These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  All the versions of him collapsing into his exhausted frame, he says, “I know it could have been me. Everyone knows that. No one knows it better than I. Perhaps if it were, it would have mattered as much, perhaps not. Perhaps it would have been better.”

  “Don’t,” she whispers.

  “I don’t know how much time I have,” he says, “to become the person that I hope I am.”

  One night on the campaign train she overhears one of the reporters say, “Someone’s going to kill him too.” She’s passing through the press car when the reporter says it over a shot of bourbon and a hand of cards where black Jacks are wild, and it stops her in her tracks.

  In the late-night light with everyone else on the train asleep, it sounds louder than he actually says it, and the reporter looks up at her and all the reporters turn to look at her; and everyone wants to take back what’s been said but they can’t. The reporter’s eyes are wet. He looks at her, they all look at her, then he looks back at his cards. “Someone’s going to kill him too,” he says again with quiet fury, “and everyone knows it, and it’s all just a dirty trick, him running like this, him raising people’s hopes, as though his election is a scenario the country can actually believe in.”

  “Don’t,” she whispers again, too late.

  South Africa, he said to her that night in London that she first met him—the glint of his blue eyes catching some light off the street—with every intent, whether he realized it, to infuriate her: purely an act of provocation; and now she watches him provoke everyone, most particularly those who would presume to be on his side, those who would presume he’s on theirs. Those who would presume to take any sort of comfort in their own righteousness or liberalism: He would make the world as anguished as he is, not out of narcissism but because no truth is worth anything to him without anguish. Everything that would presume to be true must prove itself to him by fire. He no longer accepts that, in political terms, he’s no one if he’s not who the public thinks he is. He’s come to insist that he’s who he thinks he is.

  He provokes those who would presume to be indifferent. “There are more rats in New York,” he tells one audience in the Midwest, “than there are people,” and they think he’s joking until they laugh and he hisses, “Stop it.” He provokes those who would presume that he’s indifferent. Meeting militant blacks in California, he stoically submits to their torrent of abuse until it’s exhausted and they’re left with nothing but their respect for him and the exceptional instance of a white man who will come to them alone and listen, and listen, and listen.

  But more than anyone, he provokes the killer out there. More than anything he provokes his own fate. Campaign assistants draw the curtains in hotel rooms, and she watches him get up and open them and frame himself in the window: I’m here. You out there on one of those rooftops, here I am. Ready, aim. Here I am, take . . . me . . . out. Stepping from a doorway out onto the sidewalk, his bodyguards trying to bustle him into the waiting car, she sees how he resists, stops, lingers a moment at the street’s edge: You. Up there in one of those windows—I know about high windows. I know about their vantage points. Fire. I know about high-powered fifty-two millimeter Italian Carcano rifles, I know how the flimsiest of men and circumstances can change the world.

  She made my heart sing.

  Wild thing comes from the radio through the open back door of the car waiting for him: He provokes the future, thinks Jasmine, that the New World has claimed for itself for five hundred years. With every bit of the future that he passes through unscathed, he would inoculate himself to all the ways that the present threatens him, all the ways the past haunts him.

  Of course she’ll remember all of this on the night in Los Angeles two months later, in the back kitchen of the old L.A. hotel where the Academy Awards were held several decades before. She isn’t sure whether she actually hears the shots or just imagines hearing them, not knowing exactly where they came from except close by; the one thing that the television footage can’t or won’t capture is the amount of blood a single handgun can spill. “Is there a doctor in the house?” someone with a microphone screams over and over; and over and over are the wails of “Nooo, noooo!” and “How could this happen?”—but how could it not? will be the question later.

  For a moment she sees the man behind the .22-caliber gun, dark and small, no bigger than his target, twenty-four years old, half of them spent growing up in Palestine and the other half in Pasadena fifteen minutes away. He’s cased the hotel for the last several days; his diaries will reveal that his planning was methodical. In the months to come, Jasmine will try to establish some connection, something about the man to relate to, though why she needs to understand anything about him, she doesn’t know; she wonders what music is in his head when he perforates the target with the four shots from the gun—don’t assassins have music in their heads?

