These Dreams of You

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But everything glistened beyond chemical inducement, the stars in lawns and the dark gawking windows of the sea, the wondrous clockwork of the banal and the shimmer of every color as though the world was washed down in the early hours of each morning by a rain collected in the clouds of every dream the night before. The time existed in some impossible eclipse of the moon by the sun, the two having changed places, the luminance in closer proximity than the lunacy until, at some point that no one noticed until it was too late, the two changed back. Stupid though it all was with a narcissism mistaken for innocence, it also was an epoch stoned on the waft of possibility. Years later Zan knew that if he could find a wind tunnel blowing him back, he would throw himself into its mouth without hesitation and never stop riding the gale.

For years following the publication of his last novel, Zan had nightmares about Ronnie Jack Flowers. It wasn’t that he supposed Flowers might retaliate in some way; rather Zan remains tormented by what he believes is the single greatest lapse of his life, at the very least born out of so much naïveté as to have caused destruction. Some, including friends of Zan, found what he wrote about Flowers so reckless, so thoughtlessly cavalier, that they couldn’t help wondering if he did it on purpose. They couldn’t fathom any other reason for doing it; people were furious with him, and what Zan couldn’t stand was that Flowers thought he did it on purpose too — and why wouldn’t he think so? Then Zan began to wonder if he did do it on purpose; and if it wasn’t racism, then was it an unconscious blow against the opportunism of Flowers’ convictions? Zan went from bookstore to bookstore buying up copies of the novel to get it out of circulation.