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Authors: Steve Erickson

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BOOK: These Dreams of You
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S
o the first time that the shy little orphan girl emits more volume per capita than any single body Zan has heard, it's like a boombox in a confessional. Planting her small feet in the middle of the house, Sheba rears back and roars whims and needs, complaints and demands. She engages Zan, Viv and Parker in discourse about everything under the sun.

Early on, Zan assumes this is Sheba's bountiful curiosity, the expressions of a turbo-wonderment. She sweeps through the house picking up everything within reach and turning things on and off, pushing every button of every machine, appliance and device until all are rendered digitally senseless. This drives Zan to distraction, maybe because it feels a little too representative of the way everything else about their lives is falling apart. “Lighten up,” Viv advises, until she finds her new digital camera has been similarly sabotaged, summing up perfectly the way her photography career has flatlined as well.

S
oon Zan realizes that, for the four-year-old, the substance of communication is beside the point. “It's like she's afraid,” Viv says, “that with the first break in a connection, everything and everyone around her will vanish.” Sheba kneads her fingers into Viv's body like a kitten, expanding and contracting its claws. She presses herself into her mother as though to meld herself physically.

Before Sheba came home from Ethiopia, Zan and Viv worried that the shy little orphan girl would be traumatized by the family dog Piranha, a demented mix of jack terrier and chihuahua called a jackahuahua. Named as a puppy by Parker, Piranha so terrorizes the neighborhood—attacking other dogs, chasing neighbors' cars, holding UPS men hostage on their trucks—that an electric fence has been installed around the yard and the dog has been fitted with an electric collar, this in spite of Zan's doubts that Piranha can be restrained by any mere voltage once used to execute Soviet spies. “He's a sociopath,” Zan scoffs to Viv, “an electric fence? That dog?” pointing at the animal. Piranha's head jerks up expectantly; he's practically vibrating. “Sniper fire wouldn't stop this dog.”

“Aren't all animals sociopaths?” says Viv.

“Maybe I mean psychopath.”

“Is there a difference?”

“I think one doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, and the other knows but doesn't care.”

“Which is Piranha?”

“Which is Piranha?
His name is Piranha
. Oh, he knows.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Viv says. “Piranha fish know it's wrong to eat people?”

“He knows,” Zan assures her, “and he doesn't care.” When Viv left for Africa to go get Sheba, figuring out what to do about Piranha was one of Zan's tasks back home. The canyon's local dog expert, mistress of all breeds and their mutations, told him flatly, “You're going to have to get rid of that dog—he'll terrorize the poor child.” From Ethiopia, Viv wrote in an email,
She's so sweet I'm afraid the dog will terrify her.

P
iranha never knew what hit him. Throttled by the small girl within half an hour of her arrival until his eyes bulged, the animal soon was darting shell-shocked from one hiding place of the house to the next. Only when he was hopping up and down the stairs like shrimp on a grill, as if trying to get out of his own fur, did Parker figure out that Sheba had pushed the button on the wall-unit that controlled Piranha's electric collar. Originally set at four, the monitor now was at nine, the dog zapped silly from one end of the house to the other.

S
oon Sheba and Piranha struck an accord. Now Sheba howls out on the deck and the dog howls with her, the two craning their necks and turning their mouths skyward.

Of course Sheba's name isn't really Sheba. “Should we really be calling her that?” says Viv.

“As in queen of,” says Zan.

“Yes, I know who the Queen of Sheba was,” says Viv, “that's not my point.”

“I was only explaining it to Parker,” says Zan, though at this moment Parker listens on his headphones to the small fluorescent-green music player barely bigger than a stick of gum that hangs around his neck.

Viv says, “But still.” On the birth certificate that came with the adoption, Sheba's name is shown as Zema, which in Amharic means . . . well, Zan and Viv aren't precisely sure what it means. The closest variation means “melody” or “hymn,” but from what Zan understands, Ethiopian names only derive meaning from adjoining names, like tarot cards derive meaning from the surrounding cards. Only by putting all of a person's names together do you complete the meaning.

Z
an never has been to Ethiopia but somehow this thing with the names seems typical of everything he knows about it. Ethiopia has an extra month of the year and, as best Zan can understand, its own clock, falling half an hour between the time zones of the world.

