These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  How can you believe in a god, J. Willkie Brown asks Zan at the pub outside the university following the lecture, and Zan answers, swallowing the last of his second vodka, “Because I don’t believe it’s all molecules. Because I don’t believe the conscience translates into a chemical equation. Because men and women run into a hundred-and-ten-story building to save perfect strangers, overcoming every instinct of self-preservation, when the hundred-and-ten-story building right next to it has just collapsed, which means people act not only in the face of nature and self-preservation but outright rationality. Because there are dimensions of nobility that can’t be diagrammed on a blackboard in a class. Because men wrack their brains trying to think of ways to turn their fellow human beings into lampshades, which means there are dimensions of barbarity that also can’t be diagrammed on the same blackboard. Because I believe such unquantifiables abound beyond dispute, along with evidence that human behavior is animated by spirit. Because I think the existence of the soul proves the existence of God, not the other way around.”

  I’m a traitor. Better to admit we’re traitors of the country of the banged gavel, the salem stench, the hate that hates in God’s name, so we might be patriots of the other country of the eternal pursuit, memory’s mystic chord, our nature’s better angels, and the promise that no God can help loving even when we break it. By its nature, my version of the country is blasphemous. By its nature, it allows for doubt, the possibility that my God is wrong and yours is right. The other country, where I commit treason, denies doubt, views it as a cancer on the congregation.

  The one thing that Zan knows for sure is that, should the song of his country finally fade and be silent, it will never quite be possible again to believe in it. This is the problem, he reasons, with presidents who can’t be as big as the reasons they embody. A body can only hold reasons so big. Should the silencing of the song come to pass, not only will Zan be complicit in the loss of his own faith, he will be complicit for having had faith in the first place. But without such faith, the country—this country in particular—is nothing.

  Without such faith, I’m nothing. This is the occupational hazard of being of my country, the way one’s identity becomes bound up with a landscape that manifests in its soil and psychitecture an idea, with a people still fighting over who they are because when nothing else is held in common but the idea then if the idea isn’t held in common there’s nothing left except the mystical name of the place that evokes something different for each person but which each person allows himself or herself to believe is the same thing evoked for every other person.

  At the campaign rally forty-one years ago, pulled to safety from the frenzied crowd that threatens to catch him in its undertow, the eighteen-year-old Zan feels in his ear the breath of the young black woman who rescues him and whispers something he can’t hear; but lying in the street now, he almost does.

  Lying in the street now, Zan confronts the breakdown he’s been trying to avoid since London. He’s stunned by how much this moment feels like a bookend. Finally overwhelmed by despair, that grief of the soul, he cries, My God, where’s my boy? Where’s my little girl? Where’s my wife, where’s my house? Where’s my art, where’s my country? How did I lose it all? At this moment he’s convinced it’s all been a dream: “I know I did something wrong,” he sobs out loud, “but I don’t know what.” What lapse of perspective undid him? What ambition failed him? What did he take for granted? What did he value too much or too little? What thing was undone that should have been done, or what was done that shouldn’t have been? To what dream did he commit himself that was folly? How is it that he was so old when he was so young, and how has he now been reduced to something so childish even as he’s so old?

  When he hears himself whisper his son’s name again, he opens his eyes with no idea how long he’s been out. His head pounds and the rest of him throbs.

  He tries to rise and almost makes it up onto one leg but collapses. He lies in the street another minute looking at the fog above. “Parker?”

  He turns to look at the sidewalk and in the dark sees a girl younger than Sheba standing there watching him, being pulled away by a mother who assumes he’s a derelict in a stupor.

  He makes himself roll over and again gets up on his hands and knees. His face is dried and caked into a mess of tears and blood, and as he reaches up to wipe his eyes clear, he sees the blue streak that Parker made there earlier tonight when he slashed Zan’s hand with the marker.

  Of course Zan doesn’t have his cell anymore, his muggers having taken it. Horror wells up in him at the thought that Parker might call and its new owners might answer, but then he remembers with relief that, in defiance, Parker refused to write down the number. The man wipes his eyes again and gets on his feet, holding his hand up to a streetlight and looking hard at it; and the simple streak of blue confirms for Zan the reality of having a son who made that mark.

  When he wipes his hand against his face, the streak smears like a real mark would, unless he’s hallucinating that as well. But Zan decides that he won’t allow himself to believe this; he decides that whatever faith he has left, he’ll summon for the sake of believing in the mark on his hand and thereby his life.

  He gets back to the inn and totters up the stairs inside. At the door of the room he’s looking for his key and, not finding it, wonders whether it was taken with his phone. As it occurs to him that maybe he rushed from the room without the key and should check whether the door is locked, it opens from the other side.

  The boy stares at his father. “What happened?” he says in the smallest voice his father has heard from him since the time the car crashed in an oil slick on the canyon boulevard. Zan grabs his son and pulls him close; Parker crumples into his father’s chest. “What happened,” he murmurs again in his father’s shirt.

  “I’m O.K.,” Zan says, “please, please don’t leave again.”

  “I won’t. I’m sorry. Are you O.K.?”

