Lying in the dark of the hotel on the rue d’Alsace, the dank yellow lights of the Gare de l’Est coming through the window, Zan watches his son on the other bed. “Parker,” he says after a few minutes, and the boy doesn’t answer. “Parker.”
“What?” Parker finally replies. He lies on his side, his back to his father.
“How’s the hand?”
“It hurts.”
“It will feel better when the ibuprofen kicks in.”
“O.K.”
“Are you all right?” says the father.
“I’m trying to sleep.”
“What are you thinking about?”
For a moment Parker doesn’t say anything and then, “If I had disappeared in London like Sheba, would you have left me there too?”
Zan inhales sharply. He turns onto his back in the dark and stares at the hotel ceiling: For forty-eight hours he’s been struggling to keep composed in front of his son. He says, “We’re going back for her when we find Mom.”
“How are we going to find Mom?” Parker’s voice comes from his bed.
“Molly won’t hurt Sheba, and she can’t take her out of the country.” Zan doesn’t say the other thing, the thing about Molly that he knows sounds crazy. “Do you think Molly would hurt her?” Only several minutes later does he hear from out of the dark, “No.”
Lying in the hotel bed, Zan holds his head. Since his final forty-eight hours in London he’s had a low-grade migraine that he treats with aspirin and caffeine—which makes the headache better until it makes it worse—and what modest quantity of codeine can be bought over the counter in Europe. If he can doze at all, the discomfort is bearable when he wakes in the morning before it spirals, over the course of the day, into the clutch of evening, when it’s accompanied by nausea. Since the episode a few hours ago with Parker and the taxicab, it’s become excruciating.
Zan and Viv used to joke that Parker was conceived in Berlin. When they split up years before and Zan ran to Berlin, it was where he realized he belonged back with Viv; not long after that, she was pregnant. Coming undone, Zan went to Berlin because it was the farthest place he could go before the act of traveling east turned into the act of returning west. But mostly he went because he got on the wrong car of the train. It was the aftermath of the publication of his last novel that somehow turned into a political weapon and cost another man his livelihood; those were the years when the sense of possibility that it once seemed his country might fulfill, the sense of possibility that reminded Zan what a fever dream his country could be when he was young . . . that possibility was on the run as well. The Berlin Wall was his country’s final outpost. It was where presidents said, Tear it down, and, Let them come to Berlin, and where a future president said, not so long ago, This is our time.
A New World man hurtling into the heart of the Old World, Zan ran and ran in that moment of his undoing, guilt and failure so close behind that they weren’t at his back so much as on it. Ran to Berlin and, where the Wall used to be, tore from his damned guilty novel its pages and shred them, and sprinkled them on the Wall’s rubble as though that could absolve anything.
Now in the Paris hotel on the rue d’Alsace, Zan drifts, his dreams not quite dreams, somewhere between anxious dreams and figments of disorder. In the small cabin of his cross-Atlantic ocean liner, X plots his authorship of the Twentieth Century, having had the good stroke of fortune to stumble on its literature before anyone else could write it first. Not entirely unmoved by the ethics of the situation, he reasons nonetheless that in a sense writers always are plagiarizing something albeit unconsciously, things they’ve read or heard or seen that they re-manifest in some singular fashion that’s the only true measure of a writer’s originality. As a man literally ahead of his time, X understands that “originality” will be a quaint notion in the next century, with its evolution to a higher philosophy about hybrids and appropriation: I can’t be the first person this has happened to, he thinks, this going-back-in-time thing. Maybe all pioneers are out of time, bearers of the future to the past. I’m the first literary sampler, concludes X. I’m just sampling a whole novel, that’s all.
And after all, if I produce the novel first, who’s to say I’m not the author? If you get right down to it, how often have I felt I was onto something ten years before younger writers came along and got more attention for it? Who’s to say that in another time the Irish poseur didn’t himself get knocked on the head and wake up and steal the novel from someone else? In fact, who’s to say that in another past, the Irishman didn’t get knocked on the head and wake up and find my version of the novel that I’m copying now, dropped beside him? Maybe my version of time, thinks X, is the true prototype while the other is the clone.
To be sure, dilemmas present themselves. The first is that, thoughtlessly, the black teenage girl in Berlin who hid in the shadows while X was beaten neglected to deposit at his side, along with the one book, the rest of the century’s canon, which X hasn’t exactly committed to memory. Grimly realizing he’ll have to write his own versions, he brightens: Who’s to say I can’t write them as well or better? But something else nags at X; he’s not sure he can put his finger on it . . . but if the same words are written by a different writer, then are they the same words? Is it still the same book? Or is the text transformed by the experience and persona behind it? And as X imagines writing his own versions of these novels, he begins leaving out passages of the book he copies now—it just goes on and on and on, he groans—because no one can possibly miss them; and then it isn’t such a far leap from cutting to editing to revising to recasting, enhancing, reimagining, improving.
