sure that’s what Sheba really means. “Sheba, go play with Parker,” he says.
Still gluing and painting his creatures they bought in Covent Garden, Parker says, “She can’t play what I’m playing.” Sheba starts to cry; Zan closes his eyes. It occurs to him maybe Viv is right and the young African woman might be offended by the name Sheba. Would they call an adopted Mexican child Montezuma? “Parker,” Zan says as calmly as he can, “help me out. Do something your sister can too, or find something on TV.”
Molly kneels to Sheba’s level and says to the girl, “Let me talk with your father a moment, all right? Then perhaps you and I will play.” She rises and turns to Zan as the girl backs away still watching the woman. “I apologize for the intrusion of coming to the room. I tried to ring you earlier from where I’m staying but no one answered, and I don’t have a mobile.”
Like many of the small hotels in the area, this one has no telephones in the room, so Zan can’t be sure whether Molly means that she called the front desk downstairs or tried his cell, which hasn’t rung at all and which she wouldn’t have the number for anyway. While Parker was in the room gluing and painting, there was half an hour when Zan took Sheba to the little market around the corner, darting in and out of the rain, then down the street for a sandwich and the English butter cookies with which both of them have become mildly obsessed. At a newsstand, Zan bought a copy of a British music magazine with Sheba’s favorite artist on the cover, a retrospective. There was a call earlier on Zan’s cell from J. Willkie Brown that Zan didn’t answer and hasn’t returned.
A small table huddles in the corner of the room and Zan and the young woman sit down at it. On the table is a small pot for hot water and a small selection of teas. “Operative word, obviously,” Zan waves at the room, “is small.”
“Of course,” she smiles.
“Sheba and I sleep in the big bed,” he says, “and Parker has the small one. She hasn’t gotten to the point yet where she wants to sleep alone.”
“But she will,” Molly says.
“I keep reminding my wife that Parker was the same when he was younger. Never wanted to fall asleep alone. Then one night when he was nine or ten,” Zan snaps his fingers, “not only does he want to sleep alone, he barely wants his parents in the same house.” Zan is more rattled than he realizes by the news of the foreclosure. “Have you been in London long? I’m sorry,” he stops himself, “I shouldn’t assume—”
“No,” she says, “you’re quite correct, I am not from London.” She cocks her head in thought. “I’ve been here . . . a short time.”
“Your English is excellent,” says Zan. “I hope that’s all right to say.”
Her accent is indeterminate—a bit British, a bit the singsong precision of an English by way of Africa, maybe a bit something harder, from some other corner of the world. “Thank you,” she says. “My mother spoke English so that’s what I spoke before I moved to Addis Ababa ten years ago.”
“Are you Ethiopian?” Zan says. He’s not sure how disquieted he is by this.
“Half,” she says. “My mother was born there but came to London as a small girl and grew up here.”
“And your father?”
“He may have been British but . . . it is not as clear.”
“Sorry to pry.”
“It’s all right.”
“You grew up in England then. I didn’t think ‘Molly’ sounded African.”
“Actually I was born and raised in Germany. In Berlin.”
Over these few minutes the roo
m has gradually, at first imperceptibly, filled with sound, as though frequencies are crossing, catching half a dozen musics from anywhere and everywhere. Zan still isn’t clear on the woman’s genealogy but says, “What are you doing here?” which doesn’t come out the way he intends. “I mean, in London.”
“So far I have been taking care of children,” indicating Parker and Zan, “sometimes I clean houses . . . ” She shrugs. “I do what I need to and what I can.”
“Seriously, jerkwad?” Parker says to his sister. “I just spent like twelve hours gluing that! You don’t even know how to play this game.”
“Poppy!” Sheba wails.
Zan says, “Parker, I asked you to—”
“There’s nothing I want to do or watch or play with her,” Parker answers.
Zan indicates to Molly the hotel television. “It only gets half a dozen channels and nothing the kids care about.”
“I am certain it must be difficult for them in a strange country,” she says.
“I think they’re liking it,” though he doesn’t really think so at all.
“Not the dark place with the dummies or the place where the heads are cut off,” says Sheba.
“Very civilized children, then,” she jokes. “I have never been to your country,” she adds, “but my mother lived there, in the late Sixties and much of the Seventies, after leaving England.”
“Really?” says Zan. “Where?”
“Around and about. Mostly in Los Angeles.”
“That’s where we’re from.”
“Yes,” she smiles, “I know.”
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