These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  The phone calls from debt-collection agencies grow more frequent. Every now and then someone can be seen through the kitchen window prowling around the property line, furtive and stealthy, sent by the bank to determine if anyone still lives in the house. Again Zan writes to the home lender formally requesting a review of the last mortgage application. The house’s fate is suspended in some national economic ether; with not a bit of the romance that the word implies, the Nordhocs are outlaws, squatters in their own home.

  Zan keeps the kids out of school to watch on television the inauguration of the new president. There’s nothing like missing school to make Parker civic-minded. Zan resolves not to be so boring as to hector his children that this, after all, is history. On the television, the president raises one hand and places the other on the Bible. Zan blurts, “This is history.”

  Zan receives an invitation from the University of London to lecture on the Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obso­­lescence in the Twenty-First Century. While Zan finds giving or hearing such a lecture too odious to contemplate, the £3,500 that the university offers lends itself to contemplation. At the radio station he reads the letter again.

  Dear Alexander Nordhoc, it says, we really really do think you’re a writer. Actually the invitation doesn’t say that. When Viv and the kids come by, Zan shows it to her. “I’d do it,” he tells her, “if they invited me to talk about music.”

  “What do you mean you would do it if?” says Viv. “It’s a trip to London.”

  “They don’t understand,” Zan explains, shaking the letter at her, “that I haven’t taught in two years, or been a novelist in fourteen . . . ”

  “You’re always a novelist, you’ve written four novels. That makes you a novelist.”

  “The last was fourteen years ago.”

  “The last was written fourteen years ago. But it may have been read by someone, you know,” she shrugs, “fourteen days ago.”

  “It’s from James,” Zan points at the invitation.

  Viv sighs, “I noticed.”

  Who knows what that sigh means? Wistful, regretful, oh-please-let’s-not weary? “You sighed,” he says.

  “Uh,” says Viv.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  She shrugs.

  “Wistful? Regretful.”

  “More,” she says, “oh-please-let’s-not weary.”

  “I was getting to that one,” says Zan. “James” is J. Willkie Brown, as his byline reads, chosen presumably because he doesn’t want to be mistaken for the Godfather of Soul or, if he even were to consider the more vulgar “Jim,” star football players who used to beat up their women, in more innocent times before star football players murdered them—as if either point of confusion is likely, given that J. Willkie Brown is a Brit of distinctly Anglo complexion.

  He also is a former lover of Viv’s, from a brief affair that happened during Zan’s first and only real separation from her, sixteen months before Parker was born. That was the Nineties when Brown still was a British expat in L.A. about to abandon music journalism once and for all, given that he hadn’t understood anything about music since 1987 and therefore it couldn’t possibly be worth writing about anymore.

  Since both Zan and Viv have agreed that their separation was more Zan’s fault, he’s bothered less by jealousy over the affair than what a wrong turn it represents for Viv, the other man having gone on to great fame and success and presumably not being $135,000 in debt and foreclosed on. Following his music reportage in the Seventies and Eighties, Brown increasingly spent the last quarter century writing about politics from a more and more radical perspective while also cultivating a persona at once elegant and swashbuckling, embedding himself with insurgents and revolutionaries from Berlin to Istanbul to Karachi. His celebrity is such that the University of London has created the J. Willkie Brown Chair, occupied at the moment by J. Willkie himself.

  Zan’s single triumph over Brown is that, in time-honored journalistic tradition, the world-famous journalist always longed to write a novel. While Zan knows how dubious this is, he’s not telling; it’s the only thing about Zan that there is for Brown to envy, and that now Brown invites him to lecture about the state of the novel is irresistible, even if Zan can’t help smelling a trap. “I smell a trap,” he says to Viv.

  “What are you talking about?” she says.

  “The novel as a literary form facing obsolescence?” James’ way of telling me how washed up I am, Zan thinks to himself.

  “It’s a trip to London,” says Viv, “it’s thirty-five hundred pounds. What’s a pound worth?”

  “A buck and a half?”

  “So it’s better than thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  “I have to pay my own expenses.”

  “So you get a cheap flight and a cheap hotel and come back with a couple thousand dollars maybe.” She says, “He’s famous. It could lead to other things,” then adds quickly, “I mean, of course, you’re kind of famous too—”

  “It’s O.K.,” he cuts her off.

  “You are,” she insists. “In your own way.”

  Zan wakes in the early hours with the usual terror and sits up in bed. He looks at Viv sleeping; the thought, he realizes, is infantile, but for the moment he entertains it anyway, that Viv wrote to J. Willkie Brown asking if there was something to be done in terms of throwing Zan this bone of an invitation to London. Infantile because the thought is so much about pride and ego when in fact it would have made utter if humiliating sense for Viv to have done just such a thing.

  He considers sneaking downstairs to peruse Viv’s email, but he’s never done that and finally can’t convince himself there’s a reason to now. He collapses back into his pillow and returns to his restless sleep, listening to the rats in the vents.

