Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

Zan feels his son slipping away. He’s become aware of it since London, since Sheba disappeared, maybe since Viv disappeared, maybe before that. He says to Parker, “But when you like a certain song. . ”

“What?” Parker shouts again with great exasperation, not bothering to remove the headphones this time. His father’s mouth keeps moving and finally the boy turns off the music player around his neck. “What. . ”

The father shrugs. “. . because it’s catchy or—” and Parker snaps, “A lot of annoying songs are catchy.” At this point, Zan thinks, I should understand that music is about teen tribalism. At his son’s age, musical taste is an act of revolution. Zan doesn’t particularly like music that’s political; the song he played the morning after the election— but then all the song says is that a change will come, not how fast, right? — only is political because it plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession. Yet Zan learned long ago from his teacher at the university who once was Trotsky’s bodyguard and Billie Holiday’s lover that music which isn’t at least politically aware has nothing to say about anything, and that political people who are unmoved by music — whether it be rock and roll or Broadway tunes — aren’t to be trusted.

In any case music isn’t something over which a healthy twelve-year-old bonds with his father. Between a twelve-year-old and his father, music is the line in the sand. Out of those politics is born taste. Taste gets better but, Zan hopes, not perfect. When your taste is perfect, it’s not yours.

When Parker was four, the age that Sheba is now but before she was born, his father drove him to preschool one morning and they came to a place on the canyon boulevard where a truck had spilled oil that slicked the asphalt. Their car spun out and another car spun into them colliding, and when the spinning was over and everyone stopped, Zan turned from behind the wheel to the four-year-old in back and said, “Are you all right?” Yes, the boy nodded in his stoic fashion. If he nodded yes, whether he was really all right or not, or whether he even knew he was all right, then in his own four-year-old mind he took some small measure of control of the chaos that just had unfolded.

Arriving in Paris on the Eurostar after its unscheduled pause in the Chunnel, leaving the Gare du Nord and crossing the rue Dunkerque on their way to the Gare de l’Est, Parker sees the taxicab heading toward him not at all in that slow-motion way that everyone says things like this happen. There’s nothing slow-motion about it; it all happens faster than the boy can compute before his father grabs him hard by the hand, so hard his hand crunches, and yanks him from the cab’s path. His father says, “Are you all right?” and Parker nods as stoically as if he were four; but he’s not all right. It’s not just that his hand throbs. It’s not even just the spectacle of the cab that nearly hit him flying into the limousine before it, then throwing the gear into reverse, then shifting into drive and slamming into the limo again.

Everyone on the sidewalks watches the cab reversing and crashing into the limo over and over. Dimly through the back window, the cab’s passenger grabs her head when she flies into the seat in front of her. At the age of twelve, Parker feels his first grown-up cognition of the fact that sometimes there is no exerting control. Sometimes everything loses control and there’s nothing to be done about it, and things have been out of control for a while now — since before the Chunnel or London, maybe before Sheba.

Though he doesn’t understand the details, Parker knows about the house. He knows about the money. He remembers one afternoon, back in the canyon, the panic in his father’s voice when he hustled the kids into the car to drive down to the bank because Zan just had gone online to discover no money in their account, so he needed to make a deposit before checks started bouncing. Now his mother is missing, his little sister is missing, and though of course Sheba drives him crazy he can’t help being upset that she’s disappeared, as upset in his adolescent way as his father, and it’s annoying, to be upset about Sheba. It just would be better if Sheba weren’t missing because then things wouldn’t be quite so out of control. Everything got harder in all their lives when Sheba came, the boy thinks — why wasn’t I enough, why wasn’t it enough for my mother and father to have me ? Why was I so not enough that they had to go halfway around the world to bring Sheba to their house? and it will be half a lifetime before he understands it’s never been that he wasn’t enough, it’s that his parents’ love for him was so great as to set loose within them a terror more than they could bear.

Flippin’ little jerkwad. He remembers back in London, the nanny accusing him of losing his sister on purpose in the maze, and his blood boils. Now Sheba’s gone and his mom is gone and he’s far from home, everything out of control, and there it all is before him now in the scene of this cab crashing into the same limo over and over. As people watch, the cab’s passenger finally throws open her back door on the other side and flees — and the boy and his father have walked another quarter block down the rue Dunkerque when something occurs to Parker and he stops to look back, to look for her among the crowd in the twilight before his father pulls him on, as though they have any hope in hell of catching the next train tonight.

Zan and Viv each have a different dynamic with Parker. Zan is steady, calming. Viv and Parker clash, especially over how he treats Sheba; not so long ago the mother posted a sign in the house that read PARKER BE NICE TO YOUR SISTER OR FEEL MY WRATH. But the two also have an intimacy that father and son don’t. The boy will confide in his mother what he won’t in his father: Let them have the Talk, Zan has thought more than once. Zan is ballast, Viv is sail. They’ve both noticed that Parker is at his best when the parents have had an argument concerning some point of child-rearing; Parker has enough friends whose parents are split that when his own parents fight, it’s a shot fired over the bow of the family, chastening him into doing whatever he can to set right the ship of domesticity.

There’s never been a doubt in Zan’s mind that when Sheba first became part of the family, it was hardest of all on Parker. In the two years since Sheba’s arrival, Parker has turned more volatile, explosive. This has coincided with the onset of adolescence, a time when every affront listed on the ledger of his still brief life takes on a scope worthy of tribunals in The Hague. It bugs the twelve-year-old as much as it pleases him that, among his friends, his parents are considered the cool ones — the mom who’s turquoise and the dad who plays music on the radio; and now Parker’s salutations, cordialities and exchanges are spoken in the language of estrangement. Though the boy has been calling his mother and father “Viv” and “Zan” since he was Sheba’s age, the implicit remove of a first-name basis, which between children and their parents is tantamount to last-name basis, becomes all the more meaningful.

Testosterone abides. Lately there have been eruptions of violence. Years of sensitive parenting early on, strict supervision over what the boy watched or was exposed to in movies or on television, aimed at cultivating the next Dalai Lama, vanished in a flash of hormones around his eighth birthday. Soon the house was a paramilitary compound, fully stocked with any kind of weapon of any ballistic — air pellets, paint balls, small BBs — that wasn’t actual bullets. “Shall I shoot it?” Zan heard Parker say one afternoon back in the family room of their house, and when the father turned to look, there on the wall was a small rat.