Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

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 into 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.