~ ~ ~
Zan’s single triumph over Brown is that, in time-honored journalistic tradition, the world-famous journalist always longed to write a novel. While Zan knows how dubious this is, he’s not telling; it’s the only thing about Zan that there is for Brown to envy, and that now Brown invites him to lecture about the state of the novel is irresistible, even if Zan can’t help smelling a trap. “I smell a trap,” he says to Viv.
“What are you talking about?” she says.
“The novel as a literary form facing obsolescence?” James’ way of telling me how washed up I am, Zan thinks to himself.
“It’s a trip to London,” says Viv, “it’s thirty-five hundred pounds. What’s a pound worth?”
“A buck and a half?”
“So it’s better than thirty-five hundred dollars.”
“I have to pay my own expenses.”
“So you get a cheap flight and a cheap hotel and come back with a couple thousand dollars maybe.” She says, “He’s famous. It could lead to other things,” then adds quickly, “I mean, of course, you’re kind of famous too—”
“It’s O.K.,” he cuts her off.
“You are,” she insists. “In your own way.”
~ ~ ~
Zan wakes in the early hours with the usual terror and sits up in bed. He looks at Viv sleeping; the thought, he realizes, is infantile, but for the moment he entertains it anyway, that Viv wrote to J. Willkie Brown asking if there was something to be done in terms of throwing Zan this bone of an invitation to London. Infantile because the thought is so much about pride and ego when in fact it would have made utter if humiliating sense for Viv to have done just such a thing.
~ ~ ~
He considers sneaking downstairs to peruse Viv’s email, but he’s never done that and finally can’t convince himself there’s a reason to now. He collapses back into his pillow and returns to his restless sleep, listening to the rats in the vents.
Sometimes when no one else is awake, Zan returns to a new novel that no one knows he’s writing. The novel is about a middle-aged L.A. writer who, feeling discouraged and despondent — this isn’t remotely autobiographical — escapes to Berlin a few years after the fall of the Wall. The middle-aged writer befriends (or so he believes) a young German skinhead who’s besotted with the New World, except it’s a New World of white supremacists and cracked midwest Nazi messiahs.
~ ~ ~
Within the first nine or ten thousand words of Zan’s novel, this and that happens, most of which Zan knows he’ll wind up cutting. The story really begins when the young German skinhead follows the protagonist one night and, near the entrance of the U-Bahn, with a gang of other skinheads who call themselves the Pale Flame, viciously beats the writer and leaves him for dead in the street.
Or maybe actually he is dead. This novel being not remotely autobiographical, it’s hard for Zan to be certain. In any case, before the writer passes out, he has a kind of reverie of his memory floating away, like a balloon that Viv got for Sheba while shopping, which the girl let go just for the sensation of watching it vanish in the sky.
~ ~ ~
As the dying man lies in the street, a black teenage girl emerges from the shadows where she’s hidden while the incident took place. She recognizes the members of the Pale Flame as men who would do to her something worse than what’s being done to the man, which is to say worse than murder. It may be hard for Zan’s reader to imagine something worse than murder, but Zan believes there’s such a thing, and the girl believes it too.
Zan knows that a novel keeps secrets from its author, and the first secret this novel keeps from him is that, like his own daughter, the teenage girl in the story is a transmitter, broadcasting from parts unknown. Like Sheba, her body perspires in song. Once the skinheads have left, the girl approaches the man in the street; clearly he’s dead but she feels obligated to make sure. By his side she kneels, clutching to her all of her papers and books, when she hears herself rise in volume — and then when he stirs, she’s so startled that she flees, dropping by his side an old battered paperback she’s had since she was a child, before she could read.
Why is she black? Zan wonders, annoyed with himself for asking. Can I make her a black girl? When he sees her in his head, she’s black, so that should be the end of it, but do I have the right to make her black? She’s not a major character at all, rather someone who sets in motion a plot, so is it exploitative to make her black when there’s no point to it?
Or is it wrong to think there has to be a point to it? Characters are black only because they need to be? But what do I know about being black? Isn’t any white person who writes about race asking for trouble? Of course I don’t know anything about being a teenage girl, either. For that matter I don’t know anything about being anyone else, other than who I am.
~ ~ ~
Also secret from Zan is a drawing on the opening blank page of the old battered paperback that the girl has dropped. Nor does the unnamed man left for dead in the street know of the drawing, because by the time he wakes, it isn’t there, having been ripped mysteriously from the book in the hours between.
It’s a drawing of a woman who happens to be the teenage girl’s mother. The sketch is crude and quick but not untalented, done with colored pencils, the woman in shades of brown except for her distinctive, misplaced gray eyes. None of this can mean anything to the man lying in the street; but though Zan knows nothing of the drawing either, it means a great deal to him, because he met the subject of the sketch once, in an encounter so brief and frenzied that it lasted only seconds but saved his life.
Zan grew up in the white L.A. suburbs. His parents were midwesterners who came, as his father acknowledged one night during the evening news while black people were being hosed down and attacked by dogs on television, from a past where white and black didn’t meet. Whatever their attitudes about race, Zan’s parents tried to protect him from those attitudes; the n-word wasn’t used in the house. Nonetheless not a single thing about the black experience penetrated Zan’s own until he was the age that his own son is now.
~ ~ ~
That was when he came home one afternoon from school and on his parents’ stereo played a record of country songs sung by a blind black man. This wasn’t the sort of music that Zan had heard before, and though for decades afterward purists would declaim the aesthetic offense of a soul genius committing his voice to such white songs and white strings and white arrangements, to the twelve-year-old Zan the music’s surrounding whiteness made the blackness of the voice all the more shocking.
Decades later Zan understands that, as epiphanies about race go, this is pretty pathetic. Still, it rearranged the furniture in Zan’s head, knocked out one or two of the walls. Zan would know for the rest of his life that this was the most subversive record ever made, the white trojan horse that smuggled a blind black man into the gates of Zan’s white city. Every afternoon, returning home from school, Zan snuck the record down to his own room and listened to it over and over, the volume low because it felt like something he should get in trouble for, like reading a forbidden book.