It isn't so much that Ethiopia invented its own time zone but that its zone is the original time, the temporal referent against which all other zones have contrived themselves. Within weeks of coming to L.A., Sheba has mastered English but, after more than a year, notions of time remain elusive. She has no comprehension of time's terminology. “We'll go to the park tomorrow,” Zan says.

“O.K.,” says Sheba, and minutes later still waits. “Poppy, let's go!” she says.

“Where?”

“THE PARK!”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she nods, and a minute later, “Are we going? WHY AREN'T WE GOING!” Even as she grasps other subtleties, she continues to be confounded by distinctions among weeks, days, hours, minutes. She believes her birthday both precedes and follows whatever day she occupies—not wrong, of course, technically speaking—appropriate for a child of civilization's ground zero, the land where God placed Adam and Eve, the burial place of the oldest human fossil. “We are all Ethiopians,” Viv likes to say.

To the family, Sheba's emotional need seems like a dark well that falls to time's center. It sets in motion dynamics compounded by Sheba's singular measure of things. “He's number one!” she protests, pointing at Parker, “I'm number three,” and Zan can't be sure if this is errant math, Ethiopia's own system of measurement like its own calibration of time, or whatever manipulation knows to leave out two.

F
rom the beginning Sheba has had an affinity for music. Because this is so much the stuff of racial cliché, Zan barely can tell people about the more earthbound aspects–the girl running for a piano like other kids to a scooter, warbling cheerfully in the yard of the orphanage back in Addis Ababa to the lightning in the sky–let alone that the girl's small body literally hums with song.

Within a week of Sheba's arrival, the family noticed it at the dinner table when everyone heard from her, barely audible, a distant music. “Sheba, we don't sing at the table,” Viv gently tried to admonish her, until one day the mother is driving in Hollywood with Sheba in the backseat and picks up Zan's broadcast from the canyon that usually she can't get half a mile from the station. The girl transmits on Sheba frequency. Zan calls her Radio Ethiopia.

U
p until around the time of Sheba's adoption, Zan taught popular culture and Twentieth Century literature at a local college. The popular-culture course began with the year 1954, because that was when a white nineteen-year-old truck driver wandered into a Memphis recording studio—only weeks after the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional—and instinctively, unconsciously miscegenated, in the language of the time, white and black music. Caught up in the sweep of a story, by the end of every semester the students invariably shed their old-school/new-school distinctions to afford Zan an ovation. It's the closest he's come to telling an epic; he doubts he's told a story better, certainly not any of his own.

The rest of the teachers in the department were childless and, as certainly was the case with Zan before he had children, there was little comprehension of the infinite variables that children bring, the way that children lay waste to rational odds, how one always has to err on the side of the long shot. Someone who doesn't have children may grasp the volume of time they take up but can't understand the way children won't be compartmentalized, the way children can't be consigned to their own rooms in the city of one's life. Children are the moat that surrounds the city, the canals that run throughout. They get everything wet.

A
fter the faculty meetings were changed to a day and time when Zan had to pick up kids from school, his resulting failure to attend brought down on him admonitions concerning language in his contract. Matters reached critical mass the afternoon that Zan left Parker waiting two hours so the faculty could debate whether a bartender should be hired at thesis readings. Not prone to explosions, Zan exploded anyway and walked out. “Some of us,” was the last thing he heard one of the teachers say, “liked the department better before he came.”

The suspension of Zan's contract began the Nordhocs' recession fifteen months before the rest of the country's, or before the rest of the country knew theirs had begun too. A series of media and entertainment-industry strikes sidelined Viv's career as a photographer snapping pictures locally for alternative weekly newspapers, sometimes nationally for entertainment magazines, of politicians and singers including not only the new president several years before his election but, some two decades past his prime, the redhaired glam-rocker whose music Sheba loves and Viv loved as well in her youth (distinctly marking her as an oddball among the teenage tribes of the Midwest). “Was his hair red?” Sheba asks, on raptly hearing the account of this photoshoot from her mother.

“Not as red as it used to be,” says Viv.

“Was he nice?”

“He was very nice,” Viv assures the girl, “one of the nicest, actually. Very charming, gracious.”

“He said grace?” The girl is dumbfounded. Often Sheba likes to say grace at dinner—just to get attention, her brother is convinced. God's, at least, if nobody else's.

