These Dreams of You

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Some months ago, shortly before the election, Zan underwent a routine medical procedure, and lying on the table he was fascinated by the part of his brain that resisted the anesthetic even though he chose to have it and in fact would be terrified of not having it. Then, lying on the table feeling his mind resisting, he worried that — like someone who can’t sleep because he lies in bed worrying about not being able to sleep — he might not be able to go under and would remain conscious during the procedure. Not to mention the enormous conceit of believing that his will was stronger than anesthesia, Zan was caught between clinging to awareness and desiring its surrender. His last fleeting thought before the anesthesia took over was to wonder why the patient is asked to count backward from one hundred when he never gets past ninety-seven. Wouldn’t starting at ten do? Or five?

Back in the canyon, the canyon that he’s not even sure anymore he’s ever lived in, Zan would drive through pockets of sunlight that he recognized as the same sunlight from forty years before when he was eighteen years old. Driving into this light he would have the feeling that he seems to have more and more as he gets older — of the past seeping into the present and marked by the quality of a particular light when he turns a bend of the road. Light is constant, he thinks, it has no past or future but always is present, so it’s always the same light; and entering these grottos of the same light that was there so many years ago, he remembers everything that happened and who it all happened with, stalactites of light and most of all the songs, every fissure with a melody all its own.