Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

She opens it and her heart stops.

The page with her mother’s drawing is gone. The serrated edge of where it’s been ripped from the binding is as fresh as if it were flesh.

Again Molly drops the book in the street. Again she looks around, for some single white leaf blowing in the breeze along the street, and when she doesn’t see it, again she runs.

How many times, Molly frets herself nearly into hysteria in the U-Bahn, has she thought of tearing that page from the book herself? After all, the rest is only a damned book , an overstuffed frame for her mother’s portrait; but exactly because it’s such a frame, exactly because from the beginning it’s provided the picture a context, she’s never brought herself to remove the picture, and now it’s too late.

When she finds the page — or rather when it finds her mother — it’s exactly in the way that Molly never wanted to see it again, there affixed to the consequences of her mistake. It’s two years later, during which that page might reasonably be assumed decimated by time and elements, decomposed at the bottom of some heap, forgotten in any case by Molly and written off to blind and mindless panic, when she returns to her Schöneberg flat one afternoon and, as soon as she sees the police, she knows.

She cries, “Mum!” and dashes through the phalanx, none of the police able to muster the force necessary to stop her. The girl who’s now eighteen gets to the top of the stairs and sees through the doorway only her mother’s legs sprawled on the floor; only then, in contrast to the body of the beaten man in the Berlin street two years before, can she really claim she knows what lifeless is. She never sees the rest. A German officer swoops in to stop her and when he turns her in his arms, she accidentally kicks the crumpled paper at her feet on the top step and sees the wadded pencil portrait, dropped there not so much as a calling card but because to the six thugs who read it like a map, it was as useless to them as their target.

For Jasmine, mercy lies in the first blow from the six young men with shaved heads coming through her door, knocking most of the life from her and making the other blows superfluous.

After that, her last moments slow down and take on an altitude. Shock and pain fall away from her. Life fades fast from what it is about the woman that her assailants most despise, which is not her black skin: It’s those white woman’s gray eyes to which they believe she has no right. If she had the time to be surprised, she might be surprised that she doesn’t think of Bob at all. She doesn’t think of the night of the three mad fathers. If she had even more time to consider this surprise, she would realize it’s not a surprise in the least: She thinks of her daughter. She prays, in the moment that she has to utter a prayer, not for herself but that her daughter doesn’t return too soon.

It’s all Jasmine thinks about, because this is the radio signal sent from maternity’s ethiopia: We think of our children. If you believe in no god then you accept that we’re so programmed by nature to think of our children in our last moments; if you believe in a God then you know She/He/It wrote the program in the first place. Jasmine hopes in the last moments for a blast of divine foresight, another radio signal from the future that tells her that her daughter will be all right. She doesn’t get this. Probably nobody gets this. Probably like countries, all people get is hope, and odds no better than even.

For Molly, what mercy there is in Jasmine’s murder lies in that the girl has only one mother to destroy, as she now is convinced she’s done. She despises the music that comes from her, that lured back the Pale Flame on that night she dropped the book with her mother’s picture. She wants to turn herself off.

When she flees Berlin for Marseilles, she doesn’t flee for herself or for her own safety let alone self-esteem. She has a body that men notice and that she sometimes trades on; she leaves behind, with the nights whose stories they tell, the tezeta of her commerce — cries through the latticed balcony doors. Men pay for the moans as much as the flesh. They pay for the music, the songs that rise up through them as if the men become tuning forks when they’re inside her. The woman means to flee anything that she deserves, the good and bad equally, because her existence has been rendered so nihilistic that she doesn’t deserve to deserve. So she doesn’t flee her remorse, as though she might watch it from a departing train, as remorse stands there in the U-Bahn station watching her back and growing smaller. Later it will seem like there’s no other place to which she could have gone but the wellspring of all chronicled memory, back to abyssinian purity, as though there’s no guilt in such a place or at such a point.

At the time that she takes it, the wandering journey from Marseilles to San Sebastian to Gibraltar to Algiers to Tripoli, she adamantly insists that in no way is it as though she’s pulled there. The only thing she knows for sure when she finally arrives in Addis Ababa, a young woman at the dawn of what the western world calls the Twenty-First Century but for which Ethiopia exhausted numbers long ago, is that the last thing she deserves, the thing she deserves least of all, is to be a mother.

Am I a ghost? she wonders in her descent, following — into its labyrinth of tunnels and bridges, lined by high walls covered with moss — all the narrow, winding stone steps of her new abysmal city. Am I in an abyss of time, or one of space? Living on the outskirts of the eucalyptopolis nine years later, lying in bed she hears one night coming through the music of mosques and thunderstorms rolling in overhead a song she not only knows but was born of, and then a distant male voice in a familiar language that’s not Amharic. Only after listening awhile does she acknowledge to herself that the transmission comes from her body. Not that it ever will really explain anything, she’s picking up a radio broadcast from ten thousand miles away— . . for what happened last night. . but then all the song says is that a change will come, not how fast, right?. . and the really old-school one about the lovers at the Berlin Wall. . who get to be heroes just for one day? That’s for my four-year-old Ethiopian daughter, who I guess can’t get enough of British extraterrestrials in dresses— and months later in London, with Sheba asleep next to her in the dark, she still hears it, almost, or convinces herself she does, in the same way she’s almost convinced herself she isn’t dying.

In the dark between London and Paris, Parker doesn’t like it when the train stops beneath the Channel. Reflexively he turns up his headphones, and his father in the seat across from him, who can make out the static of the robotic chooga-chooga from the music player around Parker’s neck, says, “What are you listening to?”

Seeing his father’s lips move, Parker pulls the headphones from his ears. “What?” the boy says.

“What are you listening to?” says Zan.

“Why?” says the boy.

“I was just wondering,” Zan answers quietly. Parker remembers his dad taking him and his sister to that creepy underground bunker in London, and at the bottom the elevator doors opened to mannequins in cots; it was creepy, it creeped him out. It didn’t matter that the bunker turned out not to be underground at all, it didn’t matter if the whole thing was fake — it was creepy and now here on this train stopped in the dark, stuck under the flippin’ ocean or wherever they are, Parker thinks it’s like the bunker except worse. He looks around at the other passengers in the dim light and sees the dummies that he saw in the bunker. He sees one when he looks at his dad in the seat across from him; everyone on the train looks inanimate and stuffed, and Parker wants out and off. But he knows there’s no getting out and off until the train moves and surfaces on the other side, wherever that is.