These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Flickers of conscience aside, lately the boy puts his fist through the thin walls of his room. No wonder, thinks Zan, his hand hurts all the time. “You have a right to get angry,” Viv rails at their son, “but you don’t have the right to destroy the walls!” though Zan wonders if Parker knows about the foreclosure and finds a certain justice in taking out his anger on the house. Zan and Viv buy for Parker a punching bag in the form of a man whom the boy names Alejandro.

More alarming have been Parker’s plots to escape. After one blow-up, Zan caught him trying to go through the two-story window: “You care more about Sheba than you do me!” the boy yelled at his father. “You’re better off without me!” and though Zan realized some of this was drama engendered by too much reality TV and internet posturing, Parker shook with a fury that wasn’t faked. One time he actually left. Forty minutes later he was back, but not soon enough to undo the trauma; and since then, every time Zan hears the slam of a door or finds a window agape, he wonders if his son has gone. Of course Zan and Viv don’t feel remotely ready for any of it. Zan still is recovering from his son casually using the word “orgasm” in conversation with his buddies in the back of the car on the way home from school.

He’s twelve. It’s part of his job description as a twelve-year-old to believe the modern age began the day he was born. To the extent that it was about anything to Parker, the recent election wasn’t about history, it wasn’t about politics, it was about one candidate being cool and the other one not; if there was a single kid in Parker’s school who was for the other guy, he or she kept quiet about it. Parker is the mindless embodiment of the oldest liberal cliché: Some of his best friends are black, particularly Thomas, the son of a black mother from the Bahamas and a white German body-builder who scandalized Parker’s school by showing up at a Halloween festival as an SS officer. Turning stereotypes on their heads, in the election the black born-again Christian mother voted for the white conservative and the white German with SS fantasies voted for the black liberal. “No more old men,” Thomas’ father scowled. Like any kid who instinctively understands he’s a resident of the future and already has his young eye on his true home in time, Parker is bored by the past, so it means nothing to Parker now that the city where they arrive the next evening, after spending a night in Paris and taking the long eleven-hour train, again and again has been at the crux of the past century.