~ ~ ~
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?
How can you believe in a god, J. Willkie Brown asks Zan at the pub outside the university following the lecture, and Zan answers, swallowing the last of his second vodka, “Because I don’t believe it’s all molecules. Because I don’t believe the conscience translates into a chemical equation. Because men and women run into a hundred-and-ten-story building to save perfect strangers, overcoming every instinct of self-preservation, when the hundred-and-ten-story building right next to it has just collapsed, which means people act not only in the face of nature and self-preservation but outright rationality. Because there are dimensions of nobility that can’t be diagrammed on a blackboard in a class. Because men wrack their brains trying to think of ways to turn their fellow human beings into lampshades, which means there are dimensions of barbarity that also can’t be diagrammed on the same blackboard. Because I believe such unquantifiables abound beyond dispute, along with evidence that human behavior is animated by spirit. Because I think the existence of the soul proves the existence of God, not the other way around.”
~ ~ ~
I’m a traitor. Better to admit we’re traitors of the country of the banged gavel, the salem stench, the hate that hates in God’s name, so we might be patriots of the other country of the eternal pursuit, memory’s mystic chord, our nature’s better angels, and the promise that no God can help loving even when we break it. By its nature, my version of the country is blasphemous. By its nature, it allows for doubt, the possibility that my God is wrong and yours is right. The other country, where I commit treason, denies doubt, views it as a cancer on the congregation.
The one thing that Zan knows for sure is that, should the song of his country finally fade and be silent, it will never quite be possible again to believe in it. This is the problem, he reasons, with presidents who can’t be as big as the reasons they embody. A body can only hold reasons so big. Should the silencing of the song come to pass, not only will Zan be complicit in the loss of his own faith, he will be complicit for having had faith in the first place. But without such faith, the country — this country in particular — is nothing.
~ ~ ~
Without such faith, I’m nothing. This is the occupational hazard of being of my country, the way one’s identity becomes bound up with a landscape that manifests in its soil and psychitecture an idea, with a people still fighting over who they are because when nothing else is held in common but the idea then if the idea isn’t held in common there’s nothing left except the mystical name of the place that evokes something different for each person but which each person allows himself or herself to believe is the same thing evoked for every other person.
At the campaign rally forty-one years ago, pulled to safety from the frenzied crowd that threatens to catch him in its undertow, the eighteen-year-old Zan feels in his ear the breath of the young black woman who rescues him and whispers something he can’t hear; but lying in the street now, he almost does.
Lying in the street now, Zan confronts the breakdown he’s been trying to avoid since London. He’s stunned by how much this moment feels like a bookend. Finally overwhelmed by despair, that grief of the soul, he cries, My God, where’s my boy? Where’s my little girl? Where’s my wife, where’s my house? Where’s my art, where’s my country? How did I lose it all? At this moment he’s convinced it’s all been a dream: “I know I did something wrong,” he sobs out loud, “but I don’t know what.” What lapse of perspective undid him? What ambition failed him? What did he take for granted? What did he value too much or too little? What thing was undone that should have been done, or what was done that shouldn’t have been? To what dream did he commit himself that was folly? How is it that he was so old when he was so young, and how has he now been reduced to something so childish even as he’s so old?