This begs of X the most profound question of all. That question is whether it’s possible for someone of his country to speak for the Old World. X is of and from a country that no sooner became the New World than it was time’s other bookend, or floated outside time altogether; he is of and from a country that always has belonged to the rest of the world’s imagination more than it belongs to its own. Now X labors to author the novel where the literature of the Old World discovers the vision of the New and waves goodbye to itself. Dublin? X would never be able to explain Dublin anyway. But if he doesn’t know much about Dublin 1904, then let the story take place in the Los Angeles of 1989, seventy years early. Nighttown will be Twilighttown and Molly will be Dolly, and Bloom will be Zoom or Doom or Groom (as in a man searching for a bride) or Ploom (as in a column of smoke) or Woom (as in where a mother carries a child). Or Toom (as in where you’re buried).
Zan wants to kill X. In his sleep, he seethes at the character with every passing word, growing more furious: This is why you’re a failure! he screams at him silently in the dark of the rue d’Alsace hotel. You have a chance to be the greatest novelist of all time, author of the literature of the century, and you rewrite it.
With John’s revision of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Zan tells the university seminar in London a week and a half ago, though it seems longer now, “the novelization of history replaces history itself.” John’s version of the narrative means to preclude all others. It means to banish from history those who are deaf to its music and to declare all other sins trivial compared to the sin of deafness. John’s is the narrative as sustained hallucination, totalitarian in the manner of all great art. With paper and the printing press, the act of creation becomes an intimate one, the act of reading a private one, at which point storytelling is liberated from avoiding the forbidden in order to pursue it. The transformed imagination transforms the conscience. From John’s novel there can only be one place to go, the Book of Revelation, “which isn’t a novel at all,” Zan tells the lecture hall, “but a rave.”
Zan can’t kill X. If he kills X, the rest of Zan’s novel vanishes into the future. But as the ocean liner continues its way to New York, in the early morning hours a mysterious and unseen stranger bearing a strong resemblance to Zan himself breaks into X’s cabin and beats him senselessly.
When Viv went to Addis Ababa the firs
t time to get her new daughter from the orphanage, lying on the hotel bed and feeling the small girl next to her at night she heard the sax line of a song drift through the open window.
It was a song that Viv heard everywhere in Ethiopia; later Zan would play it on his radio show. “Tezeta”—meaning memory, or nostalgia, or reminiscence or melancholy—was not quite a title as much as a musical species like the blues, and in this land where memory is a euphemism for the blues, this curling melody always sounded the same to Viv’s ears, whether played on sax or piano: smoke that got in your ears rather than your eyes. When the girl lying on the bed next to the mother ran her finger along the outline of Viv’s profile to make certain she was there, it felt to Viv like smoke itself.
Now on her return to Addis to find Sheba’s mother, when Viv stops in the labyrinth at the city center where the driver has led her and says, looking around, “No, this isn’t right,” she hears “Tezeta” rise mournfully in the distance like an answer. She has no idea what the answer is. The walls of the passages resonate with distant chants, the thunder of gathering storms, and Viv feels the past and future yearn for each other. Though she’s almost certain the song she hears isn’t just in her head, now she hears things in the Ethiopian memory-blues that she never heard the first time, lying on the hotel bed with Sheba beside her.
The song is ravenous for memory, and Viv hears in it everything that’s happened to her and her family since that first time she came, the struggle of everything since Sheba came to live with them, the whispers between her and Zan in the night that somehow everything will be all right even as it becomes harder to understand how that can possibly be true. Lost here in these passageways Viv has a realization bordering on a small epiphany: It’s the memory of how quiet Sheba was those first nights lying on the hotel bed beside Viv wreathed by “Tezeta,” and how it wasn’t until Sheba got back home that her own small body began to broadcast its music, as though a secret word was spoken that turned her up.
Jasmine hears the song on returning to Ethiopia for the first time since the age that Sheba was on leaving it. This is during Assassination Summer, riots as much about grief as rage sweeping the Chicago park where, forty years later on Zan’s TV one November night, crowds greet the election of a new president whose only precedent is what forty years before was forsaken. Jasmine’s sojourn follows a brief reconnection with her father, a retired medical orderly—who never became a doctor—hobbling with arthritis, and her brother, an eternal thirty-one-year-old student wandering the landscape of aspirations looking for his.
While she’s angry at her father for abandoning her and her brother and mother, Jasmine senses this reconciliation is a fleeting final chance at something. The three take a trip to Addis together where at night she hears “Tezeta” wafting from the clubs and isn’t sure whether what she glimpses is a memory from when she was two or a dream posing as one; but hearing this song is the only time Jasmine feels like she’s home. In assassination’s wake she sometimes aches for the solace—a less secular word than comfort—of the mosque; on the flight to Ethiopia, she wonders if she’ll leave. Eight days later, with her brother she does, but her father does not, and she never sees him again.
Jasmine knows it should never have been about him, the small struck-down man. It should have been about what he stood for; she knows that. But she can’t separate the two nor, she finally reasons, should they be separated. Democrazy, as she calls it, isn’t about abstractions, it’s about the humanity behind abstractions, the candidate’s persona that becomes inextricable from accompanying convictions.
