These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Not knowing where the shots are fired or exactly where they come from, the newscaster audibly trembles. Some semblance of professionalism in his voice struggles to keep catastrophe at bay.

Zan gets out of his dorm bed and pulls on some clothes and goes into the room next door where other guys who live on the same floor play cards. Without asking, he turns on his neighbor’s small black-and-white television and there’s the young black woman in the tumult, none of the fear in her eyes that Zan saw that afternoon weeks ago but rather now a dead release. “What’s going on?” one of the guys says looking up from his hand of cards, and Zan says, “Something’s happened.”

Forty years later, the original exhilaration felt by the country that greeted the new president on his election is supplanted by an opposite hysteria for which Zan can only wonder if the first hysteria is in some measure responsible. On the express Eurostar that pulls out of London’s St. Pancras station off King’s Cross and hurtles beneath the Channel toward Brussels and Paris, while his son, wreathed by a rare quiet, stares out the train window at the Chunnel walls, Zan reads newspapers scooped up beneath the skylights of the station arcade and, from the dispassionate vantage point of foreign shores, realizes that his country has lost its mind.