  There in the ensuing tumult of the hotel, fear dies along with her dread, and anticipation along with her hope. She feels like she might go under the madness like the teenage boy she pulled from the frenzied crowd a few weeks ago, not caught in others’ current but rather a current of her own in which she now not only expects drowning but desires it. “We’re a great country,” are practically his last words, “we’re a selfless country, a compassionate country,” and before mounting the stage he confides in her, “I’ve finally become who I am”—but in an instant, politics reverts to meaninglessness again. “Don’t think,” she answers to his memory afterward when no one is around, sometime when she’s alone in a room, sometime on a bus, sometime walking along the sea, “that your death inspired anything. Don’t think,” she cries, “that I believe yours was anything but a freak flame in the dark, one random flash of beauty that happens not because it means anything but because in a universe of such chaos even beauty is going to have its moment, by sheer chance,” and finally she slips from his hold on her, mostly.

  At first she’s determined to remain in Los Angeles, but at the request of the campaign, purely for organizational purposes she accompanies the body on its flight back to New York to lie in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which she can remember walking by during the short time she lived there, never suspecting this. Four days after his murder the coffin is carried by train from New York to Washington and she tries to hide herself in one of the cars, hide from the widow he married after dating the actress who played his dead sister, hide from those who were part of the campaign, hide more than anything from the hundreds of thousands along the track, old men with flags saluting and boy scouts with caps over their hearts, homemade signs that urge GOODBYE GOODBYE GOODBYE to the train that only proceeds more slowly as the crowds swell. Those are the ones she can’t stand to look at—until finally she looks and it’s at the sight of wet black faces sobbing more for him than any white man in memory that she bursts into tears. When the train passes an anonymous young woman fallen to her knees in the grass holding her face in her hands, Jasmine wonders, Do I have the right, as a woman from another country who hasn’t borne what they have, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks No, and holds her head anyway.

  In the late hours the train arrives in Washington and the coffin is eased from its car and taken from the station down Constitution Avenue along the Mall’s northern border to the Lincoln Memorial where people sing, then to the cemetery to lie alongside the buried brother. She’s never seen a night funeral before filled with torchlight: All funerals should be at night, she concludes, it’s the only beauty bleak enough to be worthy of funerals. Next to a plaque that quotes from the speech he gave in South Africa two years before, in that moment that first so alienated her and then so moved her to give him her heart, there’s only a small unassuming white cross.

  A few weeks after the frenzied campaign rally where he almost is trampled to death, an eighteen-year-old boy recognizes on television the woman who pulled him to safety from that terrible sea of human hope and then whispered in his ear something he’ll never forget, even as he has no idea w
hat it was.

  It’s late on the night of the state’s primary election. The news pictures are broadcast from the back kitchen of the old L.A. hotel that several decades ago hosted movie stars and presidents nearly as notable, where the Academy Awards took place; in the early-morning hours of this night, the unspeakable thing that’s on everyone’s mind finally happens. He lies in bed in his dormitory room at the university, listening to the primary returns on the radio. He’s about to turn it off, the candidate having given his victory speech, when the newscaster reports hearing shots.

  Not knowing where the shots are fired or exactly where they come from, the newscaster audibly trembles. Some semblance of professionalism in his voice struggles to keep catastrophe at bay.

  Zan gets out of his dorm bed and pulls on some clothes and goes into the room next door where other guys who live on the same floor play cards. Without asking, he turns on his neighbor’s small black-and-white television and there’s the young black woman in the tumult, none of the fear in her eyes that Zan saw that afternoon weeks ago but rather now a dead release. “What’s going on?” one of the guys says looking up from his hand of cards, and Zan says, “Something’s happened.”

  Forty years later, the original exhilaration felt by the country that greeted the new president on his election is supplanted by an opposite hysteria for which Zan can only wonder if the first hysteria is in some measure responsible. On the express Eurostar that pulls out of London’s St. Pancras station off King’s Cross and hurtles beneath the Channel toward Brussels and Paris, while his son, wreathed by a rare quiet, stares out the train window at the Chunnel walls, Zan reads newspapers scooped up beneath the skylights of the station arcade and, from the dispassionate vantage point of foreign shores, realizes that his country has lost its mind.

