~ ~ ~
Parker feels the future snatched back from him again. He feels like someone who’s been sentenced to a penal colony on another world, or like the astronaut he sees in science-fiction movies always floating in space, with that single fragile line the only thing that connects him to home, or something with the name of home — the line you know is bound to break.
The “bathroom,” the boy is mortified to observe, isn’t separate but part of the same single room where the beds are. “You can sleep in the tub,” Zan tries to joke about the large white porcelain bowl that is the room’s most prominent furniture. Parker glares at him. He refuses to take a bath. When he goes to the bathroom he insists on turning out the room’s light, sitting on the toilet and finally managing to pee by pretending his father doesn’t exist.
~ ~ ~
The next day, the two go to the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate, out on the Unter den Linden. To Parker, the massive boulevard is as wide as a river — and suddenly the idiocy of the entire journey becomes so evident that even a twelve-year-old can see it, maybe especially a twelve-year-old. The man and boy stand on the edge of the boulevard gazing across.
Zan says, “Come on,” and the two traipse from one corner of the Gate’s shadow to the other. Zan tries to calculate angles from which the photo posted by Viv online was taken. “But is this the way it looked in the picture,” Zan keeps muttering to no conceivable response from his son, “maybe over there?” and then they relocate themselves to another place.
~ ~ ~
This goes on for two hours. Afterward, with Parker in tow, Zan checks all the hotels in the area. They walk from one to the other, fumbling through English requests and German responses. Trying to ask himself why Viv would be in Berlin and what she would be doing here, Zan leads the boy to the Ethiopian embassy not far from the Gate, a relatively modest if distinguished two-story white house on Boothstrasse. From there they take the U-Bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof where they check the surrounding hotels. As darkness falls on a futile day, Parker concludes ruefully, My father is a moron.
~ ~ ~
I’m a moron, Zan groans to himself, stealing a glance at his son’s face. Beyond the inexorable compulsion to respond to the SOS of his wife’s online photo, the man accepts what he’s put off knowing until this moment, that nothing about the decision to come here has made sense — as though Viv walks the city waiting for her family to show up.
What do we do now? he wonders. Leave post-its on the Gate’s pillars? Viv, come home? Though the father barely can remember the ways in which twelve-year-old boys feel lonely, he remembers enough, and knows what the loneliness grows up into; and though he can’t be sure at which end on the scale of profundity is most profound the feeling of being lost and at loose ends — when you’re young, and closer to the beginning? or when you’re old and closer to the end — he knows the feelings are kin enough that no amount of resilience, seasoned or not, overcomes it. He’s wracked by the unstable existence to which his son has been delivered, when the guilt isn’t dislodged by how he’s abandoned his daughter back in London, in her little life of abandonments.
~ ~ ~
On the U-Bahn back to their neighborhood, sitting side by side, Parker stares out the window. “I want you to write down my cell number,” Zan says. Not turning from the window, after a moment Parker says, “Why?”
The father pulls from the boy’s coat pocket a blue marker. “Does this write?”
Parker takes off the top and slashes the marker down the back of his father’s hand, leaving a hostile blue streak. “It writes,” he snarls.
The father looks at his hand and the evidence of the boy’s assault. “O.K. So take down this number.”
~ ~ ~
Parker says, “I don’t have anything to write it on.”
“Write it on the palm of your hand,” says Zan, holding up his own hand.
“My hand still hurts. From when you crushed it,” Parker says.
The father takes a deep breath. “A taxi was about to run into you. Is it really going to hurt your hand to write on it?”
“Yes.”
“Write on your other hand.”
“Then I have to use the hand that hurts to write. Besides I’m right-handed,” though he has to stop and think, as he always does, which hand is right and which is left.
“I’ll write it.”
Parker says, “We don’t need to.”
Zan says, “Just in case.”
“In case what?”
“I don’t know. In case. . something. . ”
“What?”
“Something happens.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“We get separated or something.”
“Why would we get separated?” the boy’s voice rises.
“We won’t get separated,” the father assures him.
“Then I don’t need to write it,” Parker declares and turns back to the window.
~ ~ ~
Back in their neighborhood, they duck into a café called the CyberHansa. Zan doles out the euros, buying his son a roll and a coffee drink. “We can get online here?” he asks the woman behind the counter, but Parker already has pulled the laptop from his father’s bag and logged on. “Can you find the page with Mom’s posting?” says the father, trying to nurture a conspiratorial bond with the boy.
Parker is having none of it. “Of course,” he snaps.
The father watches his son, giving him the full rein of his twelve-year-old attitude at its most merciless. After a moment Parker pulls back from the laptop as if studying it, his brows arched. “What?” says Zan.
“It’s gone.”
Zan says, “Gone?”
“Mom’s photo,” says Parker.
“What do you mean gone?”
“I mean it’s gone.”
It’s taking a moment for Zan to fully absorb what his son is saying. “No, wait. Gone?”
“Zan,” Parker says evenly, “it’s gone.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means what gone means. It means it’s not there.”
~ ~ ~
Befuddled, Zan says, “But it was there.”
“Yeah,” Parker says. He adds, looking closer, “The weird thing is my comment is still. . ” He shrugs.
Zan has moved from his side of the table to Parker’s. He looks at the laptop. “What comment?”
“You told me to post a comment? To send Mom a message.” Parker points at the screen: Were r u. “Were are you?” Zan reads back. “What does that mean, Were are you?”
“Where are you,” corrects Parker.
“There’s an h in where. Then what happened to Mom’s photo?”
“Don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”