These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  “There’s an h in where. Then what happened to Mom’s photo?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “Zan,” the boy shouts, “what do you mean what do I mean?”

  The two return to the room in sullen silence. The boy climbs into the exposed bathtub and sits there, glaring. He’s being dramatic but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t genuinely feel dramatic. “But is that unusual,” Zan gamely tries to resume the conversation, “for the photo to have been there and now it’s not?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy says—still glaring at nothing—in a way that means, I don’t care.

  Zan is beside himself. “But why,” he flails for some sense of it, “did you say, Where are you?”

  “Why wouldn’t I say that?” Parker finally turns to him.

  “I don’t know,” the father shrugs. “Why not, We’re coming to get you, or . . . ”

  “First of all,” the boy leaps from the bathtub, “you didn’t tell me what to say. If you wanted me to say that, why didn’t you tell me? Second, when you told me, I didn’t know we were coming to get her. I didn’t know we were going to take this über, über, über-stupid trip to this stupid place!”

  “Don’t shout.”

  “I hate this! I hate this place! How are we supposed to find Mom?”

  “We both saw the photo, right?” Zan says, and he’s not being rhetorical. I mean, we didn’t imagine it, did we?

  Parker begins to cry furiously, like back in the canyon when he punches holes in the house. Sure enough, he pulls back to put his hand through the wall of their room and Zan says, “Your hand,” meaning the one the boy hurt in Paris.

  It stops Parker long enough that he kicks the wall instead, burying his foot halfway in the plaster.

  “Jesus, Parker!” his father shouts. Looking over his shoulder for a landlord to come through the door, Zan says, “You can’t do this here! We don’t live here! This place isn’t ours.”

  “Nothing is ours!” the boy cries. “I hate everything! I hate you and I hate Mom and I hate Sheba!”

  The father turns to the door and turns the latch so no one can come in. It takes only a moment for him to do it but it’s long enough so that when he faces back to the room he finds it empty, the second-story window open, in its black square the visual echo, outlined in electric blue, of his son having gone through it.

  Zan must shake himself loose from his shock. He dashes to the window to find that Parker has dropped a meter or so to an overhang and now slides the rest of the way, sore hand or no, down a drainpipe. “Parker,” Zan half-whispers and then, full-throated, “Parker!” as the boy falls into the street and sprints into a foggy Berlin night that falls into nothing.

  Zan nearly tumbles down the stairs of the inn in pursuit. He staggers out into the street and takes off in the direction that Parker ran.

  Running and stopping to listen for the boy’s footsteps, hearing nothing he runs further, but in no time comes to doubt where he is and the direction he’s chosen. “Parker!” he calls, and a light comes on in a window but he doesn’t care; he continues calling the boy’s name. After ten minutes he realizes he’s not only lost his son but himself in an anonymous part of the city with once industrial intentions, the wasteland’s only interruption being the U-Bahn station east of him.

  The father peers at the U-Bahn, wondering if the boy ran there. But Parker doesn’t like the dark closed places. Zan moans, “Parker, please come back,” not loud enough for anyone to hear but God, and in the dark he turns where he stands, constantly spinning as if to create a vortex that might catch the boy in its sway. Over and over as he spins, Zan says the boy’s name, an incantation to conjure him.

  At a loss, he begins to stumble back the way he came when someone hits him in the head.

  There’s another blow from the other direction and Zan knows there must be at least two of them, whoever they are, maybe three or four, and he falls to the street.

  On his way to passing out, memory floating away like a balloon that Viv got for Sheba once while shopping, which the girl let go just for the sensation of watching it vanish, Zan feels hands in his pockets emptying them before he closes his eyes. He whispers his son’s name and has a moment to regret it, hoping his assailants don’t hear.

  Zan often points out to Viv that sometimes she thinks about telling him something and, once she thinks it, believes she’s done it. Not long before they left Los Angeles for London, she answered tearfully that maybe sometimes he just doesn’t remember her telling him.

  Now lying in the street he has this thought that not only is she right and his memory fails ominously, but that in fact the reverse of what he told her is true—that what he thinks he tells her in fact he’s never said, that in fact what he thinks he’s told everyone he’s never said at all to anyone. That for months he’s imagined himself saying things that he never did: All those times, all those people from Viv to J. Willkie Brown who observed how recently he’s turned into a chatterbox, were only voices in his head made manifest in hallucinations. Really? Me? On the radio?

  Suddenly it seems absurd. Suddenly Zan is convinced, lying there in the street, that like the character in his new and utterly misbegotten novel, he’s been whiplashed to some other place in time except it’s another present rather than the past; he’s been swept up and deposited in a warp of voices saying things that haven’t been said but only considered—political rants, personal observations, plans and promises stillborn, playlists of songs and those who never sing them—and that in fact nothing about his life is real anymore if it ever was, he has no son, he has no daughter or wife or house.

