These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

He considers sneaking downstairs to peruse Viv’s email, but he’s never done that and finally can’t convince himself there’s a reason to now. He collapses back into his pillow and returns to his restless sleep, listening to the rats in the vents.

Sometimes when no one else is awake, Zan returns to a new novel that no one knows he’s writing. The novel is about a middle-aged L.A. writer who, feeling discouraged and despondent — this isn’t remotely autobiographical — escapes to Berlin a few years after the fall of the Wall. The middle-aged writer befriends (or so he believes) a young German skinhead who’s besotted with the New World, except it’s a New World of white supremacists and cracked midwest Nazi messiahs.