  “I am.” He might have a cracked rib. “Looks worse than it is.”

  “I’m sorry,” Parker says again.

  “No,” the father whispers, “I made a mistake. Mom wouldn’t have wanted us to leave Sheba.” He says, “We have to go back and find her.”

  “O.K.”

  Somewhere three young Germans tally up the night’s bounty, enormously disgruntled. The cell phone they took from the foreigner is the only thing of any value and its charge is nearly dead, and of course stolen cells are good for an hour or two at most before they get reported and turned off. One of the three men is staring at the cell when it rings. He hits the receive button and holds the cell to his ear.

  “Zan,” comes a woman’s voice. The three look at each other. “Zan, it’s me.” Now disgusted with how poorly the night has gone, the man curses into the cell and hurls it through the air, the words “Zan? It’s Viv, where are you?” forming an arc in the night before the phone smashes against the stone stubble of what used to be the Wall.

  But what, Viv asks herself five days ago, would a room at the beginning of time sound like?

  Looking back over her shoulder from where they’ve come, Viv says to her driver, “No, this isn’t right,” when he takes her deep into the heart of Addis Ababa, leading her by foot down the winding stone steps into the labyrinth of tunnels and bridges lined by the high walls covered with moss. Figures in white gauze dart from the shadows in a collision of pedestrian alleys, still smelling of the mustard gas with which Mussolini massacred a million Ethiopians seventy years ago. There bubbles up out of the earth three thousand radiant millennia; overhead, a sirocco blows in from the moon.

  What would a room at the beginning of time sound like? she wonders back at the hotel later that night—or is it morning? sometime, night or morning, after returning from the center of the capital’s ancient quarter where the driver took her, when Viv looks at a western calendar rather than an Ethiopian one and realizes the date is a week later than she thought. Could I have lost track of time tha
t much? she asks, standing on her hotel balcony, looking at a photograph in her hand as though it has an answer, when all it has is the face of a young woman who is dead.

  In the labyrinth, when she says to the driver, “No, this isn’t right,” he turns and answers, Please. I can take you back to the car if you wish, he says, but if I do, you’ll never find what you’re looking for.

  At the center of the quarter, in white rock that’s part wall and part ground, is an entrance at an angle that’s part door and part hole, and as it begins to rain, Viv steps down and in, ducking slightly though she’s only a little over five feet tall. She passes through a cloud bled of light into a room or cavern just a bit less dark, as her eyes adjust to the stub of a single burning candle on the other side where she sees the young journalist whom she hired to find Sheba’s mother. He rises from where he’s sitting on the rock.

  He says, “Hello, Viv,” and extends his hand. She says, “Are you hiding?” but he seems sanguine, almost good-natured about it. “Yes,” he says, “for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe it will not be so bad, maybe I will be able to leave the city at night.”

  Upset, Viv says, “I’m sorry that I got you in this much trouble.”

  “But you do not make the trouble,” the journalist assures her, “others make it. You asked a question that you have a right to answer.”

  “My daughter someday will want to know who her mother is.”

  “Of course,” he answers.

  “She’ll hate me if I haven’t tried to find out.” She begins to cry and stops herself.

  “Everyone who loves your daughter understands this.”

  Viv says, “I’m not so sure.”

  “I have news,” he says. “In a way it’s bad news and in another way . . . ”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is that the woman we have been trying to find is dead.” He takes from his back pocket the photograph and hands it to her. “But the other news is that she almost certainly is not your daughter’s mother. So it means that your daughter’s mother may still be alive. It also means that there is no answer to your question at the moment, and that now it is a harder question than ever to answer.”

  Viv looks at the photo as well as she can make it out in the dark of the room and the light of the small candle. “How did she die?” Viv says. The woman is young though hardly a girl; in the dark of the cavern she doesn’t look like Sheba, nor will she on the hotel balcony the next morning when Viv looks at the photo again in the light of day.

  “That’s not certain but it’s not important,” the journalist answers, “she is not the woman you look for.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s better that I don’t answer this,” the journalist explains sympathetically, “it may even be better for your daughter, if she were to return to Ethiopia someday.”

  “I’m sure someday she’ll want to come back.”

  Music is what a room at the beginning of time sounds like—and when Viv steps into this place, do the days pass in a matter of moments? When she slips the dictates of western months, succumbing to a calendar drawn to the rhythms of a different moon, is she bound as well to slip old temporal moorings that measure, as much as anything that people have learned, what people have forgotten?

  It’s a music of subterranean harmonics, half voice and half caw, and comes from some human source like Sheba’s music does, except it’s not coming from the journalist and certainly it’s not coming from me, thinks Viv, I never could carry a tune and there’s no one else to be seen. It comes from the room itself, the woman and the journalist at the very axis of the transmission as though they’re standing in one of the chambers of Sheba’s radio-heart, from a time before she was born.

