These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

A series of rewrites, says Zan, “of a single story written nearly a century if not more after the life of the man who inspired the narrative, and titled according to authors who almost certainly didn’t write them. In other words they’re noms de plume—‘Matthew,’ ‘Mark,’ ‘Luke,’ ‘John,’ to put them in their later order.”

The thing is, Zan explains, the original narrative wasn’t Matthew’s but Mark’s. “Mark’s was the first version written,” says Zan, “certainly the most straightforward,” referring only obliquely when at all to what later became basic tenets about the protagonist’s divinity. The climax of the story, the protagonist becoming undead—“forerunner of the current zombie phenomenon in fiction,” points out Zan — is underwhelming compared to later versions. The executed man’s mother goes to the tomb, finds the stone rolled aside from the entrance, her son’s body gone. A stranger is there in his place. “He’s, uh, just gone,” the stranger says, ending the story on a note as modern as it is enigmatic.