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.