“Where’s your mother now?”
“She is no longer alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happened long ago. I would like,” she says, “to go to your country someday. Especially now. Now it must be a very exciting place.”
The weather outside has cleared and Zan suggests a walk. The four circle the small park across the street from the hotel, which is part of a crescent of small hotels. “It’s hard getting them out of the room,” Zan explains to Molly; they all sit on a bench, Parker and Sheba fighting over a Game Boy. Zan says, “Let’s do this. I’m taking the children with me to the university tomorrow. James is going with us. Why don’t you come as well? See how it goes.”
“She’s going through your purse,” Parker says to Molly about Sheba. Molly ignores it. “James?” she says to Zan.
“Sorry,” Zan scoffs, “Mister J. Willkie Brown, as he prefers the world to know him. Of course I’ll pay you for the time. What’s your rate?”
“What do you think is fair?” she says.
He tries to calculate currency exchange. “Ten pounds an hour?” It’s more than he can afford—these days anything is more than he can afford—but he doesn’t want to be the foreigner exploiting a black woman in her country, or more her country than his, anyway.
Parker says to Molly, “She’ll break that camera.” Sheba looks at her brother and draws a finger across her throat. “Sheba,” Zan says to the girl, who’s pulled a small camera from Molly’s purse, “that’s not yours.”
“I don’t mind,” says Molly.
“Thank you, that’s nice of you,” Zan says, “but she can’t think it’s O.K. to go through other people’s things.”
“She broke Viv’s camera,” says Parker.
“SHUT UP, PARKER!” Sheba says.
“Mom was pissed off,” says the boy. He adds, “That’s a really old-school camera.” This is the first time Zan has heard his son say “pissed.” Also, if he had nothing else to think about, he would monitor the occasions when Viv is “Mom” and when Zan is “Dad”—an excavation of Parker’s references and forms of address. Sheba attacks the button on the camera. “Stop it,” Zan says and takes the camera, handing it to Molly. “It’s an old-school camera,” Sheba says, mimicking her brother.
“I have had it since I was a little girl,” says Molly, “about your age.” Parker is trying to fathom cameras existing that far back in time. “It’s a ghost camera,” Molly smiles, bending down to Sheba. “Oooh.”
“That’s not scary,” the four-year-old informs the woman. “What’s a ghost camera?”
“It means,” says the woman, leaning into her explanation to make it sound as mysterious as possible, “that sometimes you take a picture but a minute later when you pull out the film, it has disappeared.”
“I think,” Parker says, “that’s another name for a camera that doesn’t work.”
Zan shoots his son a look. “I’ll phone you tonight,” he says to the woman, “and we’ll make tomorrow’s arrangements.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a mobile,” says Molly.
“Of course. You said.”
“I assume you take the train from Waterloo Station.”
“I think that’s right.”
“Shall I come by the hotel or meet you at Waterloo then?”
“You suck,” Parker says to Sheba.
“I hate you!” Sheba answers before turning her attention back to Molly. Zan says wearily to the woman, “At eleven at Waterloo,” instead of what he was about to say, which was, I’m sure the kids are going to love you.
As Molly disappears down the road from Cartwright Gardens, Sheba watches her as intently as she did from the pub window. Zan waits to see if the woman looks back and convinces himself that at one point she’s paused, for the slightest of moments, summoning the will to stare straight ahead.
She’s pretty, more round than heavy, and has some of the extraterrestrial features of Ethiopians. She doesn’t look anything like Sheba who, Zan remembers, takes after her handsome father. Perhaps the very strange thought that will grow stranger and bigger in his head never would have occurred to him if he and the children hadn’t seen her outside the pub, returning the girl’s watch with her own, or if she hadn’t told him where she was born. “Good lord,” he can hear Viv exclaiming in front of the laptop a few weeks ago, staring at her email. “Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany?”
All of his life Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence. In part it’s the very unlikeliness of this young woman, who’s not quite here and not quite there, not quite this and not quite that, that makes what Zan thinks and feels not only possible to him but nearly inescapable. It would be so utterly in keeping with the late tenor of their lives, with the way the stars have aligned so mischievously since Sheba’s arrival, with the feeling that these last two years the universe has been putting them to a test, setting Viv off on some misbegotten journey to find an answer that in fact finds them. But more than anything, what keeps yanking Zan back from both sleep and reason that night, as his mind struggles to find both, is the music that Molly made when she came in the room. As when Sheba arrived in the canyon, the woman was filled with songs, snatches of them, few belonging to her—as if any music belongs to anyone—with the room turned into a receiver, tuned between stations, Sheba at one end of the dial and Molly at the other.
The lead character in Zan’s novel still doesn’t have a name. Almost in petulance but hardly to be mysterious, Zan marks the character with an X, as though he’s a spot on a map. If Zan were writing with a quill, he imagines slashing the parchment.
Having been pummeled and beaten nearly eighty years into the past to the spring of 1919, X manages to get himself a tiny cabin on a cross-Atlantic ocean liner sailing from Le Havre to New York. His only company is the battered paperback copy, mysteriously dropped by his body, of a novel that won’t be published for another three years.