  At citizen meetings in towns around the country, people are becoming unhinged about . . . everything. These are people who were not part of the small era of good feelings that followed the election; these are people who held their tongues. The hysteria isn’t really about what’s proposed or opposed or the facts of these things, no more than was the original hysteria. As was the original hysteria, it’s about the president himself and how into a time of tumult and anxiety has come someone that some regard as so alien that now the emotional tenor of every debate is separated from reality. It’s the dark nihilist brethren of the euphoria that greeted the new president’s election, the commensurate response to a hope and promise too uncommon and maybe delusional to last any longer than fleetingly.

  In the dark of the Chunnel, the train comes abruptly to a halt. As they wait for the train to begin again, Zan mulls the article in The Times that reports death threats against the new president up four hundred percent. Over the months that have followed his assumption of office, first there have been openly expressed hopes that he’ll fail, then accusations that he’s a radical, then questions whether he was born in the country and really is president at all. “When are we going to move?” comes Parker’s voice out of the dark.

  Then he’s accused of hating white people. Then he’s accused of fostering a presidency under which white people will be attacked and beaten. Then it’s claimed he’s setting up death tribunals that will condemn old people to termination. Then he’s compared to fascist dictators, then people bring guns to events where he speaks, then a widely-read blogger calls for a military coup, then a minister in Arizona calls from the pulpit for the president’s death. A popular website runs a poll asking respondents whether he should be assassinated.

  Following such a linear progression, Zan asks himself in the dark two hundred feet below the surface of the English Channel, what else could be next? Or, put another way, what possibly could not be next? A new source of dread invades Zan amid all his other more prosaic trepidations. While this has been a country of murder since Zan was a teenager, and though Zan has lived through other assassinations and seen the country find a way to go on, he’s uncertain whether this time the country could endure such a thing: Too much history attends this presidency. However much anyone resists it, this president is too much the asterisk of the dream’s last four hundred years; he wears asterisks like a crown of thorns. Zan feels vested like he hasn’t before—no doubt, he thinks in the dark, to an extent that’s unhealthy, politically and any other way. But he isn’t the only one so vested and then there are those vested in the man’s fall—so should the unspoken thing happen, then how does a country that has invested so much stand it? Or does the very improbability of his rise suggest that he’s fated to be martyred.

  Zan knows he’s not the only one contemplating this. He’s not the only one nursing a fear terrible enough that no one wants to name or give voice to it, just as few could stand to name or give voice to the fear that accompanied another prospective president forty years ago whom Zan, as a freshman, saw in the campus quad. Something about such men lets loose in the country a fury which no one names and to which no one gives voice; but then if it comes to pass, will everyone be left to wonder whether it would have been better to say it out loud after all? Now some do, in whispers so that fate might not overhear. From the flattest part of the Texas Panhandle, Zan’s anarchist friend writes, I can’t stand him—and I pray for him every day.

  Zan wonders if they should get off the Eurostar at Brussels and change trains there for Germany. But the disadvantage of changing in Brussels is that it would involve yet another change of trains in Cologne; if the father and son continue another hour south onto Paris, they can catch a direct overnight train heading to Berlin. Zan was planning to get a couchette for his son on the Paris-Berlin train but the boy insists he doesn’t want to be in one part of the train while his father is in another, and Zan remembers years before when he went to Berlin, during his breakup with Viv before Parker was born, learning the hard way that european trains subdivide in the night while you sleep, whisking you off, if you’re on the wrong car, to somewhere else.

  The flaw of Zan’s Paris-connection plan is that there’s only half an hour between the Eurostar’s arrival at the Gare du Nord and the departure of the train to Berlin from the nearby Gare de l’Est. Counting too much on the newly teutonic timeliness of London trains, including the sleek Eurostar, and the ease of maneuvering the ten-minute walk between stations, Zan leaves his plan behind him in the dark of the