Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

How can you believe in a god, J. Willkie Brown asks Zan at the pub outside the university following the lecture, and Zan answers, swallowing the last of his second vodka, “Because I don’t believe it’s all molecules. Because I don’t believe the conscience translates into a chemical equation. Because men and women run into a hundred-and-ten-story building to save perfect strangers, overcoming every instinct of self-preservation, when the hundred-and-ten-story building right next to it has just collapsed, which means people act not only in the face of nature and self-preservation but outright rationality. Because there are dimensions of nobility that can’t be diagrammed on a blackboard in a class. Because men wrack their brains trying to think of ways to turn their fellow human beings into lampshades, which means there are dimensions of barbarity that also can’t be diagrammed on the same blackboard. Because I believe such unquantifiables abound beyond dispute, along with evidence that human behavior is animated by spirit. Because I think the existence of the soul proves the existence of God, not the other way around.”

I’m a traitor. Better to admit we’re traitors of the country of the banged gavel, the salem stench, the hate that hates in God’s name, so we might be patriots of the other country of the eternal pursuit, memory’s mystic chord, our nature’s better angels, and the promise that no God can help loving even when we break it. By its nature, my version of the country is blasphemous. By its nature, it allows for doubt, the possibility that my God is wrong and yours is right. The other country, where I commit treason, denies doubt, views it as a cancer on the congregation.

The one thing that Zan knows for sure is that, should the song of his country finally fade and be silent, it will never quite be possible again to believe in it. This is the problem, he reasons, with presidents who can’t be as big as the reasons they embody. A body can only hold reasons so big. Should the silencing of the song come to pass, not only will Zan be complicit in the loss of his own faith, he will be complicit for having had faith in the first place. But without such faith, the country — this country in particular — is nothing.

Without such faith, I’m nothing. This is the occupational hazard of being of my country, the way one’s identity becomes bound up with a landscape that manifests in its soil and psychitecture an idea, with a people still fighting over who they are because when nothing else is held in common but the idea then if the idea isn’t held in common there’s nothing left except the mystical name of the place that evokes something different for each person but which each person allows himself or herself to believe is the same thing evoked for every other person.

At the campaign rally forty-one years ago, pulled to safety from the frenzied crowd that threatens to catch him in its undertow, the eighteen-year-old Zan feels in his ear the breath of the young black woman who rescues him and whispers something he can’t hear; but lying in the street now, he almost does.

Lying in the street now, Zan confronts the breakdown he’s been trying to avoid since London. He’s stunned by how much this moment feels like a bookend. Finally overwhelmed by despair, that grief of the soul, he cries, My God, where’s my boy? Where’s my little girl? Where’s my wife, where’s my house? Where’s my art, where’s my country? How did I lose it all? At this moment he’s convinced it’s all been a dream: “I know I did something wrong,” he sobs out loud, “but I don’t know what.” What lapse of perspective undid him? What ambition failed him? What did he take for granted? What did he value too much or too little? What thing was undone that should have been done, or what was done that shouldn’t have been? To what dream did he commit himself that was folly? How is it that he was so old when he was so young, and how has he now been reduced to something so childish even as he’s so old?

When he hears himself whisper his son’s name again, he opens his eyes with no idea how long he’s been out. His head pounds and the rest of him throbs.

He tries to rise and almost makes it up onto one leg but collapses. He lies in the street another minute looking at the fog above. “Parker?”

He turns to look at the sidewalk and in the dark sees a girl younger than Sheba standing there watching him, being pulled away by a mother who assumes he’s a derelict in a stupor.

He makes himself roll over and again gets up on his hands and knees. His face is dried and caked into a mess of tears and blood, and as he reaches up to wipe his eyes clear, he sees the blue streak that Parker made there earlier tonight when he slashed Zan’s hand with the marker.

Of course Zan doesn’t have his cell anymore, his muggers having taken it. Horror wells up in him at the thought that Parker might call and its new owners might answer, but then he remembers with relief that, in defiance, Parker refused to write down the number. The man wipes his eyes again and gets on his feet, holding his hand up to a streetlight and looking hard at it; and the simple streak of blue confirms for Zan the reality of having a son who made that mark.

When he wipes his hand against his face, the streak smears like a real mark would, unless he’s hallucinating that as well. But Zan decides that he won’t allow himself to believe this; he decides that whatever faith he has left, he’ll summon for the sake of believing in the mark on his hand and thereby his life.

He gets back to the inn and totters up the stairs inside. At the door of the room he’s looking for his key and, not finding it, wonders whether it was taken with his phone. As it occurs to him that maybe he rushed from the room without the key and should check whether the door is locked, it opens from the other side.

The boy stares at his father. “What happened?” he says in the smallest voice his father has heard from him since the time the car crashed in an oil slick on the canyon boulevard. Zan grabs his son and pulls him close; Parker crumples into his father’s chest. “What happened,” he murmurs again in his father’s shirt.

“I’m O.K.,” Zan says, “please, please don’t leave again.”

“I won’t. I’m sorry. Are you O.K.?”

“I am.” He might have a cracked rib. “Looks worse than it is.”

“I’m sorry,” Parker says again.

“No,” the father whispers, “I made a mistake. Mom wouldn’t have wanted us to leave Sheba.” He says, “We have to go back and find her.”

“O.K.”

Somewhere three young Germans tally up the night’s bounty, enormously disgruntled. The cell phone they took from the foreigner is the only thing of any value and its charge is nearly dead, and of course stolen cells are good for an hour or two at most before they get reported and turned off. One of the three men is staring at the cell when it rings. He hits the receive button and holds the cell to his ear.

“Zan,” comes a woman’s voice. The three look at each other. “Zan, it’s me.” Now disgusted with how poorly the night has gone, the man curses into the cell and hurls it through the air, the words “Zan? It’s Viv, where are you?” forming an arc in the night before the phone smashes against the stone stubble of what used to be the Wall.

But what, Viv asks herself five days ago, would a room at the beginning of time sound like?

Looking back over her shoulder from where they’ve come, Viv says to her driver, “No, this isn’t right,” when he takes her deep into the heart of Addis Ababa, leading her by foot down the winding stone steps into the labyrinth of tunnels and bridges lined by the high walls covered with moss. Figures in white gauze dart from the shadows in a collision of pedestrian alleys, still smelling of the mustard gas with which Mussolini massacred a million Ethiopians seventy years ago. There bubbles up out of the earth three thousand radiant millennia; overhead, a sirocco blows in from the moon.