These Dreams of You

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I’m a moron, Zan groans to himself, stealing a glance at his son’s face. Beyond the inexorable compulsion to respond to the SOS of his wife’s online photo, the man accepts what he’s put off knowing until this moment, that nothing about the decision to come here has made sense — as though Viv walks the city waiting for her family to show up.

What do we do now? he wonders. Leave post-its on the Gate’s pillars? Viv, come home? Though the father barely can remember the ways in which twelve-year-old boys feel lonely, he remembers enough, and knows what the loneliness grows up into; and though he can’t be sure at which end on the scale of profundity is most profound the feeling of being lost and at loose ends — when you’re young, and closer to the beginning? or when you’re old and closer to the end — he knows the feelings are kin enough that no amount of resilience, seasoned or not, overcomes it. He’s wracked by the unstable existence to which his son has been delivered, when the guilt isn’t dislodged by how he’s abandoned his daughter back in London, in her little life of abandonments.