These Dreams of You

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Paying for one night upfront, she spends the next day at the Gare du Nord casing the crowd like a thief, sizing up its ebbs and flows, points of vulnerability. She thinks, I’ve become the vagabond rebel of my youth, who hopped trains on a whim. She spends a second night in the hotel, slips out in the morning without paying, spends the second day at the station; hungry to the edge of nausea, she rations out to herself juice and a single baguette. Having left her bag with her clothes in the cab that she fled two days before, she breaks down and buys a hairbrush and clean underwear.

From Addis to Khartoum to Orly to the Gare du Nord, she’s viewed every telephone — the broken ones on the walls, those on the other sides of windows, those that people gaze at in their palms as they walk along never looking up — with an unbearable longing, believing her family only a flurry of digits away. When she finds a public phone that works, she stares in dismay at the foreign instructions, terrified she’ll waste what money she has on a call that won’t go through. For as long as she can remember, she’s had a recurring nightmare in which she rushes from dead phone to dead phone trying to make a call; and now she’s in that nightmare. A couple of times she asks someone if she can borrow a phone and they just push past, glaring at her temerity if they understand at all.