These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  She means to have her daughter in London but gets as far as Paris and a flat in Montparnasse. A New Jersey punk poetess’ record plays through the window of another apartment across the courtyard. No sooner has Molly slipped into welcoming hands than the midwife holds her up astonished at the hum from her little body; already the baby transmits on Molly frequency. For six months she has her mother’s gray eyes, before they turn brown.

  If no one can be sure where the frequency comes from, it makes sense anyway for Jasmine to try and return Molly to its source. Fifteen months after her daughter’s birth, the little girl already walking adeptly, the mother spots a familiar redheaded rock star coming out of a hotel on the rue des Beaux Arts off St. Germain-des-Prés, and she pivots, sliding around the corner of rue Bonaparte just as he turns to do a double-take. Some mysterious music from some unknown place has gotten his attention. The next day from the window she spots him in the street below as though searching, and she lets loose the curtain from her fingers just as he looks up; she hurls a blanket over the child to smother her broadcast. The next morning the girl finds outside her door a small box.

  Disregarding her mother’s standing directive about answering doors to strange people and small boxes, the girl says, “Mum?” lifting the box’s contents in her two small hands: the small camera from Berlin that catches images and strands them mid-air on their way to film.

  When they move back to Berlin, taking a flat in Schöneberg not far from the one where Jasmine lived before, the small girl clicks ghost pictures from Checkpoint Charlie to the Branden­burg Gate. Sometimes the pictures themselves are ghosts, disappearing into the electric ether; sometimes the pictures are of ghosts, people who aren’t there when she looks up from the camera. Sometimes the strangers in her pictures are ghosts of the past, sometimes they’re ghosts of a future the girl may or may not know. Everywhere she goes, she trails visual octaves looking for a home; for years the only thing she prizes more is a paperback that her mother stole, with a drawing of her inside.

  Not far from Checkpoint Charlie, near what used to be a recording studio and, before that, an old movie studio, a southern part of the Wall unravels into a stone labyrinth between east and west, provoking confusion on both sides. Lovers meet there and children play, and when Molly’s mother takes her to it, the child hides in the maze of concrete, some of the passages sheltered by the debris of surrounding construction, others made blue tunnels by the sky above. Molly winds through the maze to the center and her mother always finds her, and only when Molly is older does she understand that Jasmine follows her music, left by the child like breadcrumbs.

  Raised among Turks and Muslims, every now and then the girl goes to the local mosque where the constant humming from her is frowned upon. At the age of twelve she’s there at the Wall’s fall, taking pictures of people dancing along the edge, wine bottles in hand, her own small tune filling the pauses of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

  Like everyone who’s grown up in Berlin, she feels the sense of liberation, as a line down the center of the century is erased and replaced by a hole. The fallen wall is the city’s ghost limb, history an amputee that feels an appendage no longer there; but with the fall, something dark is unleashed along with the dream. Even the girl feels the shift in sentiment. When the army of skinheads that calls itself the Pale Flame marches down the Unter den Linden and screams at the mother watching from the sidewalk with her young teenage daughter—who already has the body of a woman—Molly is old enough to understand what foreboding is.

  Is it the arc of the imagination bending back to history, or just coincidence the night that she seals her mother’s fate? Molly enters a U-Bahn station near what used to be Checkpoint Charlie, not far from the Hansa recording studio, when she comes upon members of the Pale Flame beating a middle-aged man in the street. She darts into the shadows nearby, thanking the night for the color of her skin. Developed at sixteen years old and taught by her mother to keep herself covered and wary of male crowds, she’s terrified, and only when the skinheads finish with the man in the street and leave him lying crumpled there does she run to him.

  She hasn’t seen a dead body before so she can’t be certain about this one, but if this isn’t dead then it ought to be what dead looks like. Kneeling by him, clutching all her papers and books, she barely can bring herself to whisper to him, afraid she’ll make a sound, when to her horror she hears the song that’s coming through her body grow louder, like someone has turned up her volume.

  The body in the street stirs. She’s so startled that she jumps back and flees, dropping by his side the old battered paperback with the drawing of her mother.

  A few years ago, the first time she picked up the book, it wasn’t her mother’s picture she noticed. Molly just had turned twelve and it was the autumn the Wall fell and she still remembers, coming through the window of the flat where they lived, the music in the distance so celebratory and defiant that it drowned out her own; she picked up the paperback and there cascaded from its pages a folded newspaper clipping from more than two decades before. The girl stood in the middle of the flat scrutinizing the face of the man in the grainy newsprint photo when an astounded Jasmine said, “Where did you get that?”

  The way she said it, the daughter thought she had done something wrong. “It was in the book,” Molly said, frightened.

  Jasmine had no idea how the clipping got there. She had looked for it everywhere before the book ever came into her vicinity or possession. Something strange happened in this moment that Molly discovered the clipping: When Jasmine reached for it, instinctively the twelve-year-old pulled it back. “Give it,” Jasmine said quietly.

  Molly looked again at the man in the photo. “He’s very sad,” she said to her mother.

