These Dreams of You

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It doesn’t take long for X to realize, of course, that once he finishes this book, the entire future of Twentieth Century literature — from massive tomes about tubercular patients in German mountaintop sanatoria before World War I to gripping epics of the Spanish Civil War, with Gary Cooperish saboteurs boinking seductive latina guerrillas — is at his fingertips, waiting to be rewritten. He lies in his bunk at night staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the waves outside the portal crash against the ship: I will be the greatest genius of all time.

“The Novel,” Zan begins his address to the University of London seminar, “as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century. Or, the Evolution of History to Pure Fiction, which at least is where we’ll begin. The novel is born in a series of rewrites,” and behind him is a blowup of the image from the television report of the new president with the word ANTICHRIST underneath. The university must already want back its £3,500, Zan wonders soberly; he looks out at sixty or seventy students not including Parker, for whom spending time with his sister has become so unacceptable that he prefers listening to his father’s drone. Somewhere outside the hall, Zan hears a shriek that he knows is Sheba, somewhere else in the building with the new nanny. Parker looks toward the sound too, then at Zan, where son and father catch each other’s eye and the boy smiles.