These Dreams of You

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Also secret from Zan is a drawing on the opening blank page of the old battered paperback that the girl has dropped. Nor does the unnamed man left for dead in the street know of the drawing, because by the time he wakes, it isn’t there, having been ripped mysteriously from the book in the hours between.

It’s a drawing of a woman who happens to be the teenage girl’s mother. The sketch is crude and quick but not untalented, done with colored pencils, the woman in shades of brown except for her distinctive, misplaced gray eyes. None of this can mean anything to the man lying in the street; but though Zan knows nothing of the drawing either, it means a great deal to him, because he met the subject of the sketch once, in an encounter so brief and frenzied that it lasted only seconds but saved his life.

Zan grew up in the white L.A. suburbs. His parents were midwesterners who came, as his father acknowledged one night during the evening news while black people were being hosed down and attacked by dogs on television, from a past where white and black didn’t meet. Whatever their attitudes about race, Zan’s parents tried to protect him from those attitudes; the n-word wasn’t used in the house. Nonetheless not a single thing about the black experience penetrated Zan’s own until he was the age that his own son is now.