These Dreams of You

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The headline of the review reads AUTHOR PLAGIARIZES THE FUTURE. The piece continues: “. . as if larceny of the future is any less dubious than larceny of the past, Mr. [this being the New York Times] X — who doesn’t have the courage of his own name, never mind his imagination — is that most derivative of novelists, plundering concepts and ideas advanced with more skill and maturity in years to come by other authors better suited to them. The sad lesson of Mr. X’s career is that while genius can be faked, authenticity cannot, so let us leave this slipshod and overwrought body of work on the ash heap of tomorrow where it belongs. . ”

Of course what the reader of Zan’s novel knows, and what even X himself may suspect, is that this review is written by the novel’s author, though whether in some collaboration with the zeitgeist even Zan can’t be certain. Over the course of the next two decades X wanders west. He flees the East Coast’s centers of higher and refined thought until he makes a home amid the West Coast’s various ignominies of artifice and audacity, where shamelessness has so little shame it doesn’t bother calling itself something else. In the late Forties after the War, his literary life a distant shambles, he finds himself working in a small radio station off Hollywood Boulevard, of which the only attraction is the library of 78s by Ellington, Hodges, Holiday, Vaughan, Hawkins, Powell, Young, Webster, and Parker, who’s not to be confused with a twelve-year-old boy named after him fifty years later, and whose father calls him now from the dark Berlin pavement. Fate blesses X by letting him live long enough to again see the Sixties, after already having seen them once at the age of eighteen. Fate curses X by making him, in the year 1968, ninety-one years old.