These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Brown says, “Off to Africa, then, is she?” watching Sheba and appearing to become even more nervous than her father.

“It’s complicated. I. . ” Zan glances at the girl, “. . should explain another time.”

“Right,” says Brown. “But I trust she’ll be back before the lecture next week.” Discernible in his eyes are images of Sheba amok on the university grounds.

“I hope so, for all kinds of reasons. Mainly I’m worried about her.”

“Viv always was resilient,” Brown shrugs.

He’s trying to be reassuring but Zan doesn’t need any reminder of how well Brown knows Viv or whatever way it is he thinks he knows her. “She gets lost,” Zan says, “she has no sense of direction.”

“Mount Kilimanjaro and all that, as I remember.”

“Mount Kilimanjaro is up,” Zan points out, “that direction she’s mastered. Most people would have taken the Mount Kilimanjaro experience as a warning, given that she missed the only flight out that week. Viv took it as a lifetime Get Out of Insane Situations Free card. Except when she’s being a mom and worrying the kids are going to drink the Drano. Listen, James,” Zan announces somberly, “here it is in a nutshell: I’m the family’s sanest person. Do you understand? Can you wrap your head around the implications of that? Can you envision the. . the. . state of general derangement this portends? I’m the most stable member of the family. That’s like Ahab being the captain of a Carnival Cruise line. Sheer dementedness increases in direct proportion to the decrease in physical size, until you wind up with the world’s worst dog, who finally breached an electric fence for the sheer thrill of it, like someone tasering himself.”