She doesn’t believe that she has the right to leave Los Angeles, the scene of the crime. She drifts back into a music business that’s on an altogether different level from when she was managing hardscrabble Andover bands in London trying to get a hit single; now everyone’s an Artist. No one makes singles but rather magna opera with librettos delivered in spectacular gatefolds, right up to the altogether new pretension of librettos disappearing and gatefolds going blank. Her role never has been about aesthetics. It’s about managing the lives that have gotten as extravagant as the product—bands with private planes, dressing rooms with liquor and drugs and candy of a designated color, naked girls of every color in closets wrapped in red bows. On the rare occasion when someone tries to coax her from music back to politics, she answers, “No one’s ever going to assassinate a songwriter, even in this country.”
She has an affair with a black session keyboardist who has a wife in Atlantic City. She breaks it off after eight months; to her surprise, since she never suspected such inclinations in herself, she has a longer relationship with a young white woman out of college named Kelly who designs album covers for artists that the public hasn’t heard of. The covers fill the walls of the little house on the edge of Hancock Park that the women move into together.
Though the break-up takes a couple months, the relationship ends after three and a half years when Jasmine wakes in the middle of the night realizing she wants a child. “We can adopt!” Kelly wails desperately; but Jasmine already feels her womb invaded by the future. Hating herself, pulling away from the house with Kelly sobbing in the rearview mirror, she drives and keeps driving all night, trying to escape the melody of “Tezeta” in her ears until she realizes that the song comes from the vapor within her. “Are you a ghost?” the future mother cries out loud to the daughter who haunts her before she’s conceived.
Jasmine has been working for the record company four years when she’s assigned its biggest client. “See what you can do with him,” says the executive across the desk from her, in an office overlooking Highland Avenue, “this calls for personal attention.”
“What do you mean personal attention?” Jasmine says suspiciously.
“At the rate he’s going, he’ll be dead within the year.”
“Drugs.”
“Kilos.”
“He’s a Nazi,” she says.
“Those,” sighs the executive, “were just silly things he said to an interviewer.”
“Sieg heil from the back of a car at Victoria Station?”
“He loves black music!” the executive exclaims, and Jasmine stares at him stonily. “You’ve got to learn not to take these things personally.”
“I once learned from someone,” says Jasmine, “to take everything personally.”
“Was he in music?”
“He ran for president. Does our rock and roll spaceman from Mars or Nuremberg or wherever it is this month still wear dresses?”
“That was one album jacket five years ago.” Jasmine tries to remember if Kelly designed it. “He’ll be back in town in the next couple days and has rented a house over off Doheny. Why don’t you drive out there? Talk to Anna, his personal-assistant/backup-singer/girlfriend.”
“So he does fancy girls then.”
“He’s always liked girls. Don’t tell anybody, at least not yet. Our marketing on him is just entering its heterosexual phase.”
“He’s in his Nazi phase now,” nods Jasmine.
In the driveway of the house, she stops the car aghast. The abode is Southern Californian Egyptian—white pyramid with gas jets at the top spouting fire, a flaming sarcophagus. When she rings the doorbell, the woman who answers coolly appraises Jasmine half a minute before letting her in.
“Why did they send you?” asks Anna, lit joint between her fingers as the two black women make their way down the hall. She considers her manners long and hard before offering it. “No, thanks,” says Jasmine. “I think they thought I might help.”
“I’m sure they did,” the other woman says, “but let me be fucking direct. His pasty white English ass likes the sisters. There was one before me and may be one after but it sure as shit isn’t going to be you.”
“That’s not what I’m here for.”
“Groovy, but wake up. That’s why they sent you.”
“The last thing they want is more drama. They’re worried about him.”
Anna soften
s a bit. “Can’t say he’s not worrisome.” She takes a chair and indicates the sofa across from her. “Coke,” she says, “amphetamines. Lots of coke. More coke than I’ve seen a single human being suck up. Problem is he still does function, still gets it done. I know that’s what they all say but in his case it happens to be so. Five albums in two years? And the last two sold best of all. It’d be better for him if they hadn’t. Course I know you folks just want to squeeze another out of him before it’s too late.”
“They don’t want to squeeze another,” says Jasmine, “they want to squeeze another five. If they cared only about another they’d be less worried about trying to save him and more worried about getting him into the studio every available moment while they have the chance.”
Anna leans forward as if divulging a secret. “He’s losing his mind. You hear what I’m saying? Down that hallway,” Anna points back to where the women came in, “behind that door is some extremely strange shit—black magic, voodoo, old nefertiti wah-wah,” indicating the house with the sweep of her hand.
“I’m aware,” says Jasmine, “that I’m house-mothering a Nazi.”
Anna laughs. “I know—and he’s with me? But the man,” she says with some weariness, “is not a Nazi. He’s not into the politics, he’s into the weirdness. Maybe that’s no better but when he’s got it together, he’s smarter than any musician I’ve known. Reads all the time, always onto whatever’s coming next before anybody else—and someday if he hasn’t killed himself he’s going to look back on the Nazi nonsense and think, What the fuck? In the meantime he’s coming undone. In hotel rooms he sees people fall from the sky. In the backseat of the car he hears kids’ voices crying from the trunk. Swears up and down bodies are buried in the walls of whatever room he’s in.”
These Dreams of You Page 17
