These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Seeing his father’s lips move, Parker pulls the headphones from his ears. “What?” the boy says.

“What are you listening to?” says Zan.

“Why?” says the boy.

“I was just wondering,” Zan answers quietly. Parker remembers his dad taking him and his sister to that creepy underground bunker in London, and at the bottom the elevator doors opened to mannequins in cots; it was creepy, it creeped him out. It didn’t matter that the bunker turned out not to be underground at all, it didn’t matter if the whole thing was fake — it was creepy and now here on this train stopped in the dark, stuck under the flippin’ ocean or wherever they are, Parker thinks it’s like the bunker except worse. He looks around at the other passengers in the dim light and sees the dummies that he saw in the bunker. He sees one when he looks at his dad in the seat across from him; everyone on the train looks inanimate and stuffed, and Parker wants out and off. But he knows there’s no getting out and off until the train moves and surfaces on the other side, wherever that is.

Zan feels his son slipping away. He’s become aware of it since London, since Sheba disappeared, maybe since Viv disappeared, maybe before that. He says to Parker, “But when you like a certain song. . ”

“What?” Parker shouts again with great exasperation, not bothering to remove the headphones this time. His father’s mouth keeps moving and finally the boy turns off the music player around his neck. “What. . ”

The father shrugs. “. . because it’s catchy or—” and Parker snaps, “A lot of annoying songs are catchy.” At this point, Zan thinks, I should understand that music is about teen tribalism. At his son’s age, musical taste is an act of revolution. Zan doesn’t particularly like music that’s political; the song he played the morning after the election—but then all the song says is that a change will come, not how fast, right? — only is political because it plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession. Yet Zan learned long ago from his teacher at the university who once was Trotsky’s bodyguard and Billie Holiday’s lover that music which isn’t at least politically aware has nothing to say about anything, and that political people who are unmoved by music — whether it be rock and roll or Broadway tunes — aren’t to be trusted.

In any case music isn’t something over which a healthy twelve-year-old bonds with his father. Between a twelve-year-old and his father, music is the line in the sand. Out of those politics is born taste. Taste gets better but, Zan hopes, not perfect. When your taste is perfect, it’s not yours.