Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

What would a room at the beginning of time sound like? she wonders back at the hotel later that night — or is it morning? sometime, night or morning, after returning from the center of the capital’s ancient quarter where the driver took her, when Viv looks at a western calendar rather than an Ethiopian one and realizes the date is a week later than she thought. Could I have lost track of time that much? she asks, standing on her hotel balcony, looking at a photograph in her hand as though it has an answer, when all it has is the face of a young woman who is dead.

In the labyrinth, when she says to the driver, “No, this isn’t right,” he turns and answers, Please. I can take you back to the car if you wish, he says, but if I do, you’ll never find what you’re looking for.

At the center of the quarter, in white rock that’s part wall and part ground, is an entrance at an angle that’s part door and part hole, and as it begins to rain, Viv steps down and in, ducking slightly though she’s only a little over five feet tall. She passes through a cloud bled of light into a room or cavern just a bit less dark, as her eyes adjust to the stub of a single burning candle on the other side where she sees the young journalist whom she hired to find Sheba’s mother. He rises from where he’s sitting on the rock.

He says, “Hello, Viv,” and extends his hand. She says, “Are you hiding?” but he seems sanguine, almost good-natured about it. “Yes,” he says, “for a while.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe it will not be so bad, maybe I will be able to leave the city at night.”

Upset, Viv says, “I’m sorry that I got you in this much trouble.”

“But you do not make the trouble,” the journalist assures her, “others make it. You asked a question that you have a right to answer.”

“My daughter someday will want to know who her mother is.”

“Of course,” he answers.

“She’ll hate me if I haven’t tried to find out.” She begins to cry and stops herself.

“Everyone who loves your daughter understands this.”

Viv says, “I’m not so sure.”

“I have news,” he says. “In a way it’s bad news and in another way. . ”

“What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is that the woman we have been trying to find is dead.” He takes from his back pocket the photograph and hands it to her. “But the other news is that she almost certainly is not your daughter’s mother. So it means that your daughter’s mother may still be alive. It also means that there is no answer to your question at the moment, and that now it is a harder question than ever to answer.”

Viv looks at the photo as well as she can make it out in the dark of the room and the light of the small candle. “How did she die?” Viv says. The woman is young though hardly a girl; in the dark of the cavern she doesn’t look like Sheba, nor will she on the hotel balcony the next morning when Viv looks at the photo again in the light of day.

“That’s not certain but it’s not important,” the journalist answers, “she is not the woman you look for.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s better that I don’t answer this,” the journalist explains sympathetically, “it may even be better for your daughter, if she were to return to Ethiopia someday.”

“I’m sure someday she’ll want to come back.”

Music is what a room at the beginning of time sounds like — and when Viv steps into this place, do the days pass in a matter of moments? When she slips the dictates of western months, succumbing to a calendar drawn to the rhythms of a different moon, is she bound as well to slip old temporal moorings that measure, as much as anything that people have learned, what people have forgotten?

It’s a music of subterranean harmonics, half voice and half caw, and comes from some human source like Sheba’s music does, except it’s not coming from the journalist and certainly it’s not coming from me , thinks Viv, I never could carry a tune and there’s no one else to be seen. It comes from the room itself, the woman and the journalist at the very axis of the transmission as though they’re standing in one of the chambers of Sheba’s radio-heart, from a time before she was born.

Minutes later, or is it hours or days? rising from the white rock at the city’s center Viv brushes her head against a sagging sky the color of mauve. The blue eucalyptuses against the Entoto Hills have turned to glass, and in the sagging mauve sky a flock of flamingos bursts into flames. It reminds her of the time back home when the canyons were on fire, the inferno roaring toward the house; all around them the family could see the hazy hot red flare that circled the night. Viv and Zan packed up Parker and Sheba in the car along with the personal effects and valuables. It was shortly after Sheba came to Los Angeles — definitely it was after —and, two years old in her booster seat in the back, sucking her thumb, the girl wondered in her infant fashion how her life had come to this, on the other side of a world on fire. Viv remembers a talk that she and her husband once had: If ever there was a decision to be made for either mother or father to save each other or the children, they would save the children. It was the easiest thing they ever agreed on.

The firmament went up in flames that night and now rising from the white rock, at the center of one of the highest cities in the world, Viv reaches up and draws a blue line in the ash sky. She looks at the blue dust on her finger then looks up and knows with certainty that the woman in the photograph that she holds in her hand is buried there behind the sky’s soot. When Viv reaches up again and scoops out of the heavens a hole, the music roars up out of the hole in the white earth behind her and through the blue puncture she’s made, like air sucked out of a rocket in space.

No, Sheba’s father says the next day when Viv goes back to the family to show them the photograph. The aunt won’t look at it; the grandmother is near blind with cataracts. Sheba’s father takes the photo, and as Viv hands it over and the father’s hand stops briefly midair before taking it, she makes no effort to hide the intensity with which she studies his reaction. He doesn’t look straight at the photo but peers down as though his lids might hide whatever Viv can see in his eyes. After several seconds, maybe as many as five or seven or eight, he says, utterly impassive, “No.”

But, she thinks, the eight or seven or five seconds are endless; he takes so long to answer. And now she wishes that she pressed the journalist to explain how he knows what he thinks he knows, so that she can put Sheba’s father’s no in a context of pain or fear or the same rejection by which he so long rejected fatherhood. “No,” he says for the third time, either to make it final or to protest one time too many.

Viv’s last night in the hotel she is too distraught to sleep. Outside her window a storm blows into Addis, and lying on her bed in the dark she feels the room tremble around her, the floor tremble beneath her; as the wind picks up though the balcony doors, she thinks the rumble of the room is from the storm but then realizes that the thunder coming up through the bed is percussive and mesmeric, and it’s music. Full of wrath and sorrow at everything, Viv hurls the sheets away from her, gets up. Beneath her brief lowcut nightie she pulls on some jeans and shoes and throws a wrap around her shoulders and heads downstairs to the lobby.