Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

Zan says, “Come on,” and the two traipse from one corner of the Gate’s shadow to the other. Zan tries to calculate angles from which the photo posted by Viv online was taken. “But is this the way it looked in the picture,” Zan keeps muttering to no conceivable response from his son, “maybe over there?” and then they relocate themselves to another place.

This goes on for two hours. Afterward, with Parker in tow, Zan checks all the hotels in the area. They walk from one to the other, fumbling through English requests and German responses. Trying to ask himself why Viv would be in Berlin and what she would be doing here, Zan leads the boy to the Ethiopian embassy not far from the Gate, a relatively modest if distinguished two-story white house on Boothstrasse. From there they take the U-Bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof where they check the surrounding hotels. As darkness falls on a futile day, Parker concludes ruefully, My father is a moron.

I’m a moron, Zan groans to himself, stealing a glance at his son’s face. Beyond the inexorable compulsion to respond to the SOS of his wife’s online photo, the man accepts what he’s put off knowing until this moment, that nothing about the decision to come here has made sense — as though Viv walks the city waiting for her family to show up.

What do we do now? he wonders. Leave post-its on the Gate’s pillars? Viv, come home ? Though the father barely can remember the ways in which twelve-year-old boys feel lonely, he remembers enough, and knows what the loneliness grows up into; and though he can’t be sure at which end on the scale of profundity is most profound the feeling of being lost and at loose ends — when you’re young, and closer to the beginning? or when you’re old and closer to the end — he knows the feelings are kin enough that no amount of resilience, seasoned or not, overcomes it. He’s wracked by the unstable existence to which his son has been delivered, when the guilt isn’t dislodged by how he’s abandoned his daughter back in London, in her little life of abandonments.

On the U-Bahn back to their neighborhood, sitting side by side, Parker stares out the window. “I want you to write down my cell number,” Zan says. Not turning from the window, after a moment Parker says, “Why?”

The father pulls from the boy’s coat pocket a blue marker. “Does this write?”

Parker takes off the top and slashes the marker down the back of his father’s hand, leaving a hostile blue streak. “It writes,” he snarls.

The father looks at his hand and the evidence of the boy’s assault. “O.K. So take down this number.”

Parker says, “I don’t have anything to write it on.”

“Write it on the palm of your hand,” says Zan, holding up his own hand.

“My hand still hurts. From when you crushed it,” Parker says.

The father takes a deep breath. “A taxi was about to run into you. Is it really going to hurt your hand to write on it?”

“Yes.”

“Write on your other hand.”

“Then I have to use the hand that hurts to write. Besides I’m right-handed,” though he has to stop and think, as he always does, which hand is right and which is left.

“I’ll write it.”

Parker says, “We don’t need to.”

Zan says, “Just in case.”

“In case what?”

“I don’t know. In case. . something. . ”

“What?”

“Something happens.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“We get separated or something.”

“Why would we get separated?” the boy’s voice rises.

“We won’t get separated,” the father assures him.

“Then I don’t need to write it,” Parker declares and turns back to the window.

Back in their neighborhood, they duck into a café called the CyberHansa. Zan doles out the euros, buying his son a roll and a coffee drink. “We can get online here?” he asks the woman behind the counter, but Parker already has pulled the laptop from his father’s bag and logged on. “Can you find the page with Mom’s posting?” says the father, trying to nurture a conspiratorial bond with the boy.

Parker is having none of it. “Of course,” he snaps.

The father watches his son, giving him the full rein of his twelve-year-old attitude at its most merciless. After a moment Parker pulls back from the laptop as if studying it, his brows arched. “What?” says Zan.

“It’s gone.”

Zan says, “Gone?”

“Mom’s photo,” says Parker.

“What do you mean gone?”

“I mean it’s gone.”

It’s taking a moment for Zan to fully absorb what his son is saying. “No, wait. Gone?”

“Zan,” Parker says evenly, “it’s gone.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what gone means. It means it’s not there.”

Befuddled, Zan says, “But it was there.”

“Yeah,” Parker says. He adds, looking closer, “The weird thing is my comment is still. . ” He shrugs.

Zan has moved from his side of the table to Parker’s. He looks at the laptop. “What comment?”

“You told me to post a comment? To send Mom a message.” Parker points at the screen: Were r u . “Were are you?” Zan reads back. “What does that mean, Were are you?”

“ Where are you,” corrects Parker.

“There’s an h in where. Then what happened to Mom’s photo?”

“Don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Zan,” the boy shouts, “what do you mean what do I mean?”

The two return to the room in sullen silence. The boy climbs into the exposed bathtub and sits there, glaring. He’s being dramatic but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t genuinely feel dramatic. “But is that unusual,” Zan gamely tries to resume the conversation, “for the photo to have been there and now it’s not?”

“I don’t know,” the boy says — still glaring at nothing — in a way that means, I don’t care.

Zan is beside himself. “But why,” he flails for some sense of it, “did you say, Where are you?”

“Why wouldn’t I say that?” Parker finally turns to him.

“I don’t know,” the father shrugs. “Why not, We’re coming to get you, or. . ”

“First of all,” the boy leaps from the bathtub, “you didn’t tell me what to say. If you wanted me to say that, why didn’t you tell me? Second, when you told me, I didn’t know we were coming to get her. I didn’t know we were going to take this über, über, über -stupid trip to this stupid place!”

“Don’t shout.”

“I hate this! I hate this place! How are we supposed to find Mom?”

“We both saw the photo, right?” Zan says, and he’s not being rhetorical. I mean, we didn’t imagine it, did we?

Parker begins to cry furiously, like back in the canyon when he punches holes in the house. Sure enough, he pulls back to put his hand through the wall of their room and Zan says, “Your hand,” meaning the one the boy hurt in Paris.

It stops Parker long enough that he kicks the wall instead, burying his foot halfway in the plaster.

“Jesus, Parker!” his father shouts. Looking over his shoulder for a landlord to come through the door, Zan says, “You can’t do this here! We don’t live here! This place isn’t ours.”

“Nothing is ours!” the boy cries. “I hate everything! I hate you and I hate Mom and I hate Sheba!”

The father turns to the door and turns the latch so no one can come in. It takes only a moment for him to do it but it’s long enough so that when he faces back to the room he finds it empty, the second-story window open, in its black square the visual echo, outlined in electric blue, of his son having gone through it.