These Dreams of You

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But Zoo Station, where once Zan came into Berlin fourteen years before, right after the fall of the Wall, has given up to the new Hauptbahnhof its gateway to the rest of the world. As their train approaches over water — the surrounding lakes overrunning their shores in the rain to form a moat — the sight of the new trainport, emblazoned on the outside with neon stars, and the windowless future-city of globes, with its panoramas of graffiti and passages in the sky mirroring the hundreds built underground half a modern era go, perk Parker up for a moment.

In the Hauptbahnhof, Zan stares at the U-Bahn map in mute and utter confusion. He never understood the city the first time he was here; it had a hole in the middle, and Zan has learned from Los Angeles that it takes a lifetime to navigate such cities. He leads Parker to several hotels off the Kurfürstendamm, with its dark clotted shadows of the trees that line it and the display windows of the shops that shine like gold boxes. At every front desk Zan asks if by some chance someone with Viv’s name or description is checked in, and then asks for a room, always concluding to his son, “We’re not staying here.” One hotel, he explains to Parker, “has no WiFi.” Another “has no room-service.”

At midnight, when they check into an inn at the southern end of the Wall where an old recording studio used to be, Parker looks at the room and then his father in disbelief. It’s bare, cold, damp; there drifts through the window languages unlike any the boy has heard. The tiny television has something Parker has never seen: antennae, which makes it look like a monstrous bug. “Here?” Parker howls in disbelief. “They don’t have WiFi! They don’t have room service!”

Zan returns his son’s livid gaze in crestfallen silence.

“This is horrible,” says Parker. “The other hotels at least spoke English.”