Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

The storm is picking up when she reaches the ballroom of the hotel. Enough of the eucalyptic wind from outside finds its way through some hidden breach to rustle the room’s potted fronds and small dingy chandeliers turned down low; Viv buys a glass of tej, the moonshine honeywine once made by Sheba’s grandmother. She drinks it down, buys another.

He took too long to say no. He said it too many times . To clear a space in the middle of the large ballroom, its round tables have been pushed to the walls with such abandon the wind might have blown them there, and the room churns with five or six hundred otherworldly-looking Ethiopians with their african skin and european features dancing to half a dozen musicians on a bandstand at the room’s far end. Viv buys another glass of tej: Who is she? the woman in the photo, and if she’s dead and has nothing to do with Sheba then why show me the photo at all? and, watching the dance, immediately she knows she’ll never know.

Unlike in the West where the dance begins in the feet and moves up the body, here in the city of the abyss the dance begins in the shoulders, the part of the body made for bearing a weight, shoulders shimmying as though to shake away the burden of human time before the dance moves down to the clasped hands that lurch forward in a frenzy to cast something off, down to the legs galloping to catch up with whatever gauntlet the hands have thrown.

To Viv the music isn’t african in any sense with which she’s familiar but a bizarre blend of funk, swing, big band, cabaret, manzuma, armenian soul. It’s a rhythm and blues from the future that’s spiraled round the sphere of time to come back up through its birth canal. Beginning seventy years ago under the rule of Mussolini and sung down through the communist Derg, the songs have become a code: “Wax and gold,” the Ethiopians call it, when the golden messages of liberation and revolution are hidden inside the wax of the outer lyric and melody; and through the century the songs have been passed bearing the secret songs inside. In the swept ballroom of the Addis hotel tonight the band begins to play “Tezeta” and dancers break off in circles, partners claiming the center in order to dance each other into submission. As the small wrap slips from her bare shoulders, the white woman with paling blue hair finds herself vortexed into one of the circles with a young Ethiopian woman who smiles at her; ululations rise from every throat around them. Eighteen hours from now, under the English Channel thirty-six hundred miles away, Zan will think to himself how music plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession.

At the airport early the next morning, Viv finds there’s not enough credit on her card to get back to London. Her cell hasn’t worked since she got to Addis and the battery is dead, and if she returns to the hotel and stays another night to email Zan, it’s money that could go toward getting her back. She’s not certain what Zan would be able to do anyway. Zan would be the first to acknowledge that it’s in such situations when he becomes most flabbergasted that Viv is coolest.

Beginning to feel the hangover of the long sleepless night, she finds thinking that much harder. She decides to try and use the credit card to buy a less expensive ticket to some place in Western Europe from where she’ll find a way to England. Her best prospect appears to be Berlin, more out of the way than she would like, and she’s about to book a seat when, at the last moment, a flight to Paris becomes available.

After the seven hour flight to Orly by way of Khartoum, Viv takes a bus to Paris’ outskirts and then the metro further into the city, making the mistake of getting off at Châtelet. From there she could transfer to a direct line to where she wants to go but doesn’t know this; pulling her bag into the street, she keeps hailing cabs until she finds one — in the thick of rush hour as dusk falls on the city — whose driver seems to understand that she needs to get to whatever station will put her on the express rail to England.

Once in the taxi, however, she’s not so sure the cabbie understands at all. The only thing clear is he’s drunk and agitated; she can smell the Côtes du Rhone like she’s sitting in a cask of it. “Train station!” she keeps trying to explain, “anglais!” but then realizes it must sound like she’s commanding him to speak English when what she means is England. He lets loose a torrent of French and something else, Turkish or Eastern European she supposes, and then — with deliberation and intent, she’s certain — he drives his cab straight into the limousine before him, nearly hitting what looks in the twilight and blur of the event to be a young boy about Parker’s age, pulled from danger at the last moment.

Viv hurtles forward in the back of the cab, hitting her head hard on either the ceiling or the seat in front. To her astonishment, the collision hasn’t sobered the driver but sent him further into a rage. He backs up the cab and floors the accelerator, careening again into the limo in front, and then does it again.

He keeps doing this until finally she grabs her purse, throws open her door, leaves behind her luggage and lurches from the vehicle. She half expects to leap into the path of oncoming traffic; the repeated crashes, however, have brought everything around her to a stop. She hits the ground, stumbles, picks herself up and keeps running, into the large glass building before her, and the only thing that could almost astound her as much as what she’s just been through is to discover that in fact she’s where she wants to be, in the Gare du Nord, from which the Eurostar departs for London.

She doesn’t have enough money for the train, and on sheer adrenaline from what happened in the rue Dunkerque outside, she almost slips past the ticket booth before one of the officials stops her.

Depressed and rattled, she can’t bring herself to sleep in the station. She wanders several blocks east, to the cheapest no-star hotel that she can find on the rue d’Alsace.

Paying for one night upfront, she spends the next day at the Gare du Nord casing the crowd like a thief, sizing up its ebbs and flows, points of vulnerability. She thinks, I’ve become the vagabond rebel of my youth, who hopped trains on a whim. She spends a second night in the hotel, slips out in the morning without paying, spends the second day at the station; hungry to the edge of nausea, she rations out to herself juice and a single baguette. Having left her bag with her clothes in the cab that she fled two days before, she breaks down and buys a hairbrush and clean underwear.

From Addis to Khartoum to Orly to the Gare du Nord, she’s viewed every telephone — the broken ones on the walls, those on the other sides of windows, those that people gaze at in their palms as they walk along never looking up — with an unbearable longing, believing her family only a flurry of digits away. When she finds a public phone that works, she stares in dismay at the foreign instructions, terrified she’ll waste what money she has on a call that won’t go through. For as long as she can remember, she’s had a recurring nightmare in which she rushes from dead phone to dead phone trying to make a call; and now she’s in that nightmare. A couple of times she asks someone if she can borrow a phone and they just push past, glaring at her temerity if they understand at all.

I must seem like a panhandler, another homeless beggar, she thinks, and then realizes that in fact at this moment that’s exactly what she is. In the Gare du Nord she feels herself under the surveillance of patrolling police as though she’s wandered over from Pigalle to ply her trade. Her hair has grown out but still has streaks of a pale blue that faded back in that room at the center of Addis Ababa.