These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  Bob never looks up from the ground. “A little late for the theater . . . ” he nods.

  “Never fancied the theatre myself.”

  “Retracing steps . . . ”

  “How’s that?”

  “From, uh, an earlier trip.”

  “Back when you were living here.”

  “No. After the War.”

  “So you’ve been back since?”

  “I met an actress then, in one of the shows.”

  “Not your wife?” Reg says. Jasmine still lags behind alienated, head full of her own voice.

  “No.” He stops to look up at the sky.

  “Fancy being married?”

  “Sure.” The Yank holds out his palm.

  “Kids?”

  “Lots.” Still looking up, “It’s about to rain.”

  “Right, I felt something too.”

  “So we’re checking out the haunts of old flames,” says Jasmine, “brilliant,” and Reg looks at her.

  “I suppose,” Bob answers quietly.

  Reg says, “London bird then,” still looking at Jasmine, finally sensing her mood. She stares back defiantly and Reg tears himself from her stare.

  “She was in a show playing my older sister who, uh, just had been killed in a plane crash.”

  “Hang on,” says Reg. “The actress you were dating was playing your sister?”

  “It’s queer, I suppose.”

  “You suppose it’s queer?” says Jasmine.

  “It is bloody odd,” agrees Reg.

  “Fancied a woman playing your dead sister?” Jasmine says, taking some satisfaction from her own tactlessness.

  “What happened?” says Reg.

  “My father strongly discouraged it.” The Yank adds, wryly, “He, uh, knew something about showgirls.”

  “Or perhaps,” says Jasmine, “just showgirls playing your sister.”

  I’ll bet, she thinks, that he married the very next girl he went out with. So when Bob laughs, “The very next girl I went out with, my brother stole—the girl after that, I married,” she’s startled: Did I say it out loud? she wonders. Turning to her slightly, Bob doesn’t break his stride. “Well, then, mate,” says Reg absently, stopping in the street to look around or maybe just slow the pace, “you needed to nick one back from him. Jaz, is this the way?”

  On the corner is a closed Wimpy Bar. “Nearly did once,” says Bob. No, I didn’t say it out loud, thinks Jasmine. “But he wasn’t the sort—”

  “She’s the native home-town girl,” Reg nods at Jasmine.

  “—who had girls stolen from him.” The park comes into view.

  “I’m not a native and yes it’s the way and,” says Jasmine, “there’s the park.” She turns to Reg. “Can we go now?”

  “But let’s walk him the rest of it,” says Reg.

  “I want to leave.”

  “Where are you from?” Bob says to her.

  Oh don’t bloody bother. To Reg, “I want to leave.”

  “It’s all right,” Bob says to Reg, and points through the trees of the park at a large house lit from the outside, red brick and white columns visible in the lights. “That’s where you’re staying?” says Reg. As the three stand in the street peering at the house, a downpour opens up above and Reg dashes to the Wimpy Bar to take cover under the overhang; Bob follows, though never breaking from his determined stroll. Jasmine remains in the road. “Are you daft?” Reg calls to her. “Get out of there,” but the rain comes down and Jasmine doesn’t move, staring at him, arms folded.

  “I’m going home,” she says.

  “What?” calls Reg. A few feet away, he can’t hear her for the rain.

  “See you at the session,” she says and turns on her heel and walks off, and when Reg calls after her, “Cheers,” she doesn’t answer. When Bob calls, more softly, “Goodbye,” she doesn’t answer that either. Bloody hell, she thinks as she splashes down the road in the rain. The Bloody Impossible Dream. She shakes her head and soon is gone from the men’s sight.

  Reg shrugs to the Yank under the Wimpy Bar overhang. “She’s upset with me,” he says, “we’ll sort it out tomorrow.”

  “I’m the one she’s angry at,” Bob says.

  Reg is surprised. “Why would she be angry at you?”

  It’s becoming cold in the rain. Reg pulls his coat around him closer, but the other, barely noticing, says, “Evil has become a quaint word, hasn’t it?”

  “Uh,” says Reg, “well. ‘Evil’? Don’t suppose I’ve heard it since Church, whenever the last time that was.”

  Watching Jasmine disappear in the distance, Bob says, “How long have you been together?”

  “Not that long,” says Reg. Now he doesn’t want to tell the other man they’re not really a couple. “Met her through the record company. She’s there to keep an eye on us in the studio, and soon I suppose I was keeping an eye on her.”

  “What were you doing before you made records?”

  “Laying bricks back home. Started the band with another bricklayer. Still me day job, construction.”

  “Do you write your songs?”

  “Sometimes. One we’re doing tomorrow is by a cat from your hometown, New York—”

  “I don’t have a hometown . . . ”

  “—but sometimes I change a lyric or two . . . ”

  “ . . . anymore.”

  “ . . . if I think we can get away with it. Make it a bit our own, you know?”

  “No one gets angry at music.”

  “Are you having me on? People get angry at music all the bleeding time.”

  “No one will kill you for it, though.”

