These Dreams of You

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Lying in the hotel bed, Zan holds his head. Since his final forty-eight hours in London he’s had a low-grade migraine that he treats with aspirin and caffeine — which makes the headache better until it makes it worse — and what modest quantity of codeine can be bought over the counter in Europe. If he can doze at all, the discomfort is bearable when he wakes in the morning before it spirals, over the course of the day, into the clutch of evening, when it’s accompanied by nausea. Since the episode a few hours ago with Parker and the taxicab, it’s become excruciating.

Zan and Viv used to joke that Parker was conceived in Berlin. When they split up years before and Zan ran to Berlin, it was where he realized he belonged back with Viv; not long after that, she was pregnant. Coming undone, Zan went to Berlin because it was the farthest place he could go before the act of traveling east turned into the act of returning west. But mostly he went because he got on the wrong car of the train. It was the aftermath of the publication of his last novel that somehow turned into a political weapon and cost another man his livelihood; those were the years when the sense of possibility that it once seemed his country might fulfill, the sense of possibility that reminded Zan what a fever dream his country could be when he was young. . that possibility was on the run as well. The Berlin Wall was his country’s final outpost. It was where presidents said, Tear it down, and, Let them come to Berlin, and where a future president said, not so long ago, This is our time.