These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Zan 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.