These Dreams of You

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She’s black, Zan decides once and for all, pushing the laptop away. Fuck whether I have the right to make her so. My imagination gives me the right. Hearing a Ray Charles record when I was Parker’s age may not mean I know anything but it means that I can imagine something I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise. It’s a little like what Descartes said about God, that the fact men can imagine a god proves there must be one.

Viv receives an email from the Ethiopian journalist she hired. Hello Viv, it reads, this is to inform you that I have at once uncovered a most tantalizing lead and also confronted an unexpected obstacle in our search for Zema’s mother. Since we believe she was Muslim it narrows my investigation to suggest one of two different women, the first with family heritage in Oromia to the south and the other with no family in Ethiopia and who in fact may have grown up not in this country but somewhere in Eastern Europe and then immigrated. Of course few people who I meet are very willing to talk and the closer I come to answers then the more silent that people become but I persist and press on and hope to have more news soon.