conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Dreams, Christopher, Byrd with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'These Dreams of You'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: These Dreams of You
  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.
  An anti-Stalinist, Trotsky-estranged Marxist, Hale was a dedicated outsider wary of being any movement's flunky, and though Zan didn't share the professor's politics, the iconoclasm was irresistible. Zan saw in the mentor another odd man out; it's possible Hale saw in a protégé the same thing.
  One afternoon the presidential candidate Zan had written about for the university newspaper made a campaign stop at the campus. Zan never had seen close up someone who might become president. The day was ravishing: fluttery and saturated with itself in the way that days were back then; but Zan had no sense until later how unusual the afternoon was.
  There was a frenzy about the campaign for this candidate that Zan wouldn't see again until forty years later, in the campaign of the man whose election and appearance in Chicago Zan watched that November night with Sheba sitting on his lap. It was a frenzy not simply of hope but yearning so desperate as to be hysteria, and that afternoon in the campus quad it seemed to him the crowd might devour the candidate, a slight man whose frailness conveyed less strength than an impossible, even irrational courage, inspiring in the crowd a savagery that was tender but savage nonetheless. The candidate and crowd shared an appetite for sacrifice and would make a ritual of it.
  Zan got close to where the man stood. Was it on a platform? or in the back of an open car not unlike that in which the man's brother had been shot? In any case, what Zan never forgot was the pain burning in the man's gaze and the ecstasy—like he was Joan of Arc—of a crowd so increasingly unhinged that it wouldn't have surprised Zan, wouldn't have surprised anyone, had anyone told him or everyone else at that moment that within the month the man would be as dead as his brother.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' He already was old before his time when she met him in London nearly two years ago and now he's older still.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Except for the swirl of papers on his desk and the children's drawings tacked to a cork bulletin board over his shoulder, his office is no more settled than her apartment in New York, though he's been here not three months but three years. In any event it's not the space of someone planning to stay long. He swivels back and forth a bit manically, brooding at nothing she can discern; his hand holding the ice cream spoon, with his sleeve he brushes the forelock of his hair from his face. "I hear you're, uh, still upset with me," he finally says. He points at a chair on the other side of the desk from him and she takes it.
  He waits a moment, turns back to her and throws up his arms as if to say, Well? "Whether to run for president," she says.
  He takes off the black-rimmed glasses. "That was straightforward," he allows, at once relieved and vexed.
  She rises from the chair and at the door stops, the thought tripping her up. "Is it because I'm black? I mean, I don't know what you have in mind, do I, but whatever it is—?"
  He already looks like a phantom, and on the campaign trail over the next four months, he forever seems on the verge of falling apart. When he speaks to crowds he shakes, rushing through speeches when he's not stumbling; sometimes the words run into each other as if spoken by a drunk man or, worse, a man seized by a stroke. On planes and buses after each rally, he crumples into seats, passing out in a sweat, fevered by dark providences and the irredeemable. He's bleached of color, seems to be disappearing before everyone's eyes. He already was old before his time when she met him in London nearly two years ago and now he's older still.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As she sits eating her enchilada, Viv says to her, with what she hopes is just the right degree of bluntness so as to arouse a response, "Would you rather be called something other than Sheba?"
  Dusk falls and what's left of the light leaks from the day. Zan wedges a flashlight between the bridge's rafters and turns it on, splashing it against the ceiling of the old railroad car. Both kids are asleep where Viv made a bed, but after half an hour Sheba rises and walks over and for the first time since London slips into her mother's arms there in the rocking chair—where years ago Viv breast-fed her son—that Zan borrowed but she has taken back.
  As Viv rocks in the chair to her daughter's new music, Sheba curls in her mother's arms as she used to with the guard at the orphanage back in Addis Ababa, when as a two-year-old she rose in the night and ran through the yard in the rain to his post at the gate.
  Though to the outer waking world Sheba's dream is only a few seconds, in her sleep she understands it's a long voyage. Poised at the ship's bow, transmitting a distant song, she sails in search of the word that will name her, a word for those who've never belonged anywhere and who make their own belonging in the same way that people used to name themselves after where they belonged, the same word as that for the grief that goes on grieving for what's not remembered but can't be forgotten. As the girl and her brother and mother and father step from the boat onto shore, the word isn't paradise or heaven or utopia or promisedland but rather a name as damaged as it is spellbinding to everyone who's heard it since the first time anyone spoke it, then tarnished it, then hijacked it, then exploited it, then betrayed and debased and then emptied it, loving the sound of it while despising everything it means that can't be denied anyway because it's imprinted on the modern gene which is to say that even as the girl pursues it, it's already found her, passed on by her adopted father in whose ear it was whispered one afternoon when, from a crowd desperate to hear the secret of it, he was pulled by a young woman of the Old World and the beginning of time, and now it binds daughter and father though neither knows it, she carries it in her fierce core, armed to defend it with that blade of a finger she draws across her throat, and the word is america.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Asleep, reaching, lifting, sailing.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As she sits eating her enchilada, Viv says to her, with what she hopes is just the right degree of bluntness so as to arouse a response, "Would you rather be called something other than Sheba?"
  Dusk falls and what's left of the light leaks from the day. Zan wedges a flashlight between the bridge's rafters and turns it on, splashing it against the ceiling of the old railroad car. Both kids are asleep where Viv made a bed, but after half an hour Sheba rises and walks over and for the first time since London slips into her mother's arms there in the rocking chair—where years ago Viv breast-fed her son—that Zan borrowed but she has taken back. 
  As Viv rocks in the chair to her daughter's new music, Sheba curls in her mother's arms as she used to with the guard at the orphanage back in Addis Ababa, when as a two-year-old she rose in the night and ran through the yard in the rain to his post at the gate. Asleep, the girl dreams of the leviathan wave that roars through the mouth of the canyon but, reaching the railroad bridgehouse and lifting it from its moorings like a boat, becomes a gentle tide sailing her family to somewhere better. 
  Though to the outer waking world Sheba's dream is only a few seconds, in her sleep she understands it's a long voyage. Poised at the ship's bow, transmitting a distant song, she sails in search of the word that will name her, a word for those who've never belonged anywhere and who make their own belonging in the same way that people used to name themselves after where they belonged, the same word as that for the grief that goes on grieving for what's not remembered but can't be forgotten. As the girl and her brother and mother and father step from the boat onto shore, the word isn't paradise or heaven or utopia or promisedland but rather a name as damaged as it is spellbinding to everyone who's heard it since the first time anyone spoke it, then tarnished it, then hijacked it, then exploited it, then betrayed and debased and then emptied it, loving the sound of it while despising everything it means that can't be denied anyway because it's imprinted on the modern gene which is to say that even as the girl pursues it, it's already found her, passed on by her adopted father in whose ear it was whispered one afternoon when, from a crowd desperate to hear the secret of it, he was pulled by a young woman of the Old World and the beginning of time, and now it binds daughter and father though neither knows it, she carries it in her fierce core, armed to defend it with that blade of a finger she draws across her throat, and the word is america.