Steve Erickson: These Dreams of You

Piranha never knew what hit him. Throttled by the small girl within half an hour of her arrival until his eyes bulged, the animal soon was darting shell-shocked from one hiding place of the house to the next. Only when he was hopping up and down the stairs like shrimp on a grill, as if trying to get out of his own fur, did Parker figure out that Sheba had pushed the button on the wall-unit that controlled Piranha’s electric collar. Originally set at four, the monitor now was at nine, the dog zapped silly from one end of the house to the other.

Soon Sheba and Piranha struck an accord. Now Sheba howls out on the deck and the dog howls with her, the two craning their necks and turning their mouths skyward.

Of course Sheba’s name isn’t really Sheba. “Should we really be calling her that?” says Viv.

“As in queen of,” says Zan.

“Yes, I know who the Queen of Sheba was,” says Viv, “that’s not my point.”

“I was only explaining it to Parker,” says Zan, though at this moment Parker listens on his headphones to the small fluorescent-green music player barely bigger than a stick of gum that hangs around his neck.

Viv says, “But still.” On the birth certificate that came with the adoption, Sheba’s name is shown as Zema, which in Amharic means. . well, Zan and Viv aren’t precisely sure what it means. The closest variation means “melody” or “hymn,” but from what Zan understands, Ethiopian names only derive meaning from adjoining names, like tarot cards derive meaning from the surrounding cards. Only by putting all of a person’s names together do you complete the meaning.

Zan never has been to Ethiopia but somehow this thing with the names seems typical of everything he knows about it. Ethiopia has an extra month of the year and, as best Zan can understand, its own clock, falling half an hour between the time zones of the world.

It isn’t so much that Ethiopia invented its own time zone but that its zone is the original time, the temporal referent against which all other zones have contrived themselves. Within weeks of coming to L.A., Sheba has mastered English but, after more than a year, notions of time remain elusive. She has no comprehension of time’s terminology. “We’ll go to the park tomorrow,” Zan says.

“O.K.,” says Sheba, and minutes later still waits. “Poppy, let’s go!” she says.

“Where?”

“THE PARK!”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she nods, and a minute later, “Are we going? WHY AREN’T WE GOING!” Even as she grasps other subtleties, she continues to be confounded by distinctions among weeks, days, hours, minutes. She believes her birthday both precedes and follows whatever day she occupies — not wrong, of course, technically speaking — appropriate for a child of civilization’s ground zero, the land where God placed Adam and Eve, the burial place of the oldest human fossil. “We are all Ethiopians,” Viv likes to say.

To the family, Sheba’s emotional need seems like a dark well that falls to time’s center. It sets in motion dynamics compounded by Sheba’s singular measure of things. “He’s number one!” she protests, pointing at Parker, “I’m number three,” and Zan can’t be sure if this is errant math, Ethiopia’s own system of measurement like its own calibration of time, or whatever manipulation knows to leave out two.

From the beginning Sheba has had an affinity for music. Because this is so much the stuff of racial cliché, Zan barely can tell people about the more earthbound aspects — the girl running for a piano like other kids to a scooter, warbling cheerfully in the yard of the orphanage back in Addis Ababa to the lightning in the sky — let alone that the girl’s small body literally hums with song.

Within a week of Sheba’s arrival, the family noticed it at the dinner table when everyone heard from her, barely audible, a distant music. “Sheba, we don’t sing at the table,” Viv gently tried to admonish her, until one day the mother is driving in Hollywood with Sheba in the backseat and picks up Zan’s broadcast from the canyon that usually she can’t get half a mile from the station. The girl transmits on Sheba frequency. Zan calls her Radio Ethiopia.

Up until around the time of Sheba’s adoption, Zan taught popular culture and Twentieth Century literature at a local college. The popular-culture course began with the year 1954, because that was when a white nineteen-year-old truck driver wandered into a Memphis recording studio — only weeks after the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional — and instinctively, unconsciously miscegenated, in the language of the time, white and black music. Caught up in the sweep of a story, by the end of every semester the students invariably shed their old-school/new-school distinctions to afford Zan an ovation. It’s the closest he’s come to telling an epic; he doubts he’s told a story better, certainly not any of his own.

The rest of the teachers in the department were childless and, as certainly was the case with Zan before he had children, there was little comprehension of the infinite variables that children bring, the way that children lay waste to rational odds, how one always has to err on the side of the long shot. Someone who doesn’t have children may grasp the volume of time they take up but can’t understand the way children won’t be compartmentalized, the way children can’t be consigned to their own rooms in the city of one’s life. Children are the moat that surrounds the city, the canals that run throughout. They get everything wet.

After the faculty meetings were changed to a day and time when Zan had to pick up kids from school, his resulting failure to attend brought down on him admonitions concerning language in his contract. Matters reached critical mass the afternoon that Zan left Parker waiting two hours so the faculty could debate whether a bartender should be hired at thesis readings. Not prone to explosions, Zan exploded anyway and walked out. “Some of us,” was the last thing he heard one of the teachers say, “liked the department better before he came.”

The suspension of Zan’s contract began the Nordhocs’ recession fifteen months before the rest of the country’s, or before the rest of the country knew theirs had begun too. A series of media and entertainment-industry strikes sidelined Viv’s career as a photographer snapping pictures locally for alternative weekly newspapers, sometimes nationally for entertainment magazines, of politicians and singers including not only the new president several years before his election but, some two decades past his prime, the redhaired glam-rocker whose music Sheba loves and Viv loved as well in her youth (distinctly marking her as an oddball among the teenage tribes of the Midwest). “Was his hair red?” Sheba asks, on raptly hearing the account of this photoshoot from her mother.

“Not as red as it used to be,” says Viv.

“Was he nice?”

“He was very nice,” Viv assures the girl, “one of the nicest, actually. Very charming, gracious.”

“He said grace?” The girl is dumbfounded. Often Sheba likes to say grace at dinner — just to get attention, her brother is convinced. God’s, at least, if nobody else’s.

Viv’s photography career has never recovered. The family’s income plummeted as Sheba arrived with new realities of $3,000 dental work, for which health insurance reimbursed $700. Viv and Zan have kept themselves afloat on credit cards in order to make the payments on their eccentric house; then the monthly mortgage went from $2,800 to $6,000 as the house’s value fell by a third.