  “Yes,” Jasmine said and turned toward the music coming through the window from the Wall. “He would have liked to be here now, to see this . . . and to hear it,” and she smiled, “though he never knew much about music.”

  Molly said, “Is he my father?” and Jasmine’s jaw dropped. “No,” the mother answered, composing herself, “he’s not.” The girl clutched the clipping, looking at her mother quietly. “He’s not,” repeated Jasmine, “I would tell you.” Molly handed over the clipping and the book, and her mother took them, opened the book almost absently, regarding the drawing of her on the inside front page.

  Now, only after Molly has run into the mouth of the U-Bahn does she realize that she has dropped the book at the side of the man in the street aboveground. At first she dismisses any possibility of going back for it. The skinheads might return, the police might come or the beaten man might die in her arms or, rousing himself to consciousness, hurt her in some rush of adrenaline. No, she concludes, she can’t go back. She has but to step onto the train and be swept to the sanctuary of Berlin’s tunnels before the last five minutes overwhelm her like a wave.

  But then she knows she must go back. The paperback she’s dropped is one of life’s markers, one of experience’s receipts that may be destined to one day disappear; but not on this night, the sixteen-year-old decides, not in this way. Forget sentiment: Her mother’s picture is in the book, which is to say that Molly has left behind identification; and before the doors close—the arc of the imagination bending back to the history it can’t compete with—she steps from the train back onto the landing.

  When she gets back to him, the man lying in the road shows no signs of having stirred further. No one else is in sight. There’s no sound of approaching sirens, responding to a witness’ call; the paperback is in such plain view that she can’t believe she didn’t see dropping it. She tiptoes to the body, looking around furtively, then snatches the book from the ground.

  She opens it and her heart stops.

  The page with her mother’s drawing is gone. The serrated edge of where it’s been ripped from the binding is as fresh as if it were flesh.

  Again Molly drops the book in the street. Again she looks around, for some single white leaf blowing i
n the breeze along the street, and when she doesn’t see it, again she runs.

  How many times, Molly frets herself nearly into hysteria in the U-Bahn, has she thought of tearing that page from the book herself? After all, the rest is only a damned book, an overstuffed frame for her mother’s portrait; but exactly because it’s such a frame, exactly because from the beginning it’s provided the picture a context, she’s never brought herself to remove the picture, and now it’s too late.

  When she finds the page–or rather when it finds her mother–it’s exactly in the way that Molly never wanted to see it again, there affixed to the consequences of her mistake. It’s two years later, during which that page might reasonably be assumed decimated by time and elements, decomposed at the bottom of some heap, forgotten in any case by Molly and written off to blind and mindless panic, when she returns to her Schöneberg flat one afternoon and, as soon as she sees the police, she knows.

  She cries, “Mum!” and dashes through the phalanx, none of the police able to muster the force necessary to stop her. The girl who’s now eighteen gets to the top of the stairs and sees through the doorway only her mother’s legs sprawled on the floor; only then, in contrast to the body of the beaten man in the Berlin street two years before, can she really claim she knows what lifeless is. She never sees the rest. A German officer swoops in to stop her and when he turns her in his arms, she accidentally kicks the crumpled paper at her feet on the top step and sees the wadded pencil portrait, dropped there not so much as a calling card but because to the six thugs who read it like a map, it was as useless to them as their target.

  For Jasmine, mercy lies in the first blow from the six young men with shaved heads coming through her door, knocking most of the life from her and making the other blows superfluous.

  After that, her last moments slow down and take on an altitude. Shock and pain fall away from her. Life fades fast from what it is about the woman that her assailants most despise, which is not her black skin: It’s those white woman’s gray eyes to which they believe she has no right. If she had the time to be surprised, she might be surprised that she doesn’t think of Bob at all. She doesn’t think of the night of the three mad fathers. If she had even more time to consider this surprise, she would realize it’s not a surprise in the least: She thinks of her daughter. She prays, in the moment that she has to utter a prayer, not for herself but that her daughter doesn’t return too soon.

  It’s all Jasmine thinks about, because this is the radio signal sent from maternity’s ethiopia: We think of our children. If you believe in no god then you accept that we’re so programmed by nature to think of our children in our last moments; if you believe in a God then you know She/He/It wrote the program in the first place. Jasmine hopes in the last moments for a blast of divine foresight, another radio signal from the future that tells her that her daughter will be all right. She doesn’t get this. Probably nobody gets this. Probably like countries, all people get is hope, and odds no better than even.

  For Molly, what mercy there is in Jasmine’s murder lies in that the girl has only one mother to destroy, as she now is convinced she’s done. She despises the music that comes from her, that lured back the Pale Flame on that night she dropped the book with her mother’s picture. She wants to turn herself off.