There are amenities of the future that X misses—music, most of all—but otherwise he feels little sense of loss. Halfway in his voyage, at the longitude of thirty-three and a third, he wanders the decks of the ship, mulling how whatever chance he ever had of becoming a great novelist in the Nineties now is gone, when the epiphany hits him.
He stares at the paperback and rushes back to his cabin where, at a small table before the porthole, he begins to copy the words in his own hand (oh yes, definitely his own hand). When the ship’s captain lends him a typewriter, X calculates that if he copies even just five pages a day, he’ll finish by the fall, more than two years before the book is published.
It doesn’t take long for X to realize, of course, that once he finishes this book, the entire future of Twentieth Century literature—from massive tomes about tubercular patients in German mountaintop sanatoria before World War I to gripping epics of the Spanish Civil War, with Gary Cooperish saboteurs boinking seductive latina guerrillas—is at his fingertips, waiting to be rewritten. He lies in his bunk at night staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the waves outside the portal crash against the ship: I will be the greatest genius of all time.
“The Novel,” Zan begins his address to the University of London seminar, “as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century. Or, the Evolution of History to Pure Fiction, which at least is where we’ll begin. The novel is born in a series of rewrites,” and behind him is a blowup of the image from the television report of the new president with the word ANTICHRIST underneath. The university must already want back its £3,500, Zan wonders soberly; he looks out at sixty or seventy students not including Parker, for whom spending time with his sister has become so unacceptable that he prefers listening to his father’s drone. Somewhere outside the hall, Zan hears a shriek that he knows is Sheba, somewhere else in the building with the new nanny. Parker looks toward the sound too, then at Zan, where son and father catch each other’s eye and the boy smiles.
A series of rewrites, says Zan, “of a single story written nearly a century i
f not more after the life of the man who inspired the narrative, and titled according to authors who almost certainly didn’t write them. In other words they’re noms de plume—‘Matthew,’ ‘Mark,’ ‘Luke,’ ‘John,’ to put them in their later order.”
The thing is, Zan explains, the original narrative wasn’t Matthew’s but Mark’s. “Mark’s was the first version written,” says Zan, “certainly the most straightforward,” referring only obliquely when at all to what later became basic tenets about the protagonist’s divinity. The climax of the story, the protagonist becoming undead—“forerunner of the current zombie phenomenon in fiction,” points out Zan—is underwhelming compared to later versions. The executed man’s mother goes to the tomb, finds the stone rolled aside from the entrance, her son’s body gone. A stranger is there in his place. “He’s, uh, just gone,” the stranger says, ending the story on a note as modern as it is enigmatic.
The historian Mark doesn’t speculate much, reports facts as best as he can determine them. Along comes Matthew, who rewrites Mark’s version, speculating perhaps wildly.
The history becomes historical novel. Facts are orchestrated to suggest a conclusion as to what the facts mean. This version of the story attracts a following—not the last time a science-fiction writer starts a cult—and Mark’s history is demoted to supplemental text. Matthew’s more lyrical version is elevated to a place implying something authoritative. Of course this doesn’t stop other competing revisions, not to mention time-honored squabbles over originality and who’s derivative of whom.
“Luke” rewrites Matthew. Then “John” rewrites all of them. “With John’s version,” Zan says, “we witness the advent of the experimental novel,” more impressionistic, less concerned with narrative, a new kind of novel in which history recedes and defers to a “truth” bigger than mere facts can capture. The protagonist virtually disappears. When he does appear, he’s a more dramatic figure; he doesn’t simper with compassion, sorrow, mercy, “he doesn’t wallow,” says Zan, “among lowlifes and deviants with innocuous promises of love, charity. He’s a hero not a mere protagonist, with new fire and fury. He’s newly distinguished by the animating power of hate and judgment.”
The audience in the hall stares back at Zan dazed, but only one or two have left. Parker slumps in his seat, arms folded across the chest, in a perfected pose of boredom; but Zan can see the boy watching his father, surreptitiously.
Afterward some of the students from the audience invite Zan to a local pub on the edge of the university. Zan and Parker find Sheba and her new nanny in the college cafeteria where, in the corner, the girl’s attention has been successfully engaged by a stack of children’s books. Molly doesn’t look so good to Zan—exhausted or ill: We’ve burned her out in less than twenty-four hours, he thinks; except that Sheba may be the quietest her father has seen her short of unconsciousness.
The university isn’t ye olde English campus of Zan’s fantasies, with rolling knolls and cobblestone walls veined with ivy. It has an industrial look about it, though the walk to the pub is more like it, through a forest of hazy trees like crucified green clouds. Almost demurely Sheba follows with one hand clutching Molly’s.
The small crowd chitchats, some with Zan, who barely can think after the lecture. At the pub he craves a shot of tequila but settles for vodka, not wanting to embarrass anyone with presumptuously exotic requests. “Right, then,” says J. Willkie Brown, setting the vodka on the table between them in one of the pub’s back rooms. Zan isn’t inclined to ask Brown his opinion of the lecture; he would be genuinely unconcerned if he weren’t being paid £3,500. Brown says, “What’s next?”
