~ ~ ~
But now in the Berlin street his unconscious mind understands that none of this about the light is true. His mind understands that light dies like everything else; it’s not the same light at all. It’s a new light from the sun or maybe a star that already has died sometime during the thousands of years that its light was en route. He understands that what’s constant isn’t light but shadow, that it’s the shadows which are the same regardless of what light casts them. Songs are more transient than light because, unlike light that bleaches the earth or sears the flesh, a song never leaves a trace except with whatever listener can or will attest to it. The listener becomes not just a collaborator with the singer, he becomes the keeper of the song, seizing possession of it from the singer; the listener knows hearing the song more than the singer can claim singing it. If light is a ghost picture that will disappear, time is a child’s game of telephone, humming at the beginning of the line a melody transformed by a series of listeners to an altogether other melody at the end — and then who’s to say it wasn’t that final melody all along?
Nonetheless, in such moments of light and song, past and present coincide. The deepest cell of memory’s catacomb is more accessible to Zan than the most shallow; he remembers more vividly the quality of light at a given moment forty years ago than the name of someone he met yesterday. Zan has become frightened by his memory’s daily, even hourly insurrections. He’s become as terrified by the prospect of dementia as he is by all the other prospects that terrify him — more, of course, because in memory lies the self’s archeological remains. Almost idly, Zan has considered some plan by which someone euthanizes him before he allows madness to consume him. But when you have children, you don’t enjoy the luxury of any melodrama other than the one you’re actually living through.
~ ~ ~
In retrospect it’s inevitable that when X’s Bloom in FutureLA is published in early 1921, no one notices. No one comments on the passages of revolutionary stream of consciousness, no one cares about the mindbending erudition or how the book proposes to sum up western civilization in a twenty-four-hour stroll.
Rather the Irish plagiarist’s version a year later, set in Dublin, receives all the attention, just as it did before history and the imagination circled back on themselves in the form of Zan’s protagonist. X’s subsequent novels go unnoticed as well, even as he’s bitterly certain that, if anything, he’s improved on the rough drafts of pretenders. Finally, with X’s rendition of a Southern novel about a man who goes crazy not knowing whether he’s white or black, the New York Times offers a conjecture, part manifesto and part exposé.
~ ~ ~
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.