These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  Beginning to feel the hangover of the long sleepless night, she finds thinking that much harder. She decides to try and use the credit card to buy a less expensive ticket to some place in Western Europe from where she’ll find a way to England. Her best prospect appears to be Berlin, more out of the way than she would like, and she’s about to book a seat when, at the last moment, a flight to Paris becomes available.

  After the seven hour flight to Orly by way of Khartoum, Viv takes a bus to Paris’ outskirts and then the metro further into the city, making the mistake of getting off at Châtelet. From there she could transfer to a direct line to where she wants to go but doesn’t know this; pulling her bag into the street, she keeps hailing cabs until she finds one–in the thick of rush hour as dusk falls on the city–whose driver seems to understand that she needs to get to whatever station will put her on the express rail to England.

  Once in the taxi, however, she’s not so sure the cabbie understands at all. The only thing clear is he’s drunk and agitated; she can smell the Côtes du Rhone like she’s sitting in a cask of it. “Train station!” she keeps trying to explain, “anglais!” but then realizes it must sound like she’s commanding him to speak English when what she means is England. He lets loose a torrent of French and something else, Turkish or Eastern European she supposes, and then–with deliberation and intent, she’s certain–he drives his cab straight into the limousine before him, nearly hitting what looks in the twilight and blur of the event to be a young boy about Parker’s age, pulled from danger at the last moment.

  Viv hurtles forward in the back of the cab, hitting her head hard on either the ceiling or the seat in front. To her astonishment, the collision hasn’t sobered the driver but sent him further into a rage. He backs up the cab and floors the accelerator, careening again into the limo in front, and then does it again.

  He keeps doing this until finally she grabs her purse, throws open her door, leaves behind her luggage and lurches from the vehicle. She half expects to leap into the path of oncoming traffic; the repeated crashes, however, have brought everything around her to a stop. She hits the ground, stumbles, picks herself up and keeps running, into the large glass building before her, and the only thing that could almost astound her as much as what she’s just been through is to discover that in fact she’s where she wants to be, in the Gare du Nord, from which the Eurostar departs for London.

  She doesn’t have enough money for the train, and on sheer adrenaline from what happened in the rue Dunkerque outside, she almost slips past the ticket booth before one of the officials stops her.

  Depressed and rattled, she can’t bring herself to sleep in the station. She wanders several blocks east, to the cheapest no-star hotel that she can find on the rue d’Alsace.

  Paying for one night upfront, she spends the next day at the Gare du Nord casing the crowd like a thief, sizing up its ebbs and flows, points of vulnerability. She thinks, I’ve become the vagabond rebel of my youth, who hopped trains on a whim. She spends a second night in the hotel, slips out in the morning without paying, spends the second day at the station; hungry to the edge of nausea, she rations out to herself juice and a single baguette. Having left her bag with her clothes in the cab that she fled two days before, she breaks down and buys a hairbrush and clean underwear.

  From Addis to Khartoum to Orly to the Gare du Nord, she’s viewed every telephone—the broken ones on the walls, those on the other sides of windows, those that people gaze at in their palms as they walk along never looking up—with an unbearable longing, believing her family only a flurry of digits away. When she finds a public phone that works, she stares in dismay at the foreign instructions, terrified she’ll waste what money she has on a call that won’t go through. For as long as she can remember, she’s had a recurring nightmare in which she rushes from dead phone to dead phone trying to make a call; and now she’s in that nightmare. A couple of times she asks someone if she can borrow a phone and they just push past, glaring at her temerity if they understand at all.

  I must seem like a panhandler, another homeless beggar, she thinks, and then realizes that in fact at this moment that’s exactly what she is. In the Gare du Nord she feels herself under the surveillance of patrolling police as though she’s wandered over from Pigalle to ply her trade. Her hair has grown out but still has streaks of a pale blue that faded back in that room at the center of Addis Ababa.

  In the light of the sun coming through the station’s skylight, Viv eats the rest of her baguette, drinks the rest of her juice and watches a single butterfly flutter out of the morning mist and steam off the railway tracks to the glass above. The butterfly has wandered into the station through an open door, or where the trains come and go, to spend the rest of its brief life amid the furor of people and machines in passage—and as Viv watches, she wants to shield it in armor. She wants to envelop it in one of the metal frames with which she surrounded her stainless-glass recreations back home, to honor and protect what’s all the more beautiful for its precariousness; but she can’t do that anymore. Someone took from her, carelessly, a singular and beautiful vision, in order to steal not only her past but her future.

  No, she thinks. She’s lost her armor but not her future or her vision. Looking at the train to London on the other side of the station, there it is, right there, the future just beyond the ticket gate; it begins in mere moments. All aboard.

  Viv ascends to the level from which the Eurostar departs. Milling with the crowd that files toward the train, she presses past the officials taking tickets; when she hears an authoritative declamation of French directed at the back of her head, she picks up her step, and when she hears another she moves at something only slightly less conspicuous than a mad dash, darting in and out of other passengers, knocking some out of the way. She steps onto one of the sleek cars and makes her way up the train, slipping in and out of doors, dodging the attention of whoever’s behind her; she disappears into a bathroom and locks it. Staring in the mirror, struggling to hold herself together, Viv waits for a pounding on the door.