  Some months ago, shortly before the election, Zan underwent a routine medical procedure, and lying on the table he was fascinated by the part of his brain that resisted the anesthetic even though he chose to have it and in fact would be terrified of not having it. Then, lying on the table feeling his mind resisting, he worried that—like someone who can’t sleep because he lies in bed worrying about not being able to sleep—he might not be able to go under and would remain conscious during the procedure. Not to mention the enormous conceit of believing that his will was stronger than anesthesia, Zan was caught between clinging to awareness and desiring its surrender. His last fleeting thought before the anesthesia took over was to wonder why the patient is asked to count backward from one hundred when he never gets past ninety-seven. Wouldn’t starting at ten do? Or five?

  Back in the canyon, the canyon that he’s not even sure anymore he’s ever lived in, Zan would drive through pockets of sunlight that he recognized as the same sunlight from forty years before when he was eighteen years old. Driving into this light he would have the feeling that he seems to have more and more as he gets older—of the past seeping into the present and marked by the quality of a particular light when he turns a bend of the road. Light is constant, he thinks, it has no past or future but always is present, so it’s always the same light; and entering these grottos of the same light that was there so many years ago, he remembers everything that happened and who it all happened with, stalactites of light and most of all the songs, every fissure with a melody all its own.

  But now in the Berlin street his unconscious mind understands that none of this about the light is true. His mind understands that light dies like everything else; it’s not the same light at all. It’s a new light from the sun or maybe a star that already has died sometime during the thousands of years that its light was en route. He understands that what’s constant isn’t light but shadow, that it’s the shadows which are the same regardless of what light casts them. Songs are more transient than light because, unlike light that bleaches the earth or sears the flesh, a song never leaves a trace except with whatever listener can or will attest to it. The listener becomes not just a collaborator with the singer, he becomes the keeper of the song, seizing possession of it from the singer; the listener knows hearing the song more than the singer can claim sin
ging it. If light is a ghost picture that will disappear, time is a child’s game of telephone, humming at the beginning of the line a melody transformed by a series of listeners to an altogether other melody at the end—and then who’s to say it wasn’t that final melody all along?

  Nonetheless, in such moments of light and song, past and present coincide. The deepest cell of memory’s catacomb is more accessible to Zan than the most shallow; he remembers more vividly the quality of light at a given moment forty years ago than the name of someone he met yesterday. Zan has become frightened by his memory’s daily, even hourly insurrections. He’s become as terrified by the prospect of dementia as he is by all the other prospects that terrify him—more, of course, because in memory lies the self’s archeological remains. Almost idly, Zan has considered some plan by which someone euthanizes him before he allows madness to consume him. But when you have children, you don’t enjoy the luxury of any melodrama other than the one you’re actually living through.

  In retrospect it’s inevitable that when X’s Bloom in FutureLA is published in early 1921, no one notices. No one comments on the passages of revolutionary stream of consciousness, no one cares about the mindbending erudition or how the book proposes to sum up western civilization in a twenty-four-hour stroll.

  Rather the Irish plagiarist’s version a year later, set in Dublin, receives all the attention, just as it did before history and the imagination circled back on themselves in the form of Zan’s protagonist. X’s subsequent novels go unnoticed as well, even as he’s bitterly certain that, if anything, he’s improved on the rough drafts of pretenders. Finally, with X’s rendition of a Southern novel about a man who goes crazy not knowing whether he’s white or black, the New York Times offers a conjecture, part manifesto and part exposé.

  The headline of the review reads AUTHOR PLAGIARIZES THE FUTURE. The piece continues: “ . . . as if larceny of the future is any less dubious than larceny of the past, Mr. [this being the New York Times] X—who doesn’t have the courage of his own name, never mind his imagination—is that most derivative of novelists, plundering concepts and ideas advanced with more skill and maturity in years to come by other authors better suited to them. The sad lesson of Mr. X’s career is that while genius can be faked, authenticity cannot, so let us leave this slipshod and overwrought body of work on the ash heap of tomorrow where it belongs . . . ”

  Of course what the reader of Zan’s novel knows, and what even X himself may suspect, is that this review is written by the novel’s author, though whether in some collaboration with the zeitgeist even Zan can’t be certain. Over the course of the next two decades X wanders west. He flees the East Coast’s centers of higher and refined thought until he makes a home amid the West Coast’s various ignominies of artifice and audacity, where shamelessness has so little shame it doesn’t bother calling itself something else. In the late Forties after the War, his literary life a distant shambles, he finds himself working in a small radio station off Hollywood Boulevard, of which the only attraction is the library of 78s by Ellington, Hodges, Holiday, Vaughan, Hawkins, Powell, Young, Webster, and Parker, who’s not to be confused with a twelve-year-old boy named after him fifty years later, and whose father calls him now from the dark Berlin pavement. Fate blesses X by letting him live long enough to again see the Sixties, after already having seen them once at the age of eighteen. Fate curses X by making him, in the year 1968, ninety-one years old.

