These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Not even taking into account the time they’ve been stuck under the Channel on the Eurostar, the folly becomes more evident in Paris with the father and son’s arrival. Thirty minutes to not only change trains but stations? A vanity, Zan understands now, born of younger days and a sharper mind back when — long before Viv and children — he lived in Paris with crazy taxi-life Trotskyites and their aristocratic tastes, who thought, like Ronnie Jack Flowers in L.A., that all the proletariat should have Blaupunkt sound systems. That was when he could have been airlifted into Paris blindfolded and determined within five minutes exactly where he was.

Ascending the vertical Gare du Nord with its transparent tubular walkways, Zan and Parker take half an hour figuring out where to exit. I’m becoming, the father tells himself, a confused old fart. Turning toward the Gare de l’Est, he and his son dart through the twilight across the rue Dunkerque between cars, Parker a few feet behind Zan, when a taxicab, the driver apparently beyond the control of anything but unexplained fury billowing from the exhaust pipe, barrels toward the boy.

Zan grabs Parker’s hand so hard he can feel some small bone crunch. He remembers that this was the hand Parker broke the night he took the boy to the emergency room and then lost his car keys, railing about it afterward when his supernaturally wise daughter advised him from the backseat, “Poppy, let it go.” Zan yanks Parker from the path of the cab much like a young black female hand once yanked him from a surging crowd except that, given the difference in years between older man and younger boy, the force is exponential.

The cab flies into the back of a limousine. Dimly through the cab’s back window, the cab’s passenger flies into the seat in front, grabbing her head; then the cab backs up and, the gear first thrown into reverse then into drive, hits the limo again. Then it backs up and slams into the limo still again. “Are you all right?” Zan says to Parker, who nods in shock; the boy is too wide-eyed at the spectacle of the cab reversing and crashing into the same limo over and over to bother holding his throbbing hand. Everyone stops to look. Finally the cab’s passenger flees out the other side, leaving the back door open behind her. Later Zan realizes that in his own country, this scene wouldn’t be nearly as insane, or rather it would be insane in a distinctly familiar, new-world way.