  Sometimes when no one else is awake, Zan returns to a new novel that no one knows he’s writing. The novel is about a middle-aged L.A. writer who, feeling discouraged and despondent—this isn’t remotely autobiographical—escapes to Berlin a few years after the fall of the Wall. The middle-aged writer befriends (or so he believes) a young German skinhead who’s besotted with the New World, except it’s a New World of white supremacists and cracked midwest Nazi messiahs.

  Within the first nine or ten thousand words of Zan’s novel, this and that happens, most of which Zan knows he’ll wind up cutting. The story really begins when the young German skinhead follows the protagonist one night and, near the entrance of the U-Bahn, with a gang of other skinheads who call themselves the Pale Flame, viciously beats the writer and leaves him for dead in the street.

  Or maybe actually he is dead. This novel being not remotely autobiographical, it’s hard for Zan to be certain. In any case, before the writer passes out, he has a kind of reverie of his memory floating away, like a balloon that Viv got for Sheba while shopping, which the girl let go just for the sensation of watching it vanish in the sky.

  As the dying man lies in the street, a black teenage girl emerges from the shadows where she’s hidden while the incident took place. She recognizes the members of the Pale Flame as men who would do to her something worse than what’s being done to the man, which is to say worse than murder. It may be hard for Zan’s reader to imagine something worse than murder, but Zan believes there’s such a thing, and the girl believes it too.

  Zan knows that a novel keeps secrets from its author, and the first secret this novel keeps from him is that, like his own daughter, the teenage girl in the story is a transmitter, broadcasting from parts unknown. Like Sheba, her body perspires in song. Once the skinheads have left, the girl approaches the man in the street; clearly he’s dead but she feels obligated to make sure. By his side she kneels, clutching to her all of her papers and books, when she hears herself rise in volume—and then when he stirs, she’s so startled that she flees, dropping by his side an old battered paperback she’s had since she was a child, before she could read.

  Why is she black? Zan wonders, annoyed with himself for asking. Can I make her a b
lack girl? When he sees her in his head, she’s black, so that should be the end of it, but do I have the right to make her black? She’s not a major character at all, rather someone who sets in motion a plot, so is it exploitative to make her black when there’s no point to it?

  Or is it wrong to think there has to be a point to it? Characters are black only because they need to be? But what do I know about being black? Isn’t any white person who writes about race asking for trouble? Of course I don’t know anything about being a teenage girl, either. For that matter I don’t know anything about being anyone else, other than who I am.

  Also secret from Zan is a drawing on the opening blank page of the old battered paperback that the girl has dropped. Nor does the unnamed man left for dead in the street know of the drawing, because by the time he wakes, it isn’t there, having been ripped mysteriously from the book in the hours between.

  It’s a drawing of a woman who happens to be the teenage girl’s mother. The sketch is crude and quick but not untalented, done with colored pencils, the woman in shades of brown except for her distinctive, misplaced gray eyes. None of this can mean anything to the man lying in the street; but though Zan knows nothing of the drawing either, it means a great deal to him, because he met the subject of the sketch once, in an encounter so brief and frenzied that it lasted only seconds but saved his life.

  Zan grew up in the white L.A. suburbs. His parents were midwesterners who came, as his father acknowledged one night during the evening news while black people were being hosed down and attacked by dogs on television, from a past where white and black didn’t meet. Whatever their attitudes about race, Zan’s parents tried to protect him from those attitudes; the n-word wasn’t used in the house. Nonetheless not a single thing about the black experience penetrated Zan’s own until he was the age that his own son is now.

  That was when he came home one afternoon from school and on his parents’ stereo played a record of country songs sung by a blind black man. This wasn’t the sort of music that Zan had heard before, and though for decades afterward purists would declaim the aesthetic offense of a soul genius committing his voice to such white songs and white strings and white arrangements, to the twelve-year-old Zan the music’s surrounding whiteness made the blackness of the voice all the more shocking.

  Decades later Zan understands that, as epiphanies about race go, this is pretty pathetic. Still, it rearranged the furniture in Zan’s head, knocked out one or two of the walls. Zan would know for the rest of his life that this was the most subversive record ever made, the white trojan horse that smuggled a blind black man into the gates of Zan’s white city. Every afternoon, returning home from school, Zan snuck the record down to his own room and listened to it over and over, the volume low because it felt like something he should get in trouble for, like reading a forbidden book.

  The only child of a socially and politically conservative family, lower middle class when he was smaller, on the edges of upper middle class by the time he finished high school, Zan was a fifteen-year-old rightwinger before the erosion of his adolescent certainties by the television images of Negroes at the mercy of flying police sticks. That erosion was the end of one nascent political identity, such as it ever was, and the beginning of another, such as it ever would be, and by the time Zan was a college student, he found his political psyche outflanked on all sides. Students graced their dormitory walls with posters of the leader of a revolution in China, one of the great killers of the Twentieth Century; and for all the ways that Zan’s parents came to suspect their son was kidnapped in the night by leftwing professors who implanted a Marxist chip in his brain, in fact Zan felt less a part of anything and more an odd man out of everything. One afternoon between classes, in the tumultuous aftermath of four students murdered by the National Guard at another school in another part of the country, Zan stopped in the middle of the campus quadrangle to note a line of armored police to one side and protesting students to the other, with him squarely in the middle alone, which so summed up his ambivalence that it would seem to have been staged. Whatever else was true, however, and for all ambivalence’s varieties that cluttered philosophical clarity, one thing was incontestable to Zan and it was that his political conservatism failed the nation’s great moral test of the decade, which was how to redeem the transgression of slavery that betrayed his country’s original promise.

