~ ~ ~
When he hears himself whisper his son’s name again, he opens his eyes with no idea how long he’s been out. His head pounds and the rest of him throbs.
He tries to rise and almost makes it up onto one leg but collapses. He lies in the street another minute looking at the fog above. “Parker?”
~ ~ ~
He turns to look at the sidewalk and in the dark sees a girl younger than Sheba standing there watching him, being pulled away by a mother who assumes he’s a derelict in a stupor.
He makes himself roll over and again gets up on his hands and knees. His face is dried and caked into a mess of tears and blood, and as he reaches up to wipe his eyes clear, he sees the blue streak that Parker made there earlier tonight when he slashed Zan’s hand with the marker.
~ ~ ~
Of course Zan doesn’t have his cell anymore, his muggers having taken it. Horror wells up in him at the thought that Parker might call and its new owners might answer, but then he remembers with relief that, in defiance, Parker refused to write down the number. The man wipes his eyes again and gets on his feet, holding his hand up to a streetlight and looking hard at it; and the simple streak of blue confirms for Zan the reality of having a son who made that mark.
When he wipes his hand against his face, the streak smears like a real mark would, unless he’s hallucinating that as well. But Zan decides that he won’t allow himself to believe this; he decides that whatever faith he has left, he’ll summon for the sake of believing in the mark on his hand and thereby his life.
~ ~ ~
He gets back to the inn and totters up the stairs inside. At the door of the room he’s looking for his key and, not finding it, wonders whether it was taken with his phone. As it occurs to him that maybe he rushed from the room without the key and should check whether the door is locked, it opens from the other side.
The boy stares at his father. “What happened?” he says in the smallest voice his father has heard from him since the time the car crashed in an oil slick on the canyon boulevard. Zan grabs his son and pulls him close; Parker crumples into his father’s chest. “What happened,” he murmurs again in his father’s shirt.
“I’m O.K.,” Zan says, “please, please don’t leave again.”
“I won’t. I’m sorry. Are you O.K.?”
“I am.” He might have a cracked rib. “Looks worse than it is.”
“I’m sorry,” Parker says again.
“No,” the father whispers, “I made a mistake. Mom wouldn’t have wanted us to leave Sheba.” He says, “We have to go back and find her.”
“O.K.”
~ ~ ~
Somewhere three young Germans tally up the night’s bounty, enormously disgruntled. The cell phone they took from the foreigner is the only thing of any value and its charge is nearly dead, and of course stolen cells are good for an hour or two at most before they get reported and turned off. One of the three men is staring at the cell when it rings. He hits the receive button and holds the cell to his ear.
“Zan,” comes a woman’s voice. The three look at each other. “Zan, it’s me.” Now disgusted with how poorly the night has gone, the man curses into the cell and hurls it through the air, the words “Zan? It’s Viv, where are you?” forming an arc in the night before the phone smashes against the stone stubble of what used to be the Wall.
But what, Viv asks herself five days ago, would a room at the beginning of time sound like?
Looking back over her shoulder from where they’ve come, Viv says to her driver, “No, this isn’t right,” when he takes her deep into the heart of Addis Ababa, leading her by foot down the winding stone steps into the labyrinth of tunnels and bridges lined by the high walls covered with moss. Figures in white gauze dart from the shadows in a collision of pedestrian alleys, still smelling of the mustard gas with which Mussolini massacred a million Ethiopians seventy years ago. There bubbles up out of the earth three thousand radiant millennia; overhead, a sirocco blows in from the moon.
~ ~ ~
What would a room at the beginning of time sound like? she wonders back at the hotel later that night — or is it morning? sometime, night or morning, after returning from the center of the capital’s ancient quarter where the driver took her, when Viv looks at a western calendar rather than an Ethiopian one and realizes the date is a week later than she thought. Could I have lost track of time that much? she asks, standing on her hotel balcony, looking at a photograph in her hand as though it has an answer, when all it has is the face of a young woman who is dead.
~ ~ ~
In the labyrinth, when she says to the driver, “No, this isn’t right,” he turns and answers, Please. I can take you back to the car if you wish, he says, but if I do, you’ll never find what you’re looking for.
At the center of the quarter, in white rock that’s part wall and part ground, is an entrance at an angle that’s part door and part hole, and as it begins to rain, Viv steps down and in, ducking slightly though she’s only a little over five feet tall. She passes through a cloud bled of light into a room or cavern just a bit less dark, as her eyes adjust to the stub of a single burning candle on the other side where she sees the young journalist whom she hired to find Sheba’s mother. He rises from where he’s sitting on the rock.
~ ~ ~
He says, “Hello, Viv,” and extends his hand. She says, “Are you hiding?” but he seems sanguine, almost good-natured about it. “Yes,” he says, “for a while.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe it will not be so bad, maybe I will be able to leave the city at night.”
Upset, Viv says, “I’m sorry that I got you in this much trouble.”
“But you do not make the trouble,” the journalist assures her, “others make it. You asked a question that you have a right to answer.”
“My daughter someday will want to know who her mother is.”
“Of course,” he answers.
“She’ll hate me if I haven’t tried to find out.” She begins to cry and stops herself.
“Everyone who loves your daughter understands this.”
~ ~ ~
Viv says, “I’m not so sure.”
“I have news,” he says. “In a way it’s bad news and in another way. . ”