Steve Erickson: These Dreams of You

Another pause. “Sir, I’m not sure what you think I said, but the application is still being processed and a modification officer will be getting back to you. Cocksucker.” Lying in bed at night, Zan concludes that maybe the new president isn’t going to save their house. He gets up and turns on the light because otherwise he becomes insufferable even to himself, in his sense of persecution and guilt over how his children now find themselves in this predicament. He wonders about the terms of his life insurance policy and how it might take care of his family if he could somehow will himself into an aneurysm; he reflects on the perversity of karma and how it could be that the family’s luck could go so bad on the occasion of adopting an African orphan. Aren’t you supposed to get points for that on the karmic scoreboard? He muses (if that possibly can be the word) on how his time is nearly over and yet his moment, whenever or whatever that ever was supposed to be, still hasn’t come. He thinks about his father-in-law who died six years ago and his last words: “ That went fast.”

Once the preconceptions of meek Dickensian orphanhood have been laid to rest, Zan realizes that Sheba is the single most defiant child he’s known. If need be, she’ll abdicate the role of child altogether in order to assume authority; she self-administers time-outs when the parents don’t.

“I’M HUNGRY, YOUNG MAN!” she bellows at her father when she wants something to eat. She calls Viv “young lady” and Parker “baby,” which incites the boy into answering, “You’re the baby, you’re the baby!” Eventually Sheba expands defiance’s repertoire, the tenor of insult becoming more nuanced until finally, some months later in London when she, Parker and Zan wait to board a double-decker bus, she snarls to the father, “Out of my way, old man.” Drawing her finger across her throat at him, she stuffs her thumb back in her mouth like Churchill corking his face with a cigar. “I’m a professional!” is her latest rallying cry and coup de grâce, learned from her brother or television and employed to end any contentious conversation. “Eat your carrots, Sheba,” says Viv.

“Leave me alone!” says Sheba. “I’m a professional!”

“Clean up your room.”

“I don’t need you telling me, I’m a professional!” When she becomes a teenager, Zan grimly resolves, I’m faking my death. A particularly boisterous and pyrotechnic plane crash off the coast of Tahiti, or a naked walk into a ravenous sea.

Earlier in his life, Zan decided it’s the scandinavian in him that accounts for the pathological orderliness he since has surrendered. This realization preceded another that he lives with four agents of chaos, if you count the dog; but his attempted reconciliation with chaos notwithstanding, the violation of the house by rats represents something so primal he can’t abide it despite the house itself having become a locus of uncertainty. He dreams of rats the night that Viv tells him she’s counted four. He dreams of them coming out of the holes that his son has punched in the walls in small explosions of new adolescent violence; one night Viv wakes to something running down her arm. Zan will let a tsunami take the house before the bank does, but not the rats, not yet.

Some years ago Zan had the house sealed, so he isn’t sure where the breach has occurred. It’s possible, he believes, that the rats came right through the front door, which sometimes has stood open for hours when Chaos Agent Number Four, otherwise known to Zan as the Fucking Dog, pushes his way in. Whatever the explanation, now the vermin can be heard scampering across the kitchen floor at night and scurrying through vents. For $500 that they don’t have, Zan hires an exterminator, an aging latino giant named Jorge who lumbers through the house and crawls beneath it laying traps.

Every week Jorge returns to the house and retrieves the traps with the snapped carcasses of rodents, about which he talks with a tenderness born of an executioner’s familiarity.

To Zan he describes the animals’ habits and patterns intimately, lowering his voice — so the children won’t hear — on the grislier details such as the rats cannibalizing each other. Several weeks and half a dozen dead rats later, the family still can hear them, with Piranha particularly agitated, periodically ransacking the house at the rodents’ sound and scent. “He doesn’t have trouble cornering FedEx drivers,” Zan notes. “But a rat he can’t catch.”

“A FedEx driver is bigger than a rat,” Parker defends his dog. “The FedEx driver isn’t hiding in the vent.”

Zan broadcasts his radio show from a station located behind the local Mexican eatery called the Añejo. This is up the road from an old abandoned railway car that was turned into a bridge and crosses a creek that rises with the winter and vanishes in the hot summer. For a man given to silences, he’s loquacious on his broadcast. “You say more on the radio in five minutes,” Viv points out, “than you do in a week off it.”

“That’s because,” Zan explains, “on the radio no one interrupts you. It’s the closest to writing that talking gets.” Still he concedes that a life on the airwaves isn’t something most people would have foreseen for him. “This is Radio Zed,” he intones, “as in the numerical designation of the decade we live in, broadcasting to all corners of the canyon and, who knows, maybe beyond. We opened today’s show with Augustus Pablo’s ‘Chant to King Selassie,’ followed by ‘Tezeta’—which means ‘memory’—by the Duke Ellington of Ethiojazz, Mulatu Astatke, then Delroy Wilson’s ‘This Life Makes Me Wonder.’ Polly Jean Harvey’s ‘The Wind’ was in honor of the coming Santa Anas that strike terror in all our canyon hearts during fire season, and the song by Van Morrison about Ray Charles, who ‘was shot down but got up to do his best,’ was followed by the Genius himself with ‘Busted,’ in honor of our bank statement. We ended with ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car,’ back from the days when my daughter’s favorite rock star was hanging in Berlin. As usual, that one’s for Sheba,” says Zan, “but also in honor of the time Parker and I hit an oil slick on the way to school and spun out on the boulevard half a mile from here — which is to say almost within the sound of my voice.”

Even as her older brother listens to glowering black rappers on their way up the river, Sheba remains besotted by the limey spaceman in the dress and make-up from thirty years ago. She sings his songs all the time; and mostly because he’s the annoying new obsession of his new sister, Parker cannot abide the man. Songs about electric-blue rooms and sons of the silent age drive him batty because they don’t make any sense : “Seriously?” he wails in the car at the CD. “Turn it off!”

The small studio from which Zan broadcasts was discovered in what everyone believed was the Añejo’s storage space. There was a microphone, sound system, disc player. The bar’s owner, Roberto, explained, “Canyon had a station once, to the extent anyone could get a frequency in these hills,” but that lonely frequency has been as unoccupied as the canyon’s repossessed homes. “I have this idea,” Zan said to Roberto one day, “I’ll play music a few hours a night, do a little show — it will be a way to advertise the bar.”

“Do a little show?” Roberto said. “Don’t you have to have a personality for that kind of thing?”

“I have a personality,” Zan said evenly, “don’t you worry about my personality. What about a license?”