Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

Viv never would want him to leave their daughter here. If I go find her, Zan thinks, she’ll hate me for leaving the girl; he remembers a talk they once had shortly before Sheba came — wasn’t it before? — when a fire threatened the canyon: If ever there was a decision to be made for either mother or father to save each other or their son, they would save their son. It was the easiest thing they ever agreed on.

But Viv doesn’t know Sheba is missing, and now the choice doesn’t seem so easy. Zan can’t ignore what’s plainly a message from his wife, and — reminding himself that he still has Sheba’s passport and no one can take her from the country — never in the previous twenty-four hours has he believed the girl to be in danger.

Of course this leads to the next thought which finally it’s time to express if only to himself. With the sound in Zan’s ears of the lost Sheba constantly calling Molly’s name in the Hampton maze, and with the scene playing out in his mind’s eye of Sheba turning to Molly in the maze and racing into the woman’s arms, finally it’s time to say the crazy thing that’s been in his head since the moment Molly appeared at that door — Zan looks at the door now — and stepped inside.

In no way does it make sense, and in every way does it feel true; and who’s to say no to it? And if it is true, then who’s to say Molly shouldn’t have her? Who’s to say that at this moment Sheba isn’t reunited with the very person in search of whom Viv has vanished in the first place? Zan thinks, When there’s no other obvious option, sometimes you can only follow the signs. They can ignore Viv’s posting and continue waiting for her while they try to search London, and a month from now be exactly where they are at this moment with not a thing different. Sometimes life calls for a catalytic instant.

Father and son spend the next day packing. Zan moves by rote; he can barely think at all. He arranges with the front desk to leave their bags behind; he has no idea how to explain that he can’t settle the bill. Ruling out the clandestine escape in the night, nonetheless he can’t stand the prospect of humiliating himself before his son.

The woman at the desk says, “Yes, Mr. Nordhoc, it’s taken care of.”

“What?” says Zan.

She looks at the computer. “Mr. Brown has taken care of it,” and Zan is too relieved to feel bruised. Well, you’re all right then, James, he thinks to himself; maybe this is the first sign of straits at their most dire, when pride dies.

Their last night in London, Zan and Parker return to the pub that used to be the Ad Lib, where everything began with Molly, in one last hope Sheba will be there. Stepping inside, Zan closes his eyes thinking he’ll hear the girl and woman in front of him; but in the dark of his eyelids he knows the pub’s music isn’t theirs.

They take the table by the window through which Sheba saw Molly the first time. On the tabletop Zan counts his money before he orders a sandwich for his son: “You haven’t,” he struggles to ask the bartender, “seen a woman and small girl, have you? Today or yesterday, or the day before.”

“Well, that could be anyone, couldn’t it?” says the bartender. Examining the shaken man in front of him, he says, “Are you all right?”

“They’re black.” Now it seems like a magic word.

“How’s that?”

“The little girl,” Zan mutters.

“Still doesn’t narrow it down much,” the bartender answers.

In a hoarse whisper the father says, “Can I leave a number with you?” He writes it on a cocktail napkin. “It’s very important. In case they show up?”

The graying bartender looks at it. “I’ll be straight with you, mate,” he says, “forty-three years I’ve gotten a lot of napkins with a lot of numbers, and never wound up calling any of them.” Back at the table, pressed against the glass of the window and peering out one last time, Zan whispers, Sheba, forgive me. I didn’t even get your hair done like I was supposed to. I’ve failed you completely; and once again he has to pivot sharply so the boy won’t see him break down. “Tell them we’ll be coming back,” he chokes to the bartender over his shoulder, who doesn’t hear, or maybe Zan never really gets out the words.

Forty-three years ago, at this same table where Parker eats his sandwich, another Yank passing through town on his way to somewhere else, who feels every minute as old as Zan even as he’s almost twenty years younger, gazes at the front page of a newspaper that someone has handed him in the street.

The newspaper is an unseemly mess of text and image, as anarchic as the sensibility it means to convey. The black ink comes off on his fingers, with streaks of headline-red, and the Yank frowns at its front page, which has the picture of a nun who appears to be at some sort of social occasion. She’s surrounded by people who have the look if not of familiarity, of celebrities, young men and girls with hair longer than his, and caught by the camera from the back, she reveals a bare bottom.

He glares at the tall ale he’s barely sipped. Lately he’s heard that everything in London is spiked with a new and dangerous intoxicant. He brushes a brown lock of hair off his forehead.

If he allowed himself to say so, he would admit it’s an impressive bare bottom — and only when he spies the ends of blonde hair peeking out from under the rather chic habit does he fully realize this can’t be a real nun. In another lifetime, as a devout Catholic he would have had to stifle a flash of anger; now it only embarrasses him. It isn’t that he’s no longer given to flashes of anger in his life. It’s that over the past two and a half years the anger has become reserved for outrages greater than the irreverence of young people, when the anger isn’t subsumed by grief.

Brushing the hair out of his face has become a nervous habit, almost a twitch. it: reads the newspaper across the front, above the altogether too comely nun, in the large red lower-case letters which he discovers inside the newspaper stand for “international times.” Sounds communist, he thinks, which also once would have provoked anger: subversion and heresy in one swoop — and he manages the smallest and most rueful of smiles. Though he knows little about the current music, he recognizes under the masthead the variation on Plato that serves as the newspaper’s motto, and can’t help feeling his admiration stirred: When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.

It’s been nearly an hour and a half since he slipped away from the house. I wonder if they’re looking for me by now, he thinks. Perhaps I should go back.

The Yank lays the newspaper on the table. The music from the Ad Lib upstairs, which can be accessed only by a somewhat secretive elevator, is a muffled throb, and from behind the downstairs bar comes a pop tune on a radio or record player— in dollhouse rooms with colored lights swinging. . — he can’t tell. Sipping the tall ale in front of him, his first and last of the night, he finally notices the young English couple at the bar that have been watching him, and he’s only surprised he got away this long without being recognized.

“Too old to be a musician,” says the young man standing at the bar. The Yank at the table is familiar, and the man at the bar, white and in his mid-twenties with long hair, and the younger black woman, her hair already in dreadlocks that aren’t typical yet, are trying to place him. The woman teases, “But not that much older than you, is he?” and her companion exclaims, slightly outraged, “Are you serious? He’s much older!” and the woman bursts into laughter.