Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

In the light of the sun coming through the station’s skylight, Viv eats the rest of her baguette, drinks the rest of her juice and watches a single butterfly flutter out of the morning mist and steam off the railway tracks to the glass above. The butterfly has wandered into the station through an open door, or where the trains come and go, to spend the rest of its brief life amid the furor of people and machines in passage — and as Viv watches, she wants to shield it in armor. She wants to envelop it in one of the metal frames with which she surrounded her stainless-glass recreations back home, to honor and protect what’s all the more beautiful for its precariousness; but she can’t do that anymore. Someone took from her, carelessly, a singular and beautiful vision, in order to steal not only her past but her future.

No, she thinks. She’s lost her armor but not her future or her vision. Looking at the train to London on the other side of the station, there it is, right there, the future just beyond the ticket gate; it begins in mere moments. All aboard.

Viv ascends to the level from which the Eurostar departs. Milling with the crowd that files toward the train, she presses past the officials taking tickets; when she hears an authoritative declamation of French directed at the back of her head, she picks up her step, and when she hears another she moves at something only slightly less conspicuous than a mad dash, darting in and out of other passengers, knocking some out of the way. She steps onto one of the sleek cars and makes her way up the train, slipping in and out of doors, dodging the attention of whoever’s behind her; she disappears into a bathroom and locks it. Staring in the mirror, struggling to hold herself together, Viv waits for a pounding on the door.

The Belgian conductor doesn’t catch up with her until beyond Brussels, after more than an hour of the woman flitting into bathrooms and working her way through the train — at which point she finally acquiesces all composure. In an explosion of sobs she tries to explain to the conductor and British security official what happened in the taxicab in Paris, her long trek from Africa, the distance from her family and the dead cell phone and the incommunicado status of her life, never mind a dark foyer in the Garden of Eden where time drains out of the floor like water from a shower. For a panicked moment, she thinks she’s lost her passport.

Before she got back together with Zan and became pregnant with Parker, Viv lived by herself in the industrial loft section of downtown L.A., in a mammoth stone bunker from the balcony of which she could watch the trains roll in and out of Union Station between her and the sunset. The night she split up with Zan, as he was fleeing to Berlin — it was during the following two months that she had her affair with then Hollywood-based J. Willkie Brown — she watched from the landing the Southwest Chief pull out of the station and, grabbing nothing but her toothbrush, she jumped in her car and raced the train to Pasadena, arriving in time to hop on. She didn’t have a ticket then either. “Where are you going?” the conductor asked in Pasadena, and she answered, “The sunrise,” which turned out to be Flagstaff, she and the rest of the train’s staff drinking enough tequila to make her wonder ever after just how sober train travel is.

Now the Belgian conductor on the Eurostar who otherwise seems so sternly disapproving reappears twenty minutes later with a sandwich and plastic cup of red wine, for which Viv thanks him gratefully. Eating the sandwich, she pulls from her purse the photograph of the young woman that she was given in Addis and looks at it. She reproaches herself now for not having pressed harder for answers from the journalist, for not having pressed harder for answers from the grandmother and aunt and father. Zan believes in the integrity of secrets, that some things aren’t meant to be known; by this, thinks Viv, he really means mysteries. Is there a difference between a secret and a mystery? A secret sounds dishonest, like something withheld, as opposed to a mystery, where something is unknowable.

But God keeps more secrets than anyone. Is it a conceit, then, for a human being to presume that a mystery is a secret, or is it an aspiration to a larger wisdom? Viv can’t answer this. She just knows that now there are things about Sheba and her mother and her past that will be secrets forever, and that the acceptance of this, however unsatisfactory, is a fitful grace.

In the seat of the train where she’s been consigned for the duration of the ride, trying to reclaim a sense of calm, she has a sudden burst of disorientation and becomes convinced for a split moment that the train in fact is barreling south, back toward Africa. For a while she contemplates the contradiction of someone with wanderlust having no sense of direction.

That wanderlust she inherited from her father, the son and grandson of locomotionists who never could stay put, packing up five children and moving them all to Africa when Viv was twelve. As Zan would point out, Viv has a hard time staying put too. Thirty-six hours after any trip she becomes possessed of whatever is the newest strain of cabin fever, or maybe she invents one. Is Sheba’s adoption somehow an expression of that? she wonders as the window of the train exchanges the black of the european night for the black of the tunnel beneath the Channel. Is a restlessness of the body a restlessness of the heart? Like futuristic rhythm and blues, has Viv spiraled round the sphere of her own life to come back up through its birth canal and find waiting for her a small daughter of the abyss?

I’m a flawed human being! Viv moans to herself for the thousandth time in her life. The voice in her head is a running monologue of personal failings. She’s heard that a family is only as happy as the mother, and she knows that the girl she brought into all their lives is trailed by the betrayals of one mother after another; this is Sheba’s special burden that no one else can understand. Not so long ago, back in the canyon, Viv asked Zan one day, “Where’s the joy in our lives?” and Zan looked at her like she spoke some language as lost as the time back in that room in Addis. At this point Zan will settle for freedom from the fear to which he wakes every morning. But Viv will not, and neither will her wanderlust.

At St. Pancras a little before midnight, Viv is escorted by the conductor and security official to a back room in the offices of the Eurostar. In the room is a desk with a telephone and several chairs. The walls are bare.

Viv asks to use the telephone and is told to be seated. She waits half an hour before the security official returns to the room with someone she takes to be a policeman and another official affiliated with the railways company, who sits behind the desk and takes over the conversation. “Of course,” she says to Viv, “you know it’s a serious matter to breach the gate as you did in Paris and not have a ticket.”

“I didn’t have the money,” says Viv.

“Yes, well,” the official sighs, “that rather goes without saying, doesn’t it? But that’s not an excuse, is it?”

Viv realizes it’s good she’s exhausted. Otherwise this is the sort of situation where she typically, to use her word, effervesces, and she senses that now effervescence is the wrong strategy; she still has signs of turquoise hair, effervescence enough. “Why have you come to London, then, Mrs. Nordhoc?” says the official.

“My husband and children are here,” says Viv. “My husband has business.”

“What sort of business?”

“He’s giving a lecture. Or. . ” Viv thinks. “. . he may already have given it by now.”