These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson Page B

course. You said.”
    â€œI assume you take the train from Waterloo Station.”
    â€œI think that’s right.”
    â€œShall I come by the hotel or meet you at Waterloo then?”
    â€œYou suck,” Parker says to Sheba.
    â€œI hate you!” Sheba answers before turning her attention back to Molly. Zan says wearily to the woman, “At eleven at Waterloo,” instead of what he was about to say, which was, I’m sure the kids are going to love you.

A s Molly disappears down the road from Cartwright Gardens, Sheba watches her as intently as she did from the pub window. Zan waits to see if the woman looks back and convinces himself that at one point she’s paused, for the slightest of moments, summoning the will to stare straight ahead.
    She’s pretty, more round than heavy, and has some of the extraterrestrial features of Ethiopians. She doesn’t look anything like Sheba who, Zan remembers, takes after her handsome father. Perhaps the very strange thought that will grow stranger and bigger in his head never would have occurred to him if he and the children hadn’t seen her outside the pub, returning the girl’s watch with her own, or if she hadn’t told him where she was born. “Good lord,” he can hear Viv exclaiming in front of the laptop a few weeks ago, staring at her email. “Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany?”

A ll of his life Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence. In part it’s the very unlikeliness of this young woman, who’s not quite here and not quite there, not quite this and not quite that, that makes what Zan thinks and feels not only possible to him but nearly inescapable. It would be so utterly in keeping with the late tenor of their lives, with the way the stars have aligned so mischievously since Sheba’s arrival, with the feeling that these last two years the universe has been putting them to a test, setting Viv off on some misbegotten journey to find an answer that in fact finds them. But more than anything, what keeps yanking Zan back from both sleep and reason that night, as his mind struggles to find both, is the music that Molly made when she came in the room. As when Sheba arrived in the canyon, the woman was filled with songs, snatches of them, few belonging to her—as if any music belongs to anyone—with the room turned into a receiver, tuned between stations, Sheba at one end of the dial and Molly at the other.
    The lead character in Zan’s novel still doesn’t have a name. Almost in petulance but hardly to be mysterious, Zan marks the character with an X, as though he’s a spot on a map. If Zan were writing with a quill, he imagines slashing the parchment.
    Having been pummeled and beaten nearly eighty years into the past to the spring of 1919, X manages to get himself a tiny cabin on a cross-Atlantic ocean liner sailing from Le Havre to New York. His only company is the battered paperback copy, mysteriously dropped by his body, of a novel that won’t be published for another three years.

T here are amenities of the future that X misses—music, most of all—but otherwise he feels little sense of loss. Halfway in his voyage, at the longitude of thirty-three and a third, he wanders the decks of the ship, mulling how whatever chance he ever had of becoming a great novelist in the Nineties now is gone, when the epiphany hits him.
    He stares at the paperback and rushes back to his cabin where, at a small table before the porthole, he begins to copy the words in his own hand (oh yes, definitely his own hand). When the ship’s captain lends him a typewriter, X calculates that if he copies even just five pages a day, he’ll finish by the fall, more than two years before the book is published.

I t doesn’t take long for X to realize, of course, that once he finishes this book, the entire future of Twentieth Century literature—from massive tomes about tubercular