These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  Later she’ll realize he’s not as small as he seems. Standing upright to his full height, he comes within a couple inches of six feet. But now behind his desk, the chair he sits in yawns as if to swallow him.

  Everything sags from his eyes to his clothes. His coat is off and his tie barely tied; his shirtsleeves are rolled up and she’s surprised that his arms are distinctly hairy. He wears dark rimmed glasses that she’s never seen on him. He swivels slightly in the chair eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream, a man who once arrived at his own swearing-in for a job by sliding down the White House banister. In the last few years he’s grown old too fast, bowls of ice cream at odds with the black cloud he brings everywhere he goes.

  Jasmine isn’t sure whether he answered when she knocked and she didn’t hear, or he just didn’t answer. She feels like she’s been standing in the doorway several minutes—though she knows it can’t have been that long—before his gaze wanders from whatever he’s fixed on in the air before him.

  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.

  “Just trying to sort out where I’m supposed to be,” she says.

  “You’re supposed to be here,” he says.

  “Good to know.” She adds, “I’m not always upset.”

  “I remember,” he nods, “you did have a sense of humor. Mostly at my expense.”

  “Well, sir, as I recall, you don’t know Elvis Presley from Paul McCartney.”

  “Yes, I’m sure anyone would find that uproarious. I know who Frank Sinatra is,” he points out with the ice cream spoon. “It’s queer after that night,” he says, “for you to call me sir.”

  “Doesn’t feel proper calling you anything else.”

  “Probably not,” he agrees, “not around here anyway. So I’ve, uh, been asking everyone the same question—practically, you know, stopping people in the street . . . ” He looks out the window toward the street.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what the question is?”

  “Yes.”

  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.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Yes,” she repeats.

  “Is that, uh, ‘yes,’ as in, Yes you know the question that I’m asking everyone, or as in, Yes I should run?”

  “Yes you should run.”

  He takes off the black-rimmed glasses. “That was straightforward,” he allows, at once relieved and vexed.

  “Do you fancy running for president?”

  “Fancy it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s the question”—and now the kid in him swivels all the way around in the chair—“everyone asks me.” He stops before the window and the trees along the Mall in the distance. “Know much about presidential politics?”

  “No.”

  “Still studying . . . it was journalism, right?”

  “Not in a while.”

  “Still think politics is, uh, whatever it was you said that night? A waste of time.”

  “I don’t think I put it that way, sir.”

  “Pretty much.” He glances at her over his shoulder. “What changed?” and she doesn’t answer but, as if she did, he returns to the window. “Do you have family?”

  “Dad more or less disappeared when I was young. Mum died three years ago.”

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  “A brother. Don’t see him much either. He’s older.”

  “How much?”

  “Eight years.”

  He murmurs, “My brother was eight years older. I keep wondering what he would say but perhaps that doesn’t matter—he thought everyone else should be careful except him. He wasn’t careful.” The bowl of ice cream finished, he swivels back to put it on the desk. “No modern president’s ever been denied the nomination of his political party. You have to go back to, who? Cleveland?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Truman was the most unpopular man in the damned country by the time he ran. The children of Franklin Roosevelt, the man who appointed him, tried to take away the party’s nomination and give it to Eisenhower, who didn’t even belong to the party. Eisenhower only saved the world—and they still couldn’t do it. Theodore Roosevelt, most revered president since Lincoln, tried to take the nomination of his party from President Taft, who nobody liked and came in third in a three-man election,” he leans over the bowl on the desk, “and Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t do it,” and stares into the bowl as though it’s bottomless. “I need more ice cream.”

  She says, “Times change?”

  “Yes times change,” he agrees, “but the system changes last, after everything else. If I run, it will be Bad Bobby again. Ruthless Bobby. Everything that those who hate me have ever said about me, it shall all be true. Selfish Little Son-of-a-Bitch Bobby who can’t wait to get back in the White House. Every damned office-holder of my party, which is to say those who control the party, will hate me because it will just complicate the hell out of their lives and their own political fortunes. And when people are for me, they won’t be for me. They’ll be for him.”

  “You’re wrong,” she shakes her head.

  “On the other hand, there’s Dante.”

  “Dante?”

  “Uh, ‘the hottest place in hell . . . ’ etcetera.”

  “Etcetera?”

  “Is reserved for those who do nothing when faced with a moral choice.” He blurts, “Whatever I do, I need your help.”

  “Right. Of course. I would be honored.” It sounds funny but she means it.

  “Not too honored. I don’t deserve that.”

  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—?”

  “How can you wonder that,” he says, “if neither of us knows what I have in mind?”

  “I’ve never been all that conscious of that part of me. With these white woman’s gray eyes, I suppose.”