  Minutes later, or is it hours or days? rising from the white rock at the city’s center Viv brushes her head against a sagging sky the color of mauve. The blue eucalyptuses against the Entoto Hills have turned to glass, and in the sagging mauve sky a flock of flamingos bursts into flames. It reminds her of the time back home when the canyons were on fire, the inferno roaring toward the house; all around them the family could see the hazy hot red flare that circled the night. Viv and Zan packed up Parker and Sheba in the car along with the personal effects and valuables. It was shortly after Sheba came to Los Angeles—definitely it was after—and, two years old in her booster seat in the back, sucking her thumb, the girl wondered in her infant fashion how her life had come to this, on the other side of a world on fire. Viv remembers a talk that she and her husband once had: If ever there was a decision to be made for either mother or father to save each other or the children, they would save the children. It was the easiest thing they ever agreed on.

  The firmament went up in flames that night and now rising from the white rock, at the center of one of the highest cities in the world, Viv reaches up and draws a blue line in the ash sky. She looks at the blue dust on her finger then looks up and knows with certainty that the woman in the photograph that she holds in her hand is buried there behind the sky’s soot. When Viv reaches up again and scoops out of the heavens a hole, the music roars up out of the hole in the white earth behind her and through the blue puncture she’s made, like air sucked out of a rocket in space.

  No, Sheba’s father says the next day when Viv goes back to the family to show them the photograph. The aunt won’t look at it; the grandmother is near blind with cataracts. Sheba’s father takes the photo, and as Viv hands it over and the father’s hand stops briefly midair before taking it, she makes no effort to hide the intensity with which she studies his reaction. He doesn’t look straight at the photo but peers down as though his lids might hide whatever Viv can see in his eyes. After several seconds, maybe as many as five or seven or eight, he says, utterly impassive, “No.”

  But, she thinks, the eight or seven or five seconds are endless; he takes so long to answer. And now she wishes that she pressed the journalist to explain how he knows what he thinks he knows, so that she can put Sheba’s father’s no in a context of pain or fear or the same rejection by which he so long rejected fatherhood. “No,” he says for the third time, either to make it final or to protest one time too many.

  Viv’s last night in the hotel she is too distraught to sleep. Outside her window a storm blows into Addis, and lying on her bed in the dark she feels the room tremble around her, the floor tremble beneath her; as the wind picks up though the balcony doors, she thinks the rumble of the room is from the storm but then realizes that the thunder coming up through the bed is percussive and mesmeric, and it’s music. Full of wrath and sorrow at everything, Viv hurls the sheets away from her, gets up. Beneath her brief lowcut nightie she pulls on some jeans and shoes and throws a wrap around her shoulders and heads downstairs to the lobby.

  The storm is picking up when she reaches the ballroom of the hotel. Enough of the eucalyptic wind from outside finds its way through some hidden breach to rustle the room’s potted fronds and small dingy chandeliers turned down low; Viv buys a glass of tej, the moonshine honeywine once made by Sheba’s grandmother. She drinks it down, buys another.

  He took too long to say no. He said it too many times. To clear a space in the middle of the large ballroom, its round tables have been pushed to the walls with such abandon the wind might have blown them there, and the room churns with five or six hundred otherworldly-looking Ethiopians with their african skin and european features dancing to half a dozen musicians on a bandstand at the room’s far end. Viv buys another glass of tej: Who is she? the woman in the photo, and if she’s dead and has nothing to do with Sheba then why show me the photo at all? and, watching the dance, immediately she knows she’ll never know.

  Unlike in the West where the dance begins in the feet and moves up the body, here in the city of the abyss the dance begins in the shoulders, the part of the body made for bearing a weight, shoulders shimmying as though to shake away the burden of hum
an time before the dance moves down to the clasped hands that lurch forward in a frenzy to cast something off, down to the legs galloping to catch up with whatever gauntlet the hands have thrown.

  To Viv the music isn’t african in any sense with which she’s familiar but a bizarre blend of funk, swing, big band, cabaret, manzuma, armenian soul. It’s a rhythm and blues from the future that’s spiraled round the sphere of time to come back up through its birth canal. Beginning seventy years ago under the rule of Mussolini and sung down through the communist Derg, the songs have become a code: “Wax and gold,” the Ethiopians call it, when the golden messages of liberation and revolution are hidden inside the wax of the outer lyric and melody; and through the century the songs have been passed bearing the secret songs inside. In the swept ballroom of the Addis hotel tonight the band begins to play “Tezeta” and dancers break off in circles, partners claiming the center in order to dance each other into submission. As the small wrap slips from her bare shoulders, the white woman with paling blue hair finds herself vortexed into one of the circles with a young Ethiopian woman who smiles at her; ululations rise from every throat around them. Eighteen hours from now, under the English Channel thirty-six hundred miles away, Zan will think to himself how music plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession.

  At the airport early the next morning, Viv finds there’s not enough credit on her card to get back to London. Her cell hasn’t worked since she got to Addis and the battery is dead, and if she returns to the hotel and stays another night to email Zan, it’s money that could go toward getting her back. She’s not certain what Zan would be able to do anyway. Zan would be the first to acknowledge that it’s in such situations when he becomes most flabbergasted that Viv is coolest.