Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

It’s the perfect shitstorm of bad financial turns. Soon the front page of the newspaper and its running daily accounts of a nation imploding with debt and foreclosures read like the Nordhocs’ personal diary. Zan filed with the bank an application to rewrite the home loan, which was turned down because the family was current in its payments; a second application was turned down a week before the bank was taken over by another bank. The Nordhocs fell behind in the payments, offering partial sums that they subsequently learned weren’t applied to the balance on the house but rather put in a separate escrow so the bank could continue to charge delinquency fees and push the family toward foreclosure. A third application was turned down as being “incomplete,” though over the course of five months and many phone calls no one from the bank ever said the application was amiss; Zan filed a fourth application that was approved — at a monthly payment of $6,500. No one at the bank could or would explain how this figure was arrived at or why the bank offered a payment that was more than what led the Nordhocs to file the application in the first place.

Now Zan and Viv are many months delinquent on the house, which has been scheduled for foreclosure twice only to receive stays of execution at the last moment. Their debt to credit card companies has reached a level Zan doesn’t want to know. “We don’t know how much we owe?” Viv whispers so the kids won’t hear.

“We do know,” says Zan. “A lot.”

“But shouldn’t we figure it out exactly?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Zan says, “I need to be able to get out of bed in the morning. Because quantifying it with more precision won’t make it any less or any easier to deal with. Because sometimes you need a little denial in order to function.” In his head Zan figures it’s about $135,000. Various credit accounts have been closed or canceled or their limits strategically have been lowered to less than the balance. Wall Street hounds the Nordhocs ceaselessly, phoning hourly; if Zan scrounges up a grand on a $1,200 bill, the lender relentlessly pursues the outstanding $200 dawn till midnight. New bankruptcy laws are a Rube Goldberg contraption, disqualifying the family for owing too much or too little, for earning too little or too much. Zan’s conversation with an attorney about the situation is the financial equivalent of being told by a doctor he’s terminal.

Over the course of all the mortgage applications to the bank, Zan has made countless phone calls, copied countless documents, made personal appearances at the lender’s local branch to plead the case. He has consulted three government agencies and eight lawyers, several of whom he’s paid hundreds of dollars for expertise that proved something less than Zan’s. Those not crooked enough to provide useless advice confessed they were too confused to provide any advice at all.

In the ten years since they bought it, Zan and Viv came to love the house more than either might have imagined, particularly after virtually rebuilding it from the ground up. Looking out on a canyon vista, the house is an ark of CDs and books, Viv’s photos and butterfly collection and her art that’s become a nexus of the two, all ready to float away on the tsunami that their twelve-year-old son expects to see advancing through the canyon from the sea.

Zan admonishes himself that pending displacement is the inevitable fate of those who invest in any place too much. He knows that one day soon the house will reappear on the bank’s radar, a new Notice of Sale giving Zan, Viv, Parker and Sheba three weeks before they’re homeless. The parents try to keep it from the children but Zan is certain that Parker, not only a smart but intuitive kid, knows something is wrong. “Promise me,” the boy says one day in the car, “that we’re not going to move,” and Zan chokes, “I promise,” and ponders the expiration date of lies to children.

Finances weigh down everything. At least twice a day Zan goes online with a knot in his gut to check evaporating bank balances and a loan-processing website that lists which houses have had new foreclosure dates posted.

He believes it’s killing him. It coincides with the hackneyed gloom of autumnal years, the astonished pall at the great approaching wind-down; it never occurred to him that life would get harder rather than easier. He travels in a movable depression with headaches that never end, locating themselves around one eye like a vise when he wakes in the morning and goes to bed at the end of the day and wakes again the next morning. Gobbling imitrex nightly for the migraines and diovan daily for blood pressure, he believes that if by some miracle he and Viv should extricate themselves from these circumstances, within months, weeks, maybe days or moments some fatal illness will manifest itself — because at the same time he believes that their money crisis is killing him, he’s also convinced that fate is a trickster. At the same time that it’s killing him, the constant war for economic survival also is the thing keeping some other doom at bay. Fate waits for the most delicious moment to play its ultimate trick, in some unlikely future when everything finally is all right.

While Zan feels foolish that it’s taken him a lifetime to know it, it’s reassuring to finally understand that the banks are evil. It lends to the situation a clarity that’s confirmed by every contact and transaction. You don’t want this house, he tries to explain, pillaged by my children and covered in my wife’s butterfly wings, no doors on half the rooms and its driveway so steep it’s practically vertical. You’re never going to find anyone else who wants to live here. “Loan number?” asks the lender on the other end of the line, in a ritual now familiar enough that Zan has made it a point, on general principle, not to know the number by heart. “Three zero six one three nine five one nine eight,” he reads from the application.

“Address?” the woman says.

“1861 Relik Road. That’s R-e-l—”

“Are you receiving mail at that address?”

“Yes.”

“Are you living at the residence?”

“Yes.”

“You are not renting the dwelling or—”

“We live here. It’s our home.”

“You have an outstanding balance on the property of one million, one hundred forty-seven thousand five hundred sixty-two dollars and eight cents. Are you prepared to make a payment in that amount today?”

“No,” Zan sighs.

The lending agent says, “How then may I assist you today, asshole?”

Zan looks at the phone in his hand. “Excuse me?” he says.

“How may I assist you today?” she says.

“That isn’t what you said.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry?”

“That isn’t what you said.”

“That is what I said.”

“You said something else,” Zan insists.

“That is what I said, sir. How may I assist you today?”

Zan chews over the moment and clears his throat. “I’m calling to find out the status of our most recent application for a modification of our home loan. This is the fifth we’ve submitted.” He thinks. “Or maybe the sixth.”

“Let me review that,” she answers, and there’s a pause. Then, “The application is still being processed, motherfucker.”

Now Zan doesn’t feel the need to examine his telephone. “What?”

“The application is still being processed.”

“That isn’t what you said. You said something else.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said something else. What did you call me?”