These Dreams of You

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Within Zan’s first week as a college student, he published a piece in the university newspaper about the prospective presidential candidacy of a senator who, like Zan, once was a rightwinger and now was. . what? besides the brother of a martyred president, and embraced by blacks as no white politician had been since the president who ended slavery a century before.

In his student writing group that met off campus, Zan remained odd man out from the beginning. When the joint was passed he was the only one who declined, which raised eyebrows a week later when the class arrived to find it narrowly had missed a police bust. Zan immediately was suspected as the rat, “then we read your writing,” one of Zan’s fellow students explained later, “and realized you’re the trippiest one of all.” Zan’s teacher was a New Englander named Logan Hale, a novelist in his mid-fifties of some renown; as a young man Hale had been Leon Trotsky’s bodyguard in Mexico in the Thirties, resigning when he became convinced that Trotsky’s inevitable murder in fact was, for all intents and purposes, suicide — contrition by Trotsky for the Stalinism that he not only hadn’t stopped but, in his own mind, set in motion.