  “Not yet.” In the shadow of the Wimpy Bar, the Brit sees the same blue glint of the Yank’s eyes that Jasmine saw. Bob says, “You, uh, don’t have to go the rest of the way.”

  Doesn’t occur to him, thinks Reg, to spot me a few quid for a cab. “So what is it then,” he says, nodding at the large house through the park trees, “if not a hotel?”

  “Ambassador’s residence.”

  “You’re staying with the ambassador?”

  “I lived there as a boy. Queer to be back.”

  “You lived in the ambassador’s house as a boy?”

  “The scene of . . . ” says Bob, and stops. “Whatever can be redeemed, I suppose,” he finally finishes. “But then my religion would make me believe that even if I didn’t want to. My father, uh, his judgment in world affairs was something less than his judgment in showgirls.”

  They continue watching the rain come down from under the Wimpy Bar overhang. Still pulling his coat close, Reg lights another cigarette. Bob says, “What’s your girl’s name again?”

  “You’re not making a move on me old lady, are you?” Reg says it like he’s joking.

  Bob snaps, “No.”

  “Just winding you up a bit. What with stealing birds from your brother and all. Jasmine.”

  “Nearly stole.”

  “Right, nearly.”

  “Didn’t I say nearly?”

  “You did,” Reg assures him.

  Sticking his head out from beneath the dripping overhang, Bob surveys the skies. “She’s African, isn’t she?”

  “What?”

  “Your girl.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “From South Africa.”

  “Don’t remember, mate, I get all those places confused, if you want to know the truth. Same thing, aren’t they? No, she’s from that country with the emperor cat. The one the rastas think is Jesus.”

  “Haile Selassie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ethiopia.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Abyssinia. The beginning of the world. He was at my brother’s funeral.”

  “What?”

  Bob says to Reg, “My brother was better in every way.”

  “The emperor of Ethiopia was at your—?”

  “But he had his weaknesses, and she was one.”

  “Bob? I’ve sort of lost track who
we’re on about.”

  “And we couldn’t have it anymore. And when she didn’t want to let him go—”

  “Right. We’re not talking about the London bird from the theatre anymore.”

  “—she came to me,” but he stops, a man who resents having to explain anything to anyone. “I made her heart sing, for a few hours.”

  “She said that?”

  “She’s gone now. He’s gone too.”

  Bob says, “I was the one . . . not born with gifts. I was the one about whom people said, This is a boy without gifts. I wasn’t the son meant for anything, I was never meant to be the great man. Runt, they called me, sissy they said. Mama’s boy, what shall we do with him? Not born with gifts, I had, uh, only my will. My brothers and sisters were born with gifts, then one by one they were gone and left no more shadows in which to hide. No longer were their gifts for me to serve, when I no longer was a middle brother but the oldest . . . when I was left by default then I made out of my will what I could. You know, most of my life,” he says nodding at the house in the distance, “I would have beaten any man who said or hinted that my father had anything to redeem,” and up until he says it, Reg wouldn’t have imagined this small man beating up anyone; but now he can. Bob turns to Reg. “Sooner or later you have to see the sins of the father for what they are. Your Mr. Churchill understood things more clearly. It doesn’t mean I don’t love my father. It doesn’t mean I didn’t spend my life trying to make him as proud of me as he was of my brothers and sisters.” He looks back at the house. “I do worry if tomorrow is a mistake.”

  Reg says, “Look here, is this about Jaz being a colored bird?”

  “Giving a speech to some students,” says Bob, “but, uh, I’m not sure what to tell them—I don’t think there’s much I can tell them,” in his high nasal voice, “and the government doesn’t want me coming. I mean their government but mine too, I suppose. Will I only succeed in giving the white government a, a . . . an excuse to arrest black Africans? Am I only making trouble? Do I become the . . . rationale by which more blacks are oppressed, beaten, brutalized? Is this about my damned ego? Is this one more test I put myself to, for which other people pay the price, as my brothers paid the price for my father? I keep going over the speech. Taking the anger out. Putting it back in.”

  “What is it these students want from you, then?”

  For the first time tonight the hair-trigger altar boy becomes all of a piece with his sad burning eyes. “I don’t believe one man changes everything,” he says, “maybe no one man changes anything, least of all me. I’m an accident. But I believe there are times when even men who aren’t great must find a way to try and do great things. People think I’m afraid of nothing when the truth is I’m afraid of everything, and not so long ago I vowed before a God I love and trust a little less than I used to that I would do all the things I’m afraid of, because I do believe anyone can change part of something, and that part of something changes something else, and soon the ripple in the lake is the wave on the beach.”

  At Olympic Studios off Baker Street the next day, the session starts late. The band spends most of the morning and early afternoon waiting outside in a van for another session to finish; Reg and Jasmine don’t speak. He tries to tell her about the conversation under the Wimpy overhang in the downpour, but she doesn’t want to hear about it.

  Once in the recording studio, there’s further delay over the tuning of the guitars, and discussion about replacing a whistle in the song’s middle-eight with a flute. Because there’s no time left, the session is necessarily brief, two takes, the second in the can. “You changed one of the lines,” Jasmine complains to Reg and he explains, “Made it a bit our own, yeah?” and she says, “Yeah, well, the bloke who wrote it has this funny idea the song is his.” She’s bitching about everything today, thinks Reg.

