These Dreams of You

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Without such faith, I’m nothing. This is the occupational hazard of being of my country, the way one’s identity becomes bound up with a landscape that manifests in its soil and psychitecture an idea, with a people still fighting over who they are because when nothing else is held in common but the idea then if the idea isn’t held in common there’s nothing left except the mystical name of the place that evokes something different for each person but which each person allows himself or herself to believe is the same thing evoked for every other person.

At the campaign rally forty-one years ago, pulled to safety from the frenzied crowd that threatens to catch him in its undertow, the eighteen-year-old Zan feels in his ear the breath of the young black woman who rescues him and whispers something he can’t hear; but lying in the street now, he almost does.

Lying in the street now, Zan confronts the breakdown he’s been trying to avoid since London. He’s stunned by how much this moment feels like a bookend. Finally overwhelmed by despair, that grief of the soul, he cries, My God, where’s my boy? Where’s my little girl? Where’s my wife, where’s my house? Where’s my art, where’s my country? How did I lose it all? At this moment he’s convinced it’s all been a dream: “I know I did something wrong,” he sobs out loud, “but I don’t know what.” What lapse of perspective undid him? What ambition failed him? What did he take for granted? What did he value too much or too little? What thing was undone that should have been done, or what was done that shouldn’t have been? To what dream did he commit himself that was folly? How is it that he was so old when he was so young, and how has he now been reduced to something so childish even as he’s so old?