  The Belgian conductor doesn’t catch up with her until beyond Brussels, after more than an hour of the woman flitting into bathrooms and working her way through the train—at which point she finally acquiesces all composure. In an explosion of sobs she tries to explain to the conductor and British security official what happened in the taxicab in Paris, her long trek from Africa, the distance from her family and the dead cell phone and the incommunicado status of her life, never mind a dark foyer in the Garden of Eden where time drains out of the floor like water from a shower. For a panicked moment, she thinks she’s lost her passport.

  Before she got back together with Zan and became pregnant with Parker, Viv lived by herself in the industrial loft section of downtown L.A., in a mammoth stone bunker from the balcony of which she could watch the trains roll in and out of Union Station between her and the sunset. The night she split up with Zan, as he was fleeing to Berlin—it was during the following two months that she had her affair with then Hollywood-based J. Willkie Brown—she watched from the landing the Southwest Chief pull out of the station and, grabbing nothing but her toothbrush, she jumped in her car and raced the train to Pasadena, arriving in time to hop on. She didn’t have a ticket then either. “Where are you going?” the conductor asked in Pasadena, and she answered, “The sunrise,” which turned out to be Flagstaff, she and the rest of the train’s staff drinking enough tequila to make her wonder ever after just how sober train travel is.

  Now the Belgian conductor on the Eurostar who otherwise seems so sternly disapproving reappears twenty minutes later with a sandwich and plastic cup of red wine, for which Viv thanks him gratefully. Eating the sandwich, she pulls from her purse the photograph of the young woman that she was given in Addis and looks at it. She reproaches herself now for not having pressed harder for answers from the journalist, for not having pressed harder for answers from the grandmother and aunt and father. Zan believes in the integrity of
secrets, that some things aren’t meant to be known; by this, thinks Viv, he really means mysteries. Is there a difference between a secret and a mystery? A secret sounds dishonest, like something withheld, as opposed to a mystery, where something is unknowable.

  But God keeps more secrets than anyone. Is it a conceit, then, for a human being to presume that a mystery is a secret, or is it an aspiration to a larger wisdom? Viv can’t answer this. She just knows that now there are things about Sheba and her mother and her past that will be secrets forever, and that the acceptance of this, however unsatisfactory, is a fitful grace.

  In the seat of the train where she’s been consigned for the duration of the ride, trying to reclaim a sense of calm, she has a sudden burst of disorientation and becomes convinced for a split moment that the train in fact is barreling south, back toward Africa. For a while she contemplates the contradiction of someone with wanderlust having no sense of direction.

  That wanderlust she inherited from her father, the son and grandson of locomotionists who never could stay put, packing up five children and moving them all to Africa when Viv was twelve. As Zan would point out, Viv has a hard time staying put too. Thirty-six hours after any trip she becomes possessed of whatever is the newest strain of cabin fever, or maybe she invents one. Is Sheba’s adoption somehow an expression of that? she wonders as the window of the train exchanges the black of the european night for the black of the tunnel beneath the Channel. Is a restlessness of the body a restlessness of the heart? Like futuristic rhythm and blues, has Viv spiraled round the sphere of her own life to come back up through its birth canal and find waiting for her a small daughter of the abyss?

  I’m a flawed human being! Viv moans to herself for the thousandth time in her life. The voice in her head is a running monologue of personal failings. She’s heard that a family is only as happy as the mother, and she knows that the girl she brought into all their lives is trailed by the betrayals of one mother after another; this is Sheba’s special burden that no one else can understand. Not so long ago, back in the canyon, Viv asked Zan one day, “Where’s the joy in our lives?” and Zan looked at her like she spoke some language as lost as the time back in that room in Addis. At this point Zan will settle for freedom from the fear to which he wakes every morning. But Viv will not, and neither will her wanderlust.

  At St. Pancras a little before midnight, Viv is escorted by the conductor and security official to a back room in the offices of the Eurostar. In the room is a desk with a telephone and several chairs. The walls are bare.

  Viv asks to use the telephone and is told to be seated. She waits half an hour before the security official returns to the room with someone she takes to be a policeman and another official affiliated with the railways company, who sits behind the desk and takes over the conversation. “Of course,” she says to Viv, “you know it’s a serious matter to breach the gate as you did in Paris and not have a ticket.”

  “I didn’t have the money,” says Viv.

  “Yes, well,” the official sighs, “that rather goes without saying, doesn’t it? But that’s not an excuse, is it?”

  Viv realizes it’s good she’s exhausted. Otherwise this is the sort of situation where she typically, to use her word, effervesces, and she senses that now effervescence is the wrong strategy; she still has signs of turquoise hair, effervescence enough. “Why have you come to London, then, Mrs. Nordhoc?” says the official.