  Near the end of the session, she ducks out of the studio and stops on the way home at the pub below the Ad Lib, where Jonesy buys her a drink and she’s stunned by the BBC interview on the telly above the bar. “Bloody hell,” she mutters into her glass, staring at the screen.

  “Hey,” says Jonesy, remembering the night before, “isn’t that . . . ?” How can I be so dim? she thinks. And I’m studying to be a bloody journalist. “Doesn’t really look like that in real life, does he?” Jonesy says. “A lot older in real life.” A week later over a cup of tea, she reads in The Times an article about him in South Africa.

  The article describes him arriving at midnight at the airport outside Johannesburg to no state reception whatsoever, the government having decided to ignore him. Because no one representing the government is there, the airfield is stormed by hundreds of black South Africans to greet him. A few days later at the Cape Town university where he’s scheduled to speak, the government cuts the speaker cables; he speaks anyway—“It’s from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief,” he murmurs, barely audible, “that history is shaped”—stumbling through his address in his high nasal whisper, to silence that precedes the thunderclap of ovation. He rides in the backseat of an open car, recalling for those few reporters able to cover the story, the vast majority having been denied credentials and travel papers, an image that leaves them unnerved. In defiant response to that image, he stands in the backseat rising from the sea of black faces that grows from day to day and town to town.

  He faces down protesters who claim to base their views on Judeo-Christian beliefs by asking how they can be certain God isn’t black. He walks through black villages and the immense crowd doubles, triples, multiplies in what seems unquantifiable exponents; he shakes every black hand that never before has been offered a white hand that didn’t have in it a stick.

  Each rally becomes so large as to leak into the next until it’s as if the entire country is a rally. For everyone who sees him, the astonishing courage of the small shaking man with the limp handshake who said to Reg, “People think I’m afraid of nothing when the truth is I’m afraid of everything,” has about it the force of revelation. “We felt small and meaningless,” the article quotes one of the student leaders, a young woman Jasmine’s age, “and he’s the only man to come tell us we’re not alone. He has reset the moral compass.”

  Over the next year, pursuing her studies in London and continuing to work for the record company, she keeps the Times article as it makes its folded way from one textbook to the next.

  She doesn’t forget the night she met him. She follows his career and speeches back in his own country, alert to any mention in the press of a return to London. In the fall of 1967 she applies for a visa and quits both her job and school, and flies to New York, remaining forty-eight hours before she catches a train to Washington, D.C.

  As a low-level secretary and receptionist, she has worked on his staff for three months before he notices her. By then the Washington office has sent her back to the New York office, and over the course of those three months he brushes past her desk twice, even nodding at her routinely without recognizing her. Then the third time something he can’t place breaks his stride as he passes, before he keeps going. The fourth time, he stops and stares at her.

  Almost puppyish he cocks his head, studying her. To her irritation, having been in his company a couple of hours in London and felt no intimidation, now she’s a bit terrified of him. “You’re new?” he says.

  “About three months,” she says. “I was put on staff in September.”

  Then he remembers: It’s her accent, she realizes. “London,” smiling the small smile as he walks away, “you were angry at me.” A week later Jasmine sits at her desk daydreaming about Christmas trees and spending her first holiday abroad when the woman who hired her calls her into a cubicle. “Just how settled are you here?” says the woman.

  “What do you mean ‘here’?”

  “New York.”

  Jasmine shrugs. “Fancy getting a proper little Christmas tree.”

  “Get a proper little Christmas tree in Washington. They want you back down the
re, maybe for a while.”

  By ten o’clock that night she’s back in Washington. For a few days she’s doing the same work that she was in New York. On the weekend she takes the train back to pack the rest of her things and hasn’t been in her flat twenty minutes before the phone rings. “What are you doing here in New York?” says the woman who hired her, on the other end of the line.

  “Sorry?”

  “Didn’t I tell you to get down to D.C.?”

  Jasmine says, “Right, well, I came back to get the rest of my thi—”

  “They’re looking for you down there.”

  “I’ve been there all week.”

  “The senator was looking for you this morning,” huffs the woman, slightly irate. “Get back there this afternoon.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “You know, this isn’t a normal job.”

  Jasmine returns to Washington that afternoon. She goes to the office and finds it closed. “But where is everyone?” she says to somebody passing in the corridor of the Senate building. She returns to the office the next day, Sunday, and it’s still closed; she reports Monday morning. Making no effort to hide her pique, she says to her immediate supervisor, “What was the rush, then?”

  “How’s that?” He has long red hair and glasses and isn’t much older than she is.

  “I’m trying to move my belongings. Half of me still is in New York.” She storms back to her desk and half an hour later the supervisor comes over. “He wants to see you,” indicating the door over his shoulder, down the carpeted hall. She walks down the hall and knocks at the door and, when she doesn’t get an answer, opens it anyway.