These Dreams of You

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It’s a music of subterranean harmonics, half voice and half caw, and comes from some human source like Sheba’s music does, except it’s not coming from the journalist and certainly it’s not coming from me, thinks Viv, I never could carry a tune and there’s no one else to be seen. It comes from the room itself, the woman and the journalist at the very axis of the transmission as though they’re standing in one of the chambers of Sheba’s radio-heart, from a time before she was born.

Minutes later, or is it hours or days? rising from the white rock at the city’s center Viv brushes her head against a sagging sky the color of mauve. The blue eucalyptuses against the Entoto Hills have turned to glass, and in the sagging mauve sky a flock of flamingos bursts into flames. It reminds her of the time back home when the canyons were on fire, the inferno roaring toward the house; all around them the family could see the hazy hot red flare that circled the night. Viv and Zan packed up Parker and Sheba in the car along with the personal effects and valuables. It was shortly after Sheba came to Los Angeles — definitely it was after—and, two years old in her booster seat in the back, sucking her thumb, the girl wondered in her infant fashion how her life had come to this, on the other side of a world on fire. Viv remembers a talk that she and her husband once had: If ever there was a decision to be made for either mother or father to save each other or the children, they would save the children. It was the easiest thing they ever agreed on.

The firmament went up in flames that night and now rising from the white rock, at the center of one of the highest cities in the world, Viv reaches up and draws a blue line in the ash sky. She looks at the blue dust on her finger then looks up and knows with certainty that the woman in the photograph that she holds in her hand is buried there behind the sky’s soot. When Viv reaches up again and scoops out of the heavens a hole, the music roars up out of the hole in the white earth behind her and through the blue puncture she’s made, like air sucked out of a rocket in space.

No, Sheba’s father says the next day when Viv goes back to the family to show them the photograph. The aunt won’t look at it; the grandmother is near blind with cataracts. Sheba’s father takes the photo, and as Viv hands it over and the father’s hand stops briefly midair before taking it, she makes no effort to hide the intensity with which she studies his reaction. He doesn’t look straight at the photo but peers down as though his lids might hide whatever Viv can see in his eyes. After several seconds, maybe as many as five or seven or eight, he says, utterly impassive, “No.”