  “Ethiopia.”

  She’s impressed. “Did I tell you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Folks moved my brother and me when I was two—Dad was a med student. As I always heard it, the idea was eventually to come on over here. They got as far as London before they split up.”

  “If we do this, remember to bring the angry woman with you. I’ll need her.”

  “I’m not an angry woman.”

  “Bring the one with the sense of humor then.”

  “I’ll bring them all,” and with a start she’s unsettled by how much he already looks like a phantom. “There’s more than one.”

  “Yeah? Try being me.”

  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.

  But then he gathers intensity, prying himself loose from the grip of whoever he was in the past, now in pursuit of something inside him th
at he no longer can refuse to believe in—and finally catching it, though he can’t be sure that it hasn’t caught him. He holds out to the crowd his open hand as if it’s filled with a beating heart pulled from his own chest, and his persona is made raw; the motorcade moves down the street and men twice his size, their knees and hands bloodied, have to hold him around the waist so he’s not pulled away by the crowd who would disrobe him, pick him clean of his cufflinks and tie and shoes, benignly strip him as naked as their feelings for him and his for them or, more ferociously, divide him up among them in pieces. He refuses to allow about the campaign the air of celebration on which campaigns depend. When he whispers to her at a rally in Los Angeles, These are my people, it’s not a boast; he derives from it as little exhilaration as he does from the rest. He won’t reconcile himself to the old rituals of politics or to even the rituals of new politics that he in part invented. He’s come to be mortified by the political truisms to which he once devoted himself.

  The campaign is shambolic, a moving pandemonium. More than anything it resembles an act of penance, the lashed slog from one station of the cross to the next; when he unconsciously touches the heads of poor children, brushes their cheeks with a finger, it’s more priestly than political. Jasmine can’t imagine how, if he manages to get elected, he’ll survive the job—not because he isn’t tough enough, certainly not because he isn’t committed enough, but because he’s altogether too committed, because he gives altogether too much, beyond what any sane self can stand or give. Retreating to the edges of staff meetings where he lies on a couch saying nothing as some point of strategy is hashed over, he ends arguments with decisions so succinct and raging (“Indiana is essential, we need to not just win there but crush”) that Jasmine can only be mystified by the method and math of democrazy that she’s come to spell with a z.

  Wild and frenzied from kansan desolations that no foreigner can imagine short of the moon, where white college students chase the bus and train just to call to him the goodbyes that will be unbearable to remember in three months, to indianan victories not crushing enough, to oregonian defeats that leave him precarious on the edge of political oblivion, little of it seems to have bearing on what he speaks of to privileged and working-class alike: the rats of the black tenements and the self-killing grounds of Indian reservations, delano daughters with hands stained by the vineyards on which they barely subsist and delta sons with bodies misshapen by hunger. This is prosperity, he bays at them beneath montana nights, calculated as much by what’s polluted, what’s killed, what’s secured and incarcerated, but never by a child’s delight, a poem’s spell, the immutable power of a kept promise. It’s a prosperity that measures everything that means nothing and nothing that means everything. It tells all of us, he concludes to the crowds, everything about our country except why it’s ours.

  There’s another sort of murder, he warns—and does he intend it as prophecy? or does the prophetic just come naturally, not by virtue of what he foresees but what he knows in his bones—a sort of murder as fatal as the sniper’s gunshot, and that’s the violence of the institution that never sees the poor in their rags or hears the sob of the hungry or feels the touch of the forsaken. This violence shatters the spirit. It not only accepts but advances the premise that this is a country where it’s acceptable to succeed by destroying people’s dreams and breaking their hearts.

  Jasmine has no way of knowing that this campaign is singularly different from any other. It reminds her more of a concert tour not just in its organization but its entropy. Glumly assessing a campaign poster of himself, he says, “Am I a Beatle?” and winks at her about the inside joke; but when the crowds tear his clothes and steal his shoes, wanting a handful of his hair that grows longer, she realizes this is on another level from what she’s expected let alone known. “Are all campaigns over here like this?” she finally asks an aide in one of the Los Angeles suburbs. This is on an afternoon when, casting aside her clipboard, she pulls to safety a teenage boy a few years younger than she is, who’s been lifted off his feet by the crowd and nearly pulled under to be trampled or crushed. The aide doesn’t have to answer, given the look on his face, but does anyway. “No campaign,” he says, “has ever been like this,” and in his face she sees the terror at what’s been unleashed that no one can control.

  Pulled from the crowd, the teenage boy hears Jasmine—leaning close to his face—whisper in his ear a single word; and though Jasmine wouldn’t dispute that she did so, she has no distinct recollection of it though it isn’t a word that would surprise either of them if they could relive the moment, stop and catch the word in the air and hear it again.

