Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

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 mysterious 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?