Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

“Apparently,” James gestures toward the front desk and seems to choose his words as carefully as possible, “the girl went missing.”

Viv staggers a bit. “My daughter , James,” she says, flashing anger, “you keep saying ‘the girl.’ My daughter.”

“Sorry.”

She hardly can get out the words. “What do you mean missing?”

“With the nanny. Alexander was quite distraught, of course — she, uh,” indicating the front desk again, “this lady knows his books. . well, anyway, he left instructions before he and the boy. . your son. . ”

Viv sinks into a chair. Looking back and forth from Viv to James, the woman behind the front desk says, “Your husband and son left their bags here, with a number. Then when the woman and little girl came back, I tried calling but no one answered.”

There’s a pause and Viv and James turn to her. “Came back?” says James.

“The little girl and nanny.”

“Sheba came back?” says Viv, rising.

“Oh yes,” answers the woman. “They’re upstairs right now.”

The woman calls to Viv, halfway up the flight of steps, “Third floor. I couldn’t put them in the same room, it was taken, so they’re down the hall — thirty-seven, nicer, actually. . ” and Viv already hears her daughter’s music. “I called for a doctor an hour ago,” the woman turns to James. “Since they checked in, she hasn’t seemed at all well. The African lady.”

Upstairs beyond the door marked thirty-seven, in the morning shadows slowly bleached of night by the sun through the window, the little girl with the thumb in her mouth who never has understood western time retreats to the middle of the room, watching Molly unconscious on a bed in a small alcove in the room’s far wall. Sheba thinks to herself, She sleeps, or she’s sick — did I make her sick? and in her heart the girl finds herself back in Ethiopia, two years old again and on the precipice of abandonment again like when her mother — her other mother, with the blue-green hair — first came to get her. Since they have been here in this room — bewildered by western time, Sheba has no idea how long — the girl has stood at the woman’s side stroking her wet brow, wondering where her father and brother are, having almost come to believe they wouldn’t abandon her. Back in Ethiopia, at a moment when she nearly had a family, she remembers that her name was something else though she can’t quite remember: Zan? no that’s her father’s name, if he’s still her father. She returns to the bed and is stroking the arm of the young woman, who at this moment is a color more volcanic than brown, when the door of the room opens behind her.

Sheba looks at Viv and wordlessly crosses the room to her, puts a small arm around her for a moment as Viv pulls her closer whispering her name. Then the child pulls Viv by the hand over to the bedside. Staring at the woman who clearly is delirious, Viv can’t know that once this woman transmitted music of her own, because it’s gone completely quiet: “My God,” she hears James behind her, “how long do you suppose she’s been like this?”

“She needs a doctor right away,” says Viv.

“The woman downstairs said she called for one this morning.”

“It’s her,” says Viv, “isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it? Doesn’t she look like. . the woman in the photo?” by which Viv means almost dead.

“Yes.”

Viv turns to him. “Do you have it?”

“Sorry?”

“The photo?”

Reaching inside his coat, then to the other inside pocket, James murmurs, “It’s here somewhere,” checking the outer pockets, then patting his pants pockets. Then he checks the coat again. “After all, it didn’t just disappear.”

The doctor says, “Forgive me for being blunt,” but he doesn’t seem to Viv the sort of doctor who needs forgiveness in order to be blunt. “I can relocate her to a hospice,” he says, “but don’t know that there’s much point, is there?”

“I don’t know,” Viv says, you tell me. Sheba hasn’t moved from her place by the woman’s bed, she hasn’t stopped stroking the woman’s arm. The girl is the calmest Viv has seen her; it’s terrifying. Viv looks at Molly visibly bobbing on her sea of delirium and says, “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s slipping away,” the doctor snaps, then, looking at the little girl, softens. “She’s slipping away,” he says again.

“But what’s she dying of?”

“She’s dying of dying . It may have been coming on a long time, but there’s no way to know that,” and he adds, “Have you made arrangements for her daughter?”

Viv says, “I’m her mother.”

“How’s that?” says the doctor.

Viv starts to repeat herself but stops.

James says, “Shall I stay, then?”

“No,” says Viv. “Can I call if I need anything?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.” He’s half closed the door behind him when she says, “James.”

He turns and peers at her through the doorway.

“We never. . ” she says. “We didn’t really talk about you.”

“Another conversation,” he says, sounding falsely chipper because James never is truly chipper, one of the things that he and Zan always have had in common. “For another time.”

“Let’s make sure to have it.”

“Right,” he says, but both know they won’t, before it’s too late.

Afternoon passes and night falls. From outside, rising from the crescent circle of Cartwright Gardens are the sounds of people returning from work, students from school, diners in nearby restaurants. From the pub halfway down the block comes a roar of approval; someone has scored a goal or try. In the park across the street a couple argue, more and more audibly; the guy is losing. If time is a child’s game of telephone, now at the end of the line a simple melody hummed in someone’s ear long ago is a din beyond human pitch, the ashen silence that blots out every song, when light isn’t the norm of things but an aberration in the black. Trying to pull Sheba to her, Viv feels this calamitous silence pass over, the room enveloped by that momentous passage to which every life bears witness at some time and stands vigil, before it finally is itself borne witness to, and the subject of the vigil of others.

Zan, where did you go? Viv asks, staring out from a window several windows down from where Zan asked something like the same question of her. Where did you take my son? How did the determination to uncover and understand the bonds of this family lead to such a smashing of it? Is life a plate on which we’ve spooned so much that all it could do is crack?

Gently she tries to pull Sheba from the woman in the bed but the girl won’t have it. Sheba clutches Molly’s arm the way she used to clutch Viv’s in her sleep, runs her fingers along the profile of the dying woman’s face as she did Viv’s those first nights that Viv came to get her more than two years ago in Addis Ababa, “Tezeta” curling through the window. When the girl falls asleep on her feet and crumples to her knees, still she won’t be dislodged from her place.

Am I a ghost, wonders Molly in her delirium? She tosses and turns on the bed in a blur of reverie. If so, how long have I been one? Is it since Ethiopia? Is it since Berlin and my mother? When did the music turn so low? The stroke of a small girl’s hand is the only thing that tethers her to another world and keeps her from slipping away for good into this one.