  There’s more than one of me, she said to him that afternoon months before, back in the capitol, and he answered, “Try being me,” and she sees all the versions of him in the room of an Indianapolis Marriott on an early-April night of murder that can’t help feeling to everyone like a foretelling. The network reportage from the television in the other room is on a kind of loop, delivering the same news over and over so as to try and shake off the shock of it; and dozing on the bedroom floor she still can hear people crying in other parts of the suite but she’s moved most by the silence from outside, since alone among all cities tonight, on this particular night this particular city isn’t gripped by riot because the man who lies on the bed a few feet away in the same room dared to go break the news to a black crowd in the ghetto a few hours ago, a few miles away.

  It was cold that night but the rain was fine and dry like ash blown in from the southwest all its way from that motel balcony in Memphis, and the torchlight was still the red haze of the mind’s fires not yet lit. When they first drove up to the rally it wasn’t clear how many had heard the news, only that most hadn’t, especially those who came early so they could be within touching distance, or spitting distance a few feet back, or shooting distance a few more feet back.

  An aide hurriedly scribbled some brief remarks for him—and then please Senator let’s get the fuck out of here. But stepping from the car, taking the first step up to the platform to address everyone, each and every face before him black, he crumpled the speech and stuck it in his overcoat pocket and just went up and told them. He’s dead. Shot and killed tonight, he told them—and then he talked not for a minute or two or five but nearly ten, talked over the roar of gunfire heard in his mind’s ear four and a half years since Dallas, “so go home tonight,” he told them, “and yes say a prayer for Dr. King and his family, but say one too for our country that we love,” and for those close enough to see, the pain in his eyes was his passport to theirs, the signal of truth and his right to say it and theirs to hear it.

  Then however many hours later it is, from her place on the floor in the room at the Marriott she can’t tell at first if he sleeps or just stares at the ceiling. Nevertheless all his versions of himself are there on the bed with him: that man of thoughtless courage who broke the news to the ghetto tonight; the man who presumed in such a mean moment to quote Greek poets and call for the taming of men’s savagery and making gentle the life of the world; the petty man possessive of his own calamitous heartbreaks who afterward admonished those around him for their sorrow, snapping that this wasn’t the greatest tragedy in the history of the Republic, as though this murder of a black Atlanta preacher had the temerity to move anyone as much as another of a president fifty-five months earlier; the blunt man who practically spat at Jasmine in the early morning London hours “South Africa” as though to provoke her, as though to dare her to engage his conscience and expose her own; the guilty man remembering that in another life not so long ago he approved electronic surveillance of the black preacher now dead in Memphis; the stirred man who called the victim’s widow to offer solace, a word he prefers to “comfort” because it sounds less secular; the newly afraid man, corpses of fears he hoped he had killed still fresh, maybe not even corpses. The man who hears the echo of a future already fired and on its trajectory.

  All of the versions of him lie t
here on the bed and then she hears one of them in the room’s fading light. “The pain. The pain that can’t forget,” he says, “must find a way to rain forgiveness on the heart until there grows a wisdom and grace as close to God’s as we can manage. The Negro in this country understands the country’s promise better than anyone because he’s felt its betrayal. I don’t have the right to ask them to believe me. No white politician does. Six years ago when I was Attorney General and the Freedom Riders took their buses into Alabama and they were beaten and hosed down and run down by dogs and they asked me to protect them, I just wanted them to stop making trouble. Just stop, I said. You’re making trouble! Don’t be in a hurry! That seems a different life now. That man . . . seems a different man, or I hope he is, anyway. So many times in this country, faith has been asked of the children of slaves to only dishonest and treacherous ends. The children of slaves took a leap of faith six years ago out on that Mall in the shadow of our most haunting memorial and now, now that he’s been shot down, we ask them to take another leap. If it’s true that the promise of this country can’t be kept until white begs the forgiveness of black, it’s as true that the promise can’t be kept until the black man decides whether to extend that forgiveness—and slavery’s child is under no obligation to do that. In our hearts on which rains the pain that we can’t forget, we know that. Who knows how such a thing can happen, the request for forgiveness and the granting of it? What historic moment can represent that? A black man or woman someday running, perhaps, for the office that I run for now? But we can’t tell the slave’s child whether to forgive. We can’t pretend it’s incumbent on blacks to do that. One more time the fate of the country and its meaning is in the same black hands that built the White House, the same hearts broken in the country’s name. We’ll be only as good a country as the black man and woman and child allows and only as redeemed as black allows white to redeem itself. But the slave’s child owes no one that redemption.”