  Within Zan’s first week as a college student, he published a piece in the university newspaper about the prospective presidential candidacy of a senator who, like Zan, once was a rightwinger and now was . . . what? besides the brother of a martyred president, and embraced by blacks as no white politician had been since the president who ended slavery a century before.

  In his student writing group that met off campus, Zan remained odd man out from the beginning. When the joint was passed he was the only one who declined, which raised eyebrows a week later when the class arrived to find it narrowly had missed a police bust. Zan immediately was suspected as the rat, “then we read your writing,” one of Zan’s fellow students explained later, “and realized you’re the trippiest one of all.” Zan’s teacher was a New Englander named Logan Hale, a novelist in his mid-fifties of some renown; as a young man Hale had been Leon Trotsky’s bodyguard in Mexico in the Thirties, resigning when he became convinced that Trotsky’s inevitable murder in fact was, for all intents and purposes, suicide—contrition by Trotsky for the Stalinism that he not only hadn’t stopped but, in his own mind, set in motion.

  An anti-Stalinist, Trotsky-estranged Marxist, Hale was a dedicated outsider wary of being any movement’s flunky, and though Zan didn’t share the professor’s politics, the iconoclasm was irresistible. Zan saw in the mentor another odd man out; it’s possible Hale saw in a protégé the same thing.

  Another story about Hale, less reliable than the one concerning Trotsky, was that he was Billie Holiday’s lover in the mid-Forties when he worked on his first book, a ghostwritten autobiography of a white sax player and clarinetist of middling stature who dealt drugs, mostly marijuana, to other musicians including Holiday. Hale never disputed or discussed this rumor about him and Holiday, maybe out of sheer gentlemanliness, if it was true, or because he knew a great piece of public relations, if it wasn’t.

  One afternoon the presidential candidate Zan had written about for the university newspaper made a campaign stop at the campus. Zan never had seen close up someone who might become president. The day was ravishing: fluttery and saturated with itself in the way that days were back then; but Zan had no sense until later how unusual the afternoon was.

  There was a frenzy about the campaign for this candidate that Zan wouldn’t see again until forty years later, in the campaign of the man whose election and appearance in Chicago Zan watched that November night with Sheba sitting on his lap. It was a frenzy not simply of hope but yearning so desperate as to be hysteria, and that afternoon in the campus quad it seemed to him the crowd might devour the candidate, a slight man whose frailness conveyed less strength than an impossible, even irrational courage, inspiring in the crowd a savagery that was tender but savage nonetheless. The candidate and crowd shared an appetite for sacrifice and would make a ritual of it.

  Zan got close to where the man stood. Was it on a platform? or in the back of an open car not unlike that in which the man’s brother had been shot? In any case, what Zan never forgot was the pain burning in the man’s gaze and the ecstasy—like he was Joan of Arc—of a crowd so increasingly unhinged that it wouldn’t have surprised Zan, wouldn’t have surprised anyone, had anyone told him or everyone else at that moment that within the month the man would be as dead as his brother.

  Though in fact the maelstrom created by this candidacy had grown from the brother’s death a few years before, it was its own thing now, concurrent with the way this man became his own candidate. It was hard to know whether he would have become a great or disastrous president but it seemed inevitable to Zan that he would have been one or the other, poised as
such men are at a tipping point. By the time the crowd tore the coat from the candidate’s back and plucked the cufflinks from his wrists, it so had lost control that craziness found a gravity and vortex, catching Zan in the undertow around his ankles.

  He felt his feet lifted off the ground and the rest of him pulled under. Enveloped by panic, flailing wildly and reaching for anything he could grab, Zan called for help but the noise and movement were too much for anyone to hear or reach him.

  Then, as he was swallowed by the crowd to be trampled or crushed underfoot, a hand, young and female and black, reached to him from the sky and he took it.

  Now in the novel that Zan writes about the writer dying in the streets of Berlin, the black teenage witness to the beating kneels clutching her belongings, hears the music coming out of herself and, as she bends to touch the man’s body, is so startled when he stirs that she jumps back.

  Dropping by the man’s side her old battered paperback, she flees into the mouth of the U-Bahn and only when the train arrives that will safely take her away from what’s just happened does she realize the book is missing. Because it’s a book that she’s had since she was a child, she seriously considers going back; but of course she can’t go back. The skinheads might return, the police might come, or the dying man in the street might rouse himself to consciousness and strike out at her in a rush of adrenaline.