These Dreams of You

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Not long ago, Parker asked to trade his larger room in the house for a smaller one with no bathroom attached — which is to say a room that no one else in the family ever has reason to enter. The boy now is at an age when he happily barters twice the space for a door he can shut to the rest of the world. Lying in bed in the dark, Viv uttered to Zan four words that portended doom as surely as We are at war or All hope is lost: “He’s becoming a teenager,” and the father shuddered.

Parker with his otherworldly beauty that always bewildered his parents, soon to kamikaze into acne and wet dreams as well as a newfound status — that Zan never could have imagined when he was Parker’s age — as the class heartthrob. Possessed of a new vanity so surreal and implacable that the boy views the speed bumps on the canyon boulevard as put there solely for the purpose of disrupting his immaculately positioned hair. Parker the stoic with his monk’s smile, allowing of course for the melodrama of a budding artist who already makes his own movies on Zan’s laptop as well as writing and drawing Shrimpy Comix, about a mutant, or maybe just odd, crustacean. Of course all this is interspersed with adolescent tantrums, but also the occasional moment when Viv catches their son reading to his sister Shrimpy #3, hot off the press, as the girl curls in the crook of the boy’s arm listening.

In the car on Pacific Coast Highway, Parker said, “If they have a huge earthquake in Tokyo, would the wave roll all the way across the ocean here?” He’s never been to Tokyo but is fascinated by the idea of it, an animé city.