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 if 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 ilclass="underline" 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.”