~ ~ ~
Not even taking into account the time they’ve been stuck under the Channel on the Eurostar, the folly becomes more evident in Paris with the father and son’s arrival. Thirty minutes to not only change trains but stations? A vanity, Zan understands now, born of younger days and a sharper mind back when — long before Viv and children — he lived in Paris with crazy taxi-life Trotskyites and their aristocratic tastes, who thought, like Ronnie Jack Flowers in L.A., that all the proletariat should have Blaupunkt sound systems. That was when he could have been airlifted into Paris blindfolded and determined within five minutes exactly where he was.
Ascending the vertical Gare du Nord with its transparent tubular walkways, Zan and Parker take half an hour figuring out where to exit. I’m becoming, the father tells himself, a confused old fart. Turning toward the Gare de l’Est, he and his son dart through the twilight across the rue Dunkerque between cars, Parker a few feet behind Zan, when a taxicab, the driver apparently beyond the control of anything but unexplained fury billowing from the exhaust pipe, barrels toward the boy.
Zan grabs Parker’s hand so hard he can feel some small bone crunch. He remembers that this was the hand Parker broke the night he took the boy to the emergency room and then lost his car keys, railing about it afterward when his supernaturally wise daughter advised him from the backseat, “Poppy, let it go.” Zan yanks Parker from the path of the cab much like a young black female hand once yanked him from a surging crowd except that, given the difference in years between older man and younger boy, the force is exponential.
The cab flies into the back of a limousine. Dimly through the cab’s back window, the cab’s passenger flies into the seat in front, grabbing her head; then the cab backs up and, the gear first thrown into reverse then into drive, hits the limo again. Then it backs up and slams into the limo still again. “Are you all right?” Zan says to Parker, who nods in shock; the boy is too wide-eyed at the spectacle of the cab reversing and crashing into the same limo over and over to bother holding his throbbing hand. Everyone stops to look. Finally the cab’s passenger flees out the other side, leaving the back door open behind her. Later Zan realizes that in his own country, this scene wouldn’t be nearly as insane, or rather it would be insane in a distinctly familiar, new-world way.
~ ~ ~
By the time they reach the Gare de l’Est, the last night train to Berlin has departed. Zan and the boy check into a no-star hotel on the rue d’Alsace that overlooks the trainyards below and a stubby stone wall that runs alongside. In the difference between the two stations, ten minutes by foot, lies the division between centuries and longitudes, the high-tech Gare du Nord they just left full of young people, western and futurist, the Gare de l’Est shabby and old like its travelers, refugees from Old Europe or those returning to it, fleeing millennial overload. Unable to find ice in any of the stores or bars, Zan wraps Parker’s hand in a wet towel, his son finally slipping toward an ibuprofen sleep.
~ ~ ~
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.