Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

In front of her laptop, staring at the email astounded, Viv says, “Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany? Good lord. Sheba might not even be Ethiopian?”

“We are all Ethiopians!” Zan declares grandly and his wife glares at him. “Well, Sheba’s half Ethiopian anyway,” he points out.

“How can she not be Ethiopian?”

“The father is Ethiopian,” Zan persists. “In Muslim cultures, that counts.”

“The father isn’t Muslim,” she says. “Ethiopia isn’t a Muslim culture.”

“There are lots of Muslims in Ethiopia.”

“Twice as many Christians.”

“O.K.”

“Well.”

“Sheba is half Muslim. In the Muslim culture, the father counts and he’s Ethiopian.”

“But he’s not the half that’s Muslim,” she says.

“So he would count only if he were Muslim?” though Zan admits to himself that this discussion, his half in particular, doesn’t make sense to him anymore. “Why don’t you write to Sheba’s grandmother, like he suggests?”

Viv writes the email and sits before the laptop waiting as though an answer will appear immediately. I chose you to be her mother , is the answer when it comes from the grandmother, as translated by Sheba’s aunt, through God , almost exactly as she said to Viv two years ago.

The night before Viv receives the message that changes everything, Piranha disappears, having braved and broken through his high-voltage corral once and for all. Viv stands on the deck of the house calling, but only when Sheba howls her half of their duet does the dog howl back in the distance. It’s a howl that defies interpretation. Maybe it means goodbye , maybe it means so long, suckers , maybe it means help I’m being pursued by coyotes , maybe it means you try wearing one of these fucking electric collars and see how you like it . In any case, he’s gone.

Returning home from the radio station the next afternoon, Zan finds Viv fetally curled up on the couch in the family room. She buries her head in the cushion.

He sits next to her, puts his hand on her thigh. She doesn’t move; on the white cloud-shaped formica table that Parker always leaps over, her laptop is open. “Hey,” says Zan.

He looks at the laptop and an open email: Hello Viv. I write to you with troubling news and that is the woman who I believe might be Zema’s mother appears to have disappeared under suspicious circumstances related to my questions about her. It is not clear if she has run afoul of the law and is in jail or something more ominous has taken place. It also is possible that she has fled the city or even the country. In any case if indeed there ever was someone at the end of the trail, now she has vanished. For reasons and by means too complicated to explain here, it would seem to have come to the attention of the authorities that you have been sending money to Zema’s grandmother and family which has raised suspicions of child-trafficking and the possibility that Zema was sold to you by the mother, though it is difficult to be certain how seriously they take this. It all is most unfortunate I know but is becoming a common concern as adoptions are on the rise. The police are not answering any questions but ask many and it is all most confusing I am afraid. For the moment nothing has happened to Zema’s family but an investigation seems under way and no one is saying anything and strongly I would suggest that whatever contact you have cease for a while and that any inquiries as to Zema’s mother stop as well. It also is possible that the woman in question is not Zema’s mother at all, this has not been established. I now must be careful with my investigations and perhaps go “undercover” awhile but should I learn more information I will attempt to send it along in as discreet a fashion as I can. I am sorry for this news.

Viv says something and he leans over to her, his ear in her turquoise hair. “Everyone told me to leave it alone,” he hears her mutter, “everyone told me and I wouldn’t.

Zan is furious at the email and all its vague implications. “You don’t know what’s happened,” he argues. “We don’t know that this mystery person, whoever she is, is Sheba’s mother. I mean, we can’t tell that there even is such a person.”

Viv doesn’t answer.

“All we know,” says Zan, “is that some woman he thought he was looking for and that he never found might have. . left the country, or. . ”

“. . or been thrown in jail, or worse,” she finally turns to him. Her face is red.

“The odds are she isn’t even Sheba’s mother,” but as soon as he’s said it, he knows what she’ll say.

“So? I still got an innocent woman thrown in jail. Or worse.” Every time she says “or worse,” it becomes worse.

“You don’t know that. We don’t know anything .”

She searches his eyes and whispers, “Zan, they think we bought Sheba.”

It’s hard to know how long she’s been thinking it when she says, “I have to go.” Later he feels sure she’s been considering it awhile, maybe before the email.

“Go?” he says, at first genuinely confused. They’re upstairs sitting on their bed. She’s been distraught all day, more than any time since her art was stolen two years ago, succumbing to an unshakeable silence, and only does her voice find its usual spiritedness when she says, “To Addis Ababa.”

When she was in her late twenties, Viv returned to Africa for the first time since she lived there as a girl, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Immediately following this successful ascent — a framed certificate on the wall attests to the achievement — she sat for some hours at Kilimanjaro’s nearest airport drinking with a number of other overly exuberant western adventurers who at some point realized they had drunk their way through the week’s one and only flight to Europe.

This discovery was followed by a mad drive through the night to the next airport, across hundreds of kilometers of revolution-beset african desert in an outlandish episode that involved no gas and “borrowed” cars and armed soldiers and herds of zebra crashing into them. The story always has summed up for Zan what he loves and admires about Viv, and the ways in which they’re different. On the one hand, Zan’s soul will pass through many lives before one of them steps foot on Mount Kilimanjaro. On the other hand, there’s not the remotest possibility that Zan ever would have missed that flight.

It’s possible, Zan believes, that this now almost legendary chapter in Viv’s life imbued her with a. . unique sense of life’s odds and risks. Interestingly, motherhood threw life into the gear of fear, in which Viv worries about things that Zan takes in stride, maybe too much so.

In any case Zan has come to understand well enough his dynamic with Viv that he knows to fully express what he feels about her returning to Ethiopia would be counter-productive. Rather he takes a deep breath and attempts to modulate his agitation. “Baby,” he says, “it’s not a good idea.”

For a moment she sinks back into the afternoon’s abyss.

“If nothing has happened, if this woman doesn’t even exist let alone is in jail, then it’s a waste of time. If something has happened and the police are arresting people, it’s all the more reason you shouldn’t go.”