Over time Zan made some fragile peace with the episode. He tried to convince himself that although one is responsible for what he does, he can’t be responsible for every injustice and unfairness with which the culture responds; and for his part Flowers picked up the bits of his life, worked for a while with a civil rights group in L.A. — so Zan could tell himself that the man was forced by what Zan wrote to stop living a lie, forced to do with his life what he ought to be doing. But this is crap and Zan knows it. It was the other man’s choice how to live his life, even if it meant becoming a rightwinger and a phony one at that; and Zan’s betrayal, if betrayal doesn’t necessarily call for malice, exists on its own terms.
In the Twenty-First Century “the arc of the story changes,” is how Zan concludes his address on the novel in London two weeks ago, which is another lifetime to the man lying in the street. Behind Zan’s lectern is the blow-up of the television image of the president, branded with the word ANTICHRIST. “Maybe this has been going on awhile,” says Zan, “but now the arc of the imagination bends back to history, because it can’t compete with history.” A black Hawaiian with a swahili name? It’s the sort of history that puts novelists out of business. The arc of revision bends back to the original, except now the original has been revised to the point it’s become a negative of itself. In its umpteenth rewrite, the story is still — as some back in Zan’s country would have it — that of a baby born in secret, smuggled to a land where he’ll become king of its people, except now it’s not a new testament but a demonic scheme, now it’s a sign from God not of a beginning but an end, and now the protagonist no longer is the pale glowing image into which the original story transformed him from his hebraic reality over two thousand years of rewrites, but the reverse.
What was white is black. The arc of the story has gone so far, who’s to say that the revision hasn’t become the original? Who’s to say that Saint Mark himself didn’t get conked on the head and mugged in the streets of Alexandria, and then wake up and steal his story from a newer future-version dropped at his side? Who’s to say that in another past he didn’t get knocked unconscious and wake to find, left there beside him by some mysterious stranger, the version of the story that he copied, after turning the black antichrist into a golden hero? Maybe our version of the story, from this time, is the real one, and the other from two thousand years ago is the clone.
He’s the mix-tape president of a mix-tape country, full of songs that it seemed everyone heard and loved and sang in common when he was elected. Now no one hears that song anymore, only all the other songs on the tape that they ignored. He’s a partisan. He’s a pushover. He’s a radical; he’s a sell-out. He’s rigid, he’s vacillating; he’s naïve, he’s expedient; he’s ubiquitous, he’s remote. In Zan’s lifetime never has a president been heard so differently by so many, but what everyone now holds in common is what they don’t hear anymore, which was his music that once so mesmerized them and now seems to have gone silent.