V
iv's photography career has never recovered. The family's income plummeted as Sheba arrived with new realities of $3,000 dental work, for which health insurance reimbursed $700. Viv and Zan have kept themselves afloat on credit cards in order to make the payments on their eccentric house; then the monthly mortgage went from $2,800 to $6,000 as the house's value fell by a third.

It's the perfect shitstorm of bad financial turns. Soon the front page of the newspaper and its running daily accounts of a nation imploding with debt and foreclosures read like the Nordhocs' personal diary. Zan filed with the bank an application to rewrite the home loan, which was turned down because the family was current in its payments; a second application was turned down a week before the bank was taken over by another bank. The Nordhocs fell behind in the payments, offering partial sums that they subsequently learned weren't applied to the balance on the house but rather put in a separate escrow so the bank could continue to charge delinquency fees and push the family toward foreclosure. A third application was turned down as being “incomplete,” though over the course of five months and many phone calls no one from the bank ever said the application was amiss; Zan filed a fourth application that was approved—at a monthly payment of $6,500. No one at the bank could or would explain how this figure was arrived at or why the bank offered a payment that was more than what led the Nordhocs to file the application in the first place.

N
ow Zan and Viv are many months delinquent on the house, which has been scheduled for foreclosure twice only to receive stays of execution at the last moment. Their debt to credit card companies has reached a level Zan doesn't want to know. “We don't know how much we owe?” Viv whispers so the kids won't hear.

“We do know,” says Zan. “A lot.”

“But shouldn't we figure it out exactly?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Zan says, “I need to be able to get out of bed in the morning. Because quantifying it with more precision won't make it any less or any easier to deal with. Because sometimes you need a little denial in order to function.” In his head Zan figures it's about $135,000. Various credit accounts have been closed or canceled or their limits strategically have been lowered to less than the balance. Wall Street hounds the Nordhocs ceaselessly, phoning hourly; if Zan scrounges up a grand on a $1,200 bill, the lender relentlessly pursues the outstanding $200 dawn till midnight. New bankruptcy laws are a Rube Goldberg contraption, disqualifying the family for owing too much or too little, for earning too little or too much. Zan's conversation with an attorney about the situation is the financial equivalent of being told by a doctor he's terminal.

O
ver the course of all the mortgage applications to the bank, Zan has made countless phone calls, copied countless documents, made personal appearances at the lender's local branch to plead the case. He has consulted three government agencies and eight lawyers, several of whom he's paid hundreds of dollars for expertise that proved something less than Zan's. Those not crooked enough to provide useless advice confessed they were too confused to provide any advice at all.

In the ten years since they bought it, Zan and Viv came to love the house more than either might have imagined, particularly after virtually rebuilding it from the ground up. Looking out on a canyon vista, the house is an ark of CDs and books, Viv's photos and butterfly collection and her art that's become a nexus of the two, all ready to float away on the tsunami that their twelve-year-old son expects to see advancing through the canyon from the sea.

Zan admonishes himself that pending displacement is the inevitable fate of those who invest in any place too much. He knows that one day soon the house will reappear on the bank's radar, a new Notice of Sale giving Zan, Viv, Parker and Sheba three weeks before they're homeless. The parents try to keep it from the children but Zan is certain that Parker, not only a smart but intuitive kid, knows something is wrong. “Promise me,” the boy says one day in the car, “that we're not going to move,” and Zan chokes, “I promise,” and ponders the expiration date of lies to children.

Finances weigh down everything. At least twice a day Zan goes online with a knot in his gut to check evaporating bank balances and a loan-processing website that lists which houses have had new foreclosure dates posted.

He believes it's killing him. It coincides with the hackneyed gloom of autumnal years, the astonished pall at the great approaching wind-down; it never occurred to him that life would get harder rather than easier. He travels in a movable depression with headaches that never end, locating themselves around one eye like a vise when he wakes in the morning and goes to bed at the end of the day and wakes again the next morning. Gobbling imitrex nightly for the migraines and diovan daily for blood pressure, he believes that if by some miracle he and Viv should extricate themselves from these circumstances, within months, weeks, maybe days or moments some fatal illness will manifest itself—because at the same time he believes that their money crisis is killing him, he's also convinced that fate is a trickster. At the same time that it's killing him, the constant war for economic survival also is the thing keeping some other doom at bay. Fate waits for the most delicious moment to play its ultimate trick, in some unlikely future when everything finally is all right.

BOOK: These Dreams of You
8.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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