These Dreams of You

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Zan is overwhelmed by people vanishing. He’s angry at himself for not having bought Molly a cheap, temporary cell phone even though he doesn’t have the money. Everything now tumbles into the realm of scenarios that make no sense; in the clamor of Bloomsbury, he’s having a hard time focusing or thinking clearly. He convinces himself of increasingly unlikely outcomes. When there’s no sign of Sheba and Molly in the hotel lobby, he asks Parker, “Did I give Molly the key?” and sensing in his father a looming panic, the boy doesn’t answer.

Standing in the small hotel room gazing around them, as though within its few square meters the girl and woman could possibly be undetected, with revulsion Zan realizes that he struggles for composure, realizes that in front of his twelve-year-old son he’s on the edge of breaking down from everything, Viv gone, no money, no prospects and now his missing daughter. As the evening passes, Zan waits for a knock at the door as sudden and without warning as the first time Molly appeared and Sheba answered, staring up at her in a silence that for the small girl was as uncommon then as it seems foreboding now.