These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Alexander’s four-year-old daughter Sheba, adopted nineteen months before from an orphanage in Ethiopia, sits on his lap. Sheba is the color of the man on the television, in whose form the country now has imagined its most unfathomable possibility. Alexander, who goes by Zan, is the color of everyone else in the family, including his wife Viv and his son Parker, whose twelfth birthday happens to also be on this day.

With the announcement of the man’s election, bedlam consumes the living room. “He won!” Parker explodes, leaping from the couch over a low white formica table that’s in the shape of a cloud. “He won! he won! he won!” he keeps shouting, and Viv cheers too. “Zan,” Parker stops, baffled by his father’s stupefaction, “he won.” He says, “Aren’t you happy?”

On the television is the image of an anonymous young black woman who, in the grass of the park, has fallen to her knees and holds her face in her hands. Do I have the right, Zan wonders, as a middle-aged white man, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks, No. And holds his face in his hands anyway, silently mortified that he might do something so trite as sob.