These Dreams of You

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Every week Jorge returns to the house and retrieves the traps with the snapped carcasses of rodents, about which he talks with a tenderness born of an executioner’s familiarity.

To Zan he describes the animals’ habits and patterns intimately, lowering his voice — so the children won’t hear — on the grislier details such as the rats cannibalizing each other. Several weeks and half a dozen dead rats later, the family still can hear them, with Piranha particularly agitated, periodically ransacking the house at the rodents’ sound and scent. “He doesn’t have trouble cornering FedEx drivers,” Zan notes. “But a rat he can’t catch.”

“A FedEx driver is bigger than a rat,” Parker defends his dog. “The FedEx driver isn’t hiding in the vent.”

Zan broadcasts his radio show from a station located behind the local Mexican eatery called the Añejo. This is up the road from an old abandoned railway car that was turned into a bridge and crosses a creek that rises with the winter and vanishes in the hot summer. For a man given to silences, he’s loquacious on his broadcast. “You say more on the radio in five minutes,” Viv points out, “than you do in a week off it.”

“That’s because,” Zan explains, “on the radio no one interrupts you. It’s the closest to writing that talking gets.” Still he concedes that a life on the airwaves isn’t something most people would have foreseen for him. “This is Radio Zed,” he intones, “as in the numerical designation of the decade we live in, broadcasting to all corners of the canyon and, who knows, maybe beyond. We opened today’s show with Augustus Pablo’s ‘Chant to King Selassie,’ followed by ‘Tezeta’—which means ‘memory’—by the Duke Ellington of Ethiojazz, Mulatu Astatke, then Delroy Wilson’s ‘This Life Makes Me Wonder.’ Polly Jean Harvey’s ‘The Wind’ was in honor of the coming Santa Anas that strike terror in all our canyon hearts during fire season, and the song by Van Morrison about Ray Charles, who ‘was shot down but got up to do his best,’ was followed by the Genius himself with ‘Busted,’ in honor of our bank statement. We ended with ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car,’ back from the days when my daughter’s favorite rock star was hanging in Berlin. As usual, that one’s for Sheba,” says Zan, “but also in honor of the time Parker and I hit an oil slick on the way to school and spun out on the boulevard half a mile from here — which is to say almost within the sound of my voice.”