These Dreams of You

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All of his life Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence. In part it’s the very unlikeliness of this young woman, who’s not quite here and not quite there, not quite this and not quite that, that makes what Zan thinks and feels not only possible to him but nearly inescapable. It would be so utterly in keeping with the late tenor of their lives, with the way the stars have aligned so mischievously since Sheba’s arrival, with the feeling that these last two years the universe has been putting them to a test, setting Viv off on some misbegotten journey to find an answer that in fact finds them. But more than anything, what keeps yanking Zan back from both sleep and reason that night, as his mind struggles to find both, is the music that Molly made when she came in the room. As when Sheba arrived in the canyon, the woman was filled with songs, snatches of them, few belonging to her — as if any music belongs to anyone — with the room turned into a receiver, tuned between stations, Sheba at one end of the dial and Molly at the other.

The lead character in Zan’s novel still doesn’t have a name. Almost in petulance but hardly to be mysterious, Zan marks the character with an X, as though he’s a spot on a map. If Zan were writing with a quill, he imagines slashing the parchment.

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.