  When she flees Berlin for Marseilles, she doesn’t flee for herself or for her own safety let alone self-esteem. She has a body that men notice and that she sometimes trades on; she leaves behind, with the nights whose stories they tell, the tezeta of her commerce—cries through the latticed balcony doors. Men pay for the moans as much as the flesh. They pay for the music, the songs that rise up through them as if the men become tuning forks when they’re inside her. The woman means to flee anything that she deserves, the good and bad equally, because her existence has been rendered so nihilistic that she doesn’t deserve to deserve. So she doesn’t flee her remorse, as though she might watch it from a departing train, as remorse stands there in the U-Bahn station watching her back and growing smaller. Later it will seem like there’s no other place to which she could have gone but the wellspring of all chronicled memory, back to abyssinian purity, as though there’s no guilt in such a place or at such a point.

  At the time that she takes it, the wandering journey from Marseilles to San Sebastian to Gibraltar to Algiers to Tripoli, she adamantly insists that in no way is it as though she’s pulled there. The only thing she knows for sure when she finally arrives in Addis Ababa, a young woman at the dawn of what the western world calls the Twenty-First Century but for which Ethiopia exhausted numbers long ago, is that the last thing she deserves, the thing she deserves least of all, is to be a mother.

  Am I a ghost? she wonders in her descent, following—into its labyrinth of tunnels and bridges, lined by high walls covered with moss—all the narrow, winding stone steps of her new abysmal city. Am I in an abyss of time, or one of space? Living on the outskirts of the eucalyptopolis nine years later, lying in bed she hears one night coming through the music of mosques and thunderstorms rolling in overhead a song she not only knows but was born of, and then a distant male voice in a familiar language that’s not Amharic. Only after listening awhile does she acknowledge to herself that the transmission comes from her body. Not that it ever will really explain anything, she’s picking up a radio broadcast from ten thousand miles away— . . . for what happened last night . . . but then all the song says is that a change will come, not how fast, right? . . . and the really old-school one about the lovers at the Berlin Wall . . . who get to be heroes just for one day? That’s for my four-year-old Ethiopian daughter, who I guess can’t get enough of British extraterrestrials in dresses—and months later in London, with Sheba asleep next to her in the dark, she still hears it, almost, or convinces herself she does, in the same way she’s almost convinced herself she isn’t dying.

  In the dark between London and Paris, Parker doesn’t like it when the train stops beneath the Channel. Reflexively he turns up his headphones, and his father in the seat across from him, who can make out the static of the robotic chooga-chooga from the music player around Parker’s neck, says, “What are you listening to?”

  Seeing his father’s lips move, Parker pulls the headphones from his ears. “What?” the boy says.

  “What are you listening to?” says Zan.

  “Why?” says the boy.

  “I was just wondering,” Zan answers quietly. Parker remembers his dad taking him and his sister to that creepy underground bunker in London, and at the bottom the elevator doors opened to mannequins in cots; it was creepy, it creeped him out. It didn’t matter that the bunker turned out not to be underground at all, it didn’t matter if the whole thing was fake—it was creepy and now here on this train stopped in the dark, stuck under the flippin’ ocean or wherever they are, Parker thinks it’s like the bunker except worse. He looks around at the other passengers in the dim light and sees the dummies that he saw in the bunker. He sees one when he looks at his dad in the seat across from him; everyone on the train looks inanimate and stuffed, and Parker wants out and off. But he knows there’s no getting out and off until the train moves and surfaces on the other side, wherever that is.

  Zan feels his son slipping away. He’s become aware of it since London, since Sheba disappeared, maybe since Viv disappeared, maybe before that. He says to Parker, “But when you like a certain song . . . ”

  “What?” Parker shouts again with great exasperation, not bothering to remove the headphones this time. His father’s mouth keeps moving and finally the boy turns off the music player around his neck. “What . . . ”

  The father shrugs. “ . . . because it’s catchy or—” and Parker snaps, “A lot of annoying songs are catchy.” At this point, Zan thinks, I should understand that music is about teen tribalism. At his son’s age, musical taste is an act of revolution. Zan doesn’t particularly like music that’s political; the song he played the morning after the election—but then all the song says is tha
t a change will come, not how fast, right?—only is political because it plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession. Yet Zan learned long ago from his teacher at the university who once was Trotsky’s bodyguard and Billie Holiday’s lover that music which isn’t at least politically aware has nothing to say about anything, and that political people who are unmoved by music—whether it be rock and roll or Broadway tunes—aren’t to be trusted.

  In any case music isn’t something over which a healthy twelve-year-old bonds with his father. Between a twelve-year-old and his father, music is the line in the sand. Out of those politics is born taste. Taste gets better but, Zan hopes, not perfect. When your taste is perfect, it’s not yours.

  When Parker was four, the age that Sheba is now but before she was born, his father drove him to preschool one morning and they came to a place on the canyon boulevard where a truck had spilled oil that slicked the asphalt. Their car spun out and another car spun into them colliding, and when the spinning was over and everyone stopped, Zan turned from behind the wheel to the four-year-old in back and said, “Are you all right?” Yes, the boy nodded in his stoic fashion. If he nodded yes, whether he was really all right or not, or whether he even knew he was all right, then in his own four-year-old mind he took some small measure of control of the chaos that just had unfolded.