These Dreams of You

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Somewhere three young Germans tally up the night’s bounty, enormously disgruntled. The cell phone they took from the foreigner is the only thing of any value and its charge is nearly dead, and of course stolen cells are good for an hour or two at most before they get reported and turned off. One of the three men is staring at the cell when it rings. He hits the receive button and holds the cell to his ear.

“Zan,” comes a woman’s voice. The three look at each other. “Zan, it’s me.” Now disgusted with how poorly the night has gone, the man curses into the cell and hurls it through the air, the words “Zan? It’s Viv, where are you?” forming an arc in the night before the phone smashes against the stone stubble of what used to be the Wall.

But what, Viv asks herself five days ago, would a room at the beginning of time sound like?

Looking back over her shoulder from where they’ve come, Viv says to her driver, “No, this isn’t right,” when he takes her deep into the heart of Addis Ababa, leading her by foot down the winding stone steps into the labyrinth of tunnels and bridges lined by the high walls covered with moss. Figures in white gauze dart from the shadows in a collision of pedestrian alleys, still smelling of the mustard gas with which Mussolini massacred a million Ethiopians seventy years ago. There bubbles up out of the earth three thousand radiant millennia; overhead, a sirocco blows in from the moon.