Zan says, “Well, we wait for Viv to come back from Addis Ababa.” To his surprise, he has to suppress an impulse to tell Brown about the foreclosure.
“Yes, of course,” says Brown, “any news on that front?”
Zan chews his lower lip. “No.”
“Hmm,” Brown just nods. Off in the area of the bar, Zan can see Molly getting Parker a Coke and Sheba a Sprite; the boy is trying not to get talked to by some of the students while Sheba reverts to form, climbing on things. “A bit of a handful, aren’t they?” He tries his best to sound good-humored about it.
“This is nothing,” Zan says. “Peace in our time, to quote a British prime minister. It’s like the nanny has cast a spell on Sheba.”
“I see. So what’s it all about?”
“The nanny?”
“Viv in Africa.”
Zan looks at Sheba, out of earshot. “Her mother,” he answers, nodding at the girl. “I mean her birth-mother.”
“I thought she was an orphan.”
“Well, James, orphans have mothers. They’re just not mothers who are in the picture anymore.”
Brown says, “But this one is in the picture now, I take it?”
“It’s not that she’s in the picture,” says Zan, “it’s the way she’s not in the picture.”
Brown shakes his head and shrugs.
“We’ve been trying to find out about the mother for a while.” Zan glances back at the girl. “Someday she’ll want to know. She’ll be angry if we never tried to find out. She’ll be angry at us anyway about one thing or another, about all kinds of things, but this one she’ll have a right to be angry about. A couple of months ago Viv got a journalist in Addis on the trail, he asked some questions, and now there are these . . . well, they’re not even reports, they’re too undefined to be reports, they’re rumors . . . or what have you . . . that this journalist Viv hired was getting close to some discovery about the mother and, in asking all kinds of questions, something happened to her. She’s in jail. She’s in hiding. She’s fled the country. She’s dead.” He looks at Molly. “Listen, what do you know about—?”
“Another drink?” asks Brown.
Zan realizes he’s downed the one hand he has. “O.K.,” he says, pulling some money from his pocket, “let me—”
“Don’t be bloody silly.” The Englishman gets up to get another drink. Zan continues watching Molly and Sheba, calls over the waitress and orders fish and chips for the kids. When Brown returns, Zan says, “The kids like your fish and chips.”
“Hmm,” says Brown.
“Thanks for the drink,” says Zan.
Fortified, not that Brown necessarily needs it but he supposes Zan does, the Englishman says, “The flaw with your lecture, of course . . . ” He pauses to see how this beginning registers; Zan raises an eyebrow and Brown continues, “ . . . the flaw is that it presumes there’s a history at all, doesn’t it? I mean the whole original business, Jesus and God and all that. Hardly the stuff of history, is it?”
“How do we know?” says Zan.
“But you don’t mean you believe in God?” says Brown.
Zan makes a show of pondering this as though he never has before. “Fifty-one days out of a hundred.”
“What kind of faith is that?”
“The best I can manage. Whether anyone calls it faith or not, I don’t much care.”
“But why bother to believe at all?”
“Because it’s not a matter of whether I can be bothered, it’s a matter of what I do. Believe, I mean.”
“Are you certain?” Brown says. “I mean, people who believe do so because they rather want or need to, don’t they?”
“Well, a lot do. Maybe most. But no more so than those who don’t believe.”
“How’s that?”
“Not believing because you need not to, no less so than the person who does.”
Brown shakes his head. “Not following.”
“Sure you are.” Everyone picks arguments with me these days! thinks Zan.
“I don’t believe because there’s no intelligent reason to.”
“Horseshit.”
“You’ve become rather more forceful than when I used to know you, Alexander. Rather more talkative.”
“So everyone tells me lately. Maybe I always think I’m on the radio.”
“Or th
e vodka perhaps.”
“Probably.”
“But that doesn’t mean that what you say makes more sense, does it?”
“Listen, if you’re being purely rational about it, then agnosticism is the only stance that has any logic to it. The atheist is just another kind of zealot. You’re zealous in your non-belief but the zealotry is no different from the zealotry of faith.”
“But how can you believe in God?”
“Fifty-one days out of a hundred . . . ”
“Explain to me one day out of a hundred.”
“Who cares?”
“Meaning you can’t answer, can you?”
“Meaning do you care.”
“I’m positively riveted.”
“Because it makes more sense to me,” says Zan.
“God makes more sense?”
Zan explains, or tries to, and Brown does him the courtesy of appearing to be absorbed if in no way persuaded. “Right, then,” he says, with a small gesture of his hand, “so why not a hundred days out of a hundred?”
“I’m scandinavian,” Zan explains. “We don’t do joy.”
On his third vodka Zan muses out loud, “Ronnie Jack Flowers.”
Brown makes that little gesture with his hand again. “Don’t know him.”
“I knew him,” Zan says, “twenty, twenty-five years—”
“Are you all right?” Brown interjects.
“Why? Don’t I seem all right?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“Do I seem drunk?”
“Not necessarily. But then I’m not sure I would know, would I? With you, I mean.”
“Twenty, twenty-five years ago . . . ”
“Ronnie Joe . . . ”
These Dreams of You Page 9