  It was a time of compounded half-lives, when history shed its cocoon every three months and out emerged a new history, and if you were alive then—Zan never has dared tell his children because they would find it so insufferable and he could hardly blame them—you knew it was special even at the moment you were living it. To be sure they were silly times, trite before they would seem to have been true enough long enough for anything to be trite. They were indulgent and childish when not utterly confused, imposing their own conformity especially among those who fashioned themselves non-conformists. Zan can’t watch a video of the era, even if it’s only the scratchy little mental video of his memory, without wincing a little. Years afterward, the Sixties became a preposterous and unreasonable burden to everyone who followed.

  But everything glistened beyond chemical inducement, the stars in lawns and the dark gawking windows of the sea, the wondrous clockwork of the banal and the shimmer of every color as though the world was washed down in the early hours of each morning by a rain collected in the clouds of every dream the night before. The time existed in some impossible eclipse of the moon by the sun, the two having changed places, the luminance in closer proximity than the lunacy until, at some point that no one noticed until it was too late, the two changed back. Stupid though it all was with a narcissism mistaken for innocence, it also was an epoch stoned on the waft of possibility. Years later Zan knew that if he could find a wind tunnel blowing him back, he would throw himself into its mouth without hesitation and never stop riding the gale.

  For years following the publication of his last novel, Zan had nightmares about Ronnie Jack Flowers. It wasn’t that he supposed Flowers might retaliate in some way; rather Zan remains tormented by what he believes is the single greatest lapse of his life, at the very least born out of so much naïveté as to have caused destruction. Some, including friends of Zan, found what he wrote about Flowers so reckless, so thoughtlessly cavalier, that they couldn’t help wondering if he did it on purpose. They couldn’t fathom any other reason for doing it; people were furious with him, and what Zan couldn’t stand was that Flowers thought he did it on purpose too–and why wouldn’t he think so? Then Zan began to wonder if he did do it on purpose; and if it wasn’t racism, then was it an unconscious blow against the opportunism of Flowers’ convictions? Zan went from bookstore to bookstore buying up copies of the novel to get it out of circulation.

  Over time Zan made some fragile peace with the episode. He tried to convince himself that although one is responsible for what he does, he can’t be responsible for every injustice and unfairness with which the culture responds; and for his part Flowers picked up the bits of his life, worked for a while with a civil rights group in L.A.—so Zan could tell himself that the man was forced by what Zan wrote to stop living a lie, forced to do with his life what he ought to be doing. But this is crap and Zan knows it. It was the other man’s choice how to live his life, even if it meant becoming a rightwinger and a phony one at that; and Zan’s betrayal, if betrayal doesn’t necessarily call for malice, exists on its own terms.

  In the Twenty-First Century “the arc of the story changes,” is how Zan concludes his address on the novel in London two weeks ago, which is another lifetime to the man lying in the street. Behind Zan’s lectern is the blow-up of the television image of the president, branded with the word ANTICHRIST. “Maybe this has been going on awhile,” says Zan, “but now the arc of the imagination bends back to history, because it can’t compete with history.” A black Hawaiian with a swahili name? It’s the sort of history that puts novelists out of business. The arc of revision bends back to the original, except now the original has been revised to the point it’s become a negative of itself. In its umpteenth rewrite, the story is still—as some back in Zan’s country would have it—that of a baby born in secret, smuggled to a land where he’ll become king of its people, except now it’s not a new testament but a demonic scheme, now it’s a sign from God not of a beginning but an end, and now the protagonist no longer is the pale glowing image into which the original story transformed him from his hebraic reality over two thousand years of rewrites, but the reverse.

  What was white is black. The arc of the story has gone so far, who’s to say that the revision hasn’t become the original? Who’s to say that Saint Mark himself didn’t get conked on the head and mugged in the streets of Alexandria, and then wake up and steal his story from a newer future-version dropped at his side? Who’s to say that in another past he didn’t get knocked unconscious and wake to find, left there beside him by some mys
terious stranger, the version of the story that he copied, after turning the black antichrist into a golden hero? Maybe our version of the story, from this time, is the real one, and the other from two thousand years ago is the clone.

  He’s the mix-tape president of a mix-tape country, full of songs that it seemed everyone heard and loved and sang in common when he was elected. Now no one hears that song anymore, only all the other songs on the tape that they ignored. He’s a partisan. He’s a pushover. He’s a radical; he’s a sell-out. He’s rigid, he’s vacillating; he’s naïve, he’s expedient; he’s ubiquitous, he’s remote. In Zan’s lifetime never has a president been heard so differently by so many, but what everyone now holds in common is what they don’t hear anymore, which was his music that once so mesmerized them and now seems to have gone silent.

  Has it really gone silent or is its power simply exhausted, the same song but sung to a different and more desperate wind that casts the words and music on ears that have grown deaf to it? For months the new president was the only thing that made Zan happy: He made me believe in the country of my dreams, but is everyone therefore complicit in the Great Wake-Up from that dream, as accountable for what they chose to hear as for what was sung? If in fact it isn’t really the song that’s changed but the listener, then is it not only no longer the same song after all but never was? Can it be one song one moment but then, listened to another way, another song, though the same melody and lyric and singer? Was there a secret country that all along hated the song, waiting for the other country that Zan loves to become deaf to it and lose its love for it and faith in it?