These Dreams of You

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At the time that she takes it, the wandering journey from Marseilles to San Sebastian to Gibraltar to Algiers to Tripoli, she adamantly insists that in no way is it as though she’s pulled there. The only thing she knows for sure when she finally arrives in Addis Ababa, a young woman at the dawn of what the western world calls the Twenty-First Century but for which Ethiopia exhausted numbers long ago, is that the last thing she deserves, the thing she deserves least of all, is to be a mother.

Am I a ghost? she wonders in her descent, following — into its labyrinth of tunnels and bridges, lined by high walls covered with moss — all the narrow, winding stone steps of her new abysmal city. Am I in an abyss of time, or one of space? Living on the outskirts of the eucalyptopolis nine years later, lying in bed she hears one night coming through the music of mosques and thunderstorms rolling in overhead a song she not only knows but was born of, and then a distant male voice in a familiar language that’s not Amharic. Only after listening awhile does she acknowledge to herself that the transmission comes from her body. Not that it ever will really explain anything, she’s picking up a radio broadcast from ten thousand miles away— . . for what happened last night. . but then all the song says is that a change will come, not how fast, right?. . and the really old-school one about the lovers at the Berlin Wall. . who get to be heroes just for one day? That’s for my four-year-old Ethiopian daughter, who I guess can’t get enough of British extraterrestrials in dresses—and months later in London, with Sheba asleep next to her in the dark, she still hears it, almost, or convinces herself she does, in the same way she’s almost convinced herself she isn’t dying.

In the dark between London and Paris, Parker doesn’t like it when the train stops beneath the Channel. Reflexively he turns up his headphones, and his father in the seat across from him, who can make out the static of the robotic chooga-chooga from the music player around Parker’s neck, says, “What are you listening to?”