Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

Following such a linear progression, Zan asks himself in the dark two hundred feet below the surface of the English Channel, what else could be next? Or, put another way, what possibly could not be next? A new source of dread invades Zan amid all his other more prosaic trepidations. While this has been a country of murder since Zan was a teenager, and though Zan has lived through other assassinations and seen the country find a way to go on, he’s uncertain whether this time the country could endure such a thing: Too much history attends this presidency. However much anyone resists it, this president is too much the asterisk of the dream’s last four hundred years; he wears asterisks like a crown of thorns. Zan feels vested like he hasn’t before — no doubt, he thinks in the dark, to an extent that’s unhealthy, politically and any other way. But he isn’t the only one so vested and then there are those vested in the man’s fall — so should the unspoken thing happen, then how does a country that has invested so much stand it? Or does the very improbability of his rise suggest that he’s fated to be martyred.

Zan knows he’s not the only one contemplating this. He’s not the only one nursing a fear terrible enough that no one wants to name or give voice to it, just as few could stand to name or give voice to the fear that accompanied another prospective president forty years ago whom Zan, as a freshman, saw in the campus quad. Something about such men lets loose in the country a fury which no one names and to which no one gives voice; but then if it comes to pass, will everyone be left to wonder whether it would have been better to say it out loud after all? Now some do, in whispers so that fate might not overhear. From the flattest part of the Texas Panhandle, Zan’s anarchist friend writes, I can’t stand him — and I pray for him every day.

Zan wonders if they should get off the Eurostar at Brussels and change trains there for Germany. But the disadvantage of changing in Brussels is that it would involve yet another change of trains in Cologne; if the father and son continue another hour south onto Paris, they can catch a direct overnight train heading to Berlin. Zan was planning to get a couchette for his son on the Paris-Berlin train but the boy insists he doesn’t want to be in one part of the train while his father is in another, and Zan remembers years before when he went to Berlin, during his breakup with Viv before Parker was born, learning the hard way that european trains subdivide in the night while you sleep, whisking you off, if you’re on the wrong car, to somewhere else.

The flaw of Zan’s Paris-connection plan is that there’s only half an hour between the Eurostar’s arrival at the Gare du Nord and the departure of the train to Berlin from the nearby Gare de l’Est. Counting too much on the newly teutonic timeliness of London trains, including the sleek Eurostar, and the ease of maneuvering the ten-minute walk between stations, Zan leaves his plan behind him in the dark of the Chunnel, once the express finally begins to move.

Not even taking into account the time they’ve been stuck under the Channel on the Eurostar, the folly becomes more evident in Paris with the father and son’s arrival. Thirty minutes to not only change trains but stations? A vanity, Zan understands now, born of younger days and a sharper mind back when — long before Viv and children — he lived in Paris with crazy taxi-life Trotskyites and their aristocratic tastes, who thought, like Ronnie Jack Flowers in L.A., that all the proletariat should have Blaupunkt sound systems. That was when he could have been airlifted into Paris blindfolded and determined within five minutes exactly where he was.

Ascending the vertical Gare du Nord with its transparent tubular walkways, Zan and Parker take half an hour figuring out where to exit. I’m becoming, the father tells himself, a confused old fart. Turning toward the Gare de l’Est, he and his son dart through the twilight across the rue Dunkerque between cars, Parker a few feet behind Zan, when a taxicab, the driver apparently beyond the control of anything but unexplained fury billowing from the exhaust pipe, barrels toward the boy.

Zan grabs Parker’s hand so hard he can feel some small bone crunch. He remembers that this was the hand Parker broke the night he took the boy to the emergency room and then lost his car keys, railing about it afterward when his supernaturally wise daughter advised him from the backseat, “Poppy, let it go.” Zan yanks Parker from the path of the cab much like a young black female hand once yanked him from a surging crowd except that, given the difference in years between older man and younger boy, the force is exponential.

The cab flies into the back of a limousine. Dimly through the cab’s back window, the cab’s passenger flies into the seat in front, grabbing her head; then the cab backs up and, the gear first thrown into reverse then into drive, hits the limo again. Then it backs up and slams into the limo still again. “Are you all right?” Zan says to Parker, who nods in shock; the boy is too wide-eyed at the spectacle of the cab reversing and crashing into the same limo over and over to bother holding his throbbing hand. Everyone stops to look. Finally the cab’s passenger flees out the other side, leaving the back door open behind her. Later Zan realizes that in his own country, this scene wouldn’t be nearly as insane, or rather it would be insane in a distinctly familiar, new-world way.

By the time they reach the Gare de l’Est, the last night train to Berlin has departed. Zan and the boy check into a no-star hotel on the rue d’Alsace that overlooks the trainyards below and a stubby stone wall that runs alongside. In the difference between the two stations, ten minutes by foot, lies the division between centuries and longitudes, the high-tech Gare du Nord they just left full of young people, western and futurist, the Gare de l’Est shabby and old like its travelers, refugees from Old Europe or those returning to it, fleeing millennial overload. Unable to find ice in any of the stores or bars, Zan wraps Parker’s hand in a wet towel, his son finally slipping toward an ibuprofen sleep.

Lying in the dark of the hotel on the rue d’Alsace, the dank yellow lights of the Gare de l’Est coming through the window, Zan watches his son on the other bed. “Parker,” he says after a few minutes, and the boy doesn’t answer. “Parker.”

“What?” Parker finally replies. He lies on his side, his back to his father.

“How’s the hand?”

“It hurts.”

“It will feel better when the ibuprofen kicks in.”

“O.K.”

“Are you all right?” says the father.

“I’m trying to sleep.”

“What are you thinking about?”

For a moment Parker doesn’t say anything and then, “If I had disappeared in London like Sheba, would you have left me there too?”

Zan inhales sharply. He turns onto his back in the dark and stares at the hotel ceiling: For forty-eight hours he’s been struggling to keep composed in front of his son. He says, “We’re going back for her when we find Mom.”

“How are we going to find Mom?” Parker’s voice comes from his bed.

“Molly won’t hurt Sheba, and she can’t take her out of the country.” Zan doesn’t say the other thing, the thing about Molly that he knows sounds crazy. “Do you think Molly would hurt her?” Only several minutes later does he hear from out of the dark, “No.”

Lying in the hotel bed, Zan holds his head. Since his final forty-eight hours in London he’s had a low-grade migraine that he treats with aspirin and caffeine — which makes the headache better until it makes it worse — and what modest quantity of codeine can be bought over the counter in Europe. If he can doze at all, the discomfort is bearable when he wakes in the morning before it spirals, over the course of the day, into the clutch of evening, when it’s accompanied by nausea. Since the episode a few hours ago with Parker and the taxicab, it’s become excruciating.