These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Zan has to admit it’s creepy. “O.K., we’re leaving,” he assures them, but Parker doesn’t want to go back on the lift so the father dashes from door to door until rashly he flings open the emergency exit — only to find himself on the street, out on the sidewalk, traffic rushing past him. He realizes that the “lift” is a ruse. They haven’t been underground at all. “I don’t know,” he says to the silent kids on the Tube back to the hotel, “if that’s really where Winston Churchill was during the Blitz.”

At two in the London morning, still fully in the thrall of jetlag after the kids have begun to readjust, Zan tries to compose his lecture on the Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century. Instead he peeks at the fitful story he began back in the canyon; his main character, the washed-up, middle-aged L.A. writer left for dead in the Berlin street by both skinhead murderers and their witness — the black teenage girl who dropped her book by his body — stirs and opens his eyes.