  “My husband and children are here,” says Viv. “My husband has business.”

  “What sort of business?”

  “He’s giving a lecture. Or . . . ” Viv thinks. “ . . . he may already have given it by now.”

  “Do you know where he’s lecturing?”

  “The university.”

  “Yes,” says the official, with a greater sigh than before, “we have a number of universities in London. It’s a big city.”

  “I know.” Viv says, “I don’t remember which one.”

  “Where is your family staying?”

  “In a hotel.” When the woman across the desk says nothing, Viv tries to effervesce after all, laughing wearily, “There are a lot of hotels, aren’t there? Like universities.”

  “I don’t suppose you know which hotel.”

  “I . . . ” Where she sits, Viv sways a bit from the exhaustion. “Can I call him?”

  After a moment the official says, “All right,” pointing to the telephone. “If it’s a number from back home then you need to dial zero one.” This confuses Viv, and in her fatigue she finds herself punching the wrong numbers. The other official from the train dials for her and hands her the phone.

  It rings several times and her heart leaps when there’s an answer. “Zan!” she says, but no one says anything. “Zan, it’s me,” and then there’s a distant, abrupt expletive in a foreign language. “Zan,” she says again, “it’s Viv, where are you?” before the line goes dead. “That wasn’t him,” she says to the officials.

  “I dialed correctly,” says the official who dialed the phone.

  “It wasn’t him.” She thinks she’s going to cry again and says, “Can I make one more call? It’s local—I think it’s local. I’m pretty sure. I don’t have the number but maybe it’s listed.” A minute later she says on the phone, “James? Sorry to wake you so late. It’s Viv. I’m in London.”

  An hour later, J. Willkie Brown shows up at St. Pancras and pays for Viv’s train ticket. “I don’t actually know,” he says in the taxi on the way to St. John’s Wood, “what hotel Alexander is at . . . I mean,” he hesitates, “I had the bill taken care of through the university because, well, he’s seemed in some distress. Very worried about you, of course.”

  “I’ve completely lost track of time,” says Viv.

  “The school will have a record. We’ll find out first thing in the morning.”

  It’s strange to see James again. Viv says, “Thanks for bailing me out. I tried calling Zan but . . . ”

  “He was leaving messages,” James says, “that were . . . a bit frantic. Needed to talk urgently but never said what about, and we kept missing each other. The last was three, four days ago . . . so I figured whatever it was got resolved. Had his hands full, of course, with the children, until the nanny showed up.”

  In the back of the taxicab, London swirling by her, Viv nods, and it’s a minute or so before she thinks to herself, The nanny?

  At James’ townhouse, Viv barely sleeps on the sofa he’s made into a bed for her. “No bag?” he says while fluffing cushions, and when she explains about the insane cab in Paris, he gives her one of his clean undershirts to wear; now in the dark she stumbles from the sofa to the window and stares out at the city, wondering where her husband and children are. Before the window, she closes her eyes as if trying to pick up a signal. She’s up early the next morning, and when James emerges from the back room fully dressed, he sees the look on her face. “School office opens in thirty minutes,” he assures her gently. “I’ll ring them in twenty.”

  He says, “Looks like you had a restless night.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Tea?”

  “Please.”

  “How have you been? Aside from everything.”

  “Great,” Viv answers somewhere in the upper register of hope, “aside from everything.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  “That did sound,” he says, “rather like the usual upbeat Viv answer.” She watches him shuffle around the kitchen. “One of your more endearing qualities, I should add,” bending over with apparent difficulty to light the stove.

  “Nothing,” she replies, “that winning the lottery wouldn’t solve.”

  “Let’s try to arrange that then, shall we?”

  “Zan suspects I coerced you into this lecture thing, or whatever it was.” She adds, “Not that you can be coerced.”

  “By you?” says James. “Of course I can. You know that. You’re quite notorious in the art world these days, I hear.” />
  She folds her arms. “I guess. Not something I like talking about.”

  “But you should feel vindicated,” he insists. “It’s accepted by virtually everyone that the bastard ripped you off.”

  “I don’t want to be a chapter in someone else’s story.”

  “We’re all chapters in someone else’s story. You should feel vindicated.”

  When she asks, “What about you?” she has no idea it’s a real question until, curiously, he shrugs, “How’s that?” before rushing into the rest. “Work goes all right, I suppose—new piece about the impact of torture at Guantanamo on the Muslim . . . well, never mind. Alexander and I got into a bit of a row about it.”

  “Zan in a row?”

  “Nothing explosive.”

  “Why did you invite him?” she asks. “I mean the lecture, or . . . whatever it—”

  “Oh,” James throws open his arms.

  “Oh?”

  “When one’s timer has been set, your perspective becomes fixed, doesn’t it? To whatever moment it’s going off.”

  “James?”

  “From that moment, everything looks different.” He shrugs again, this time less curious than ominous. “I, uh . . . have some health issues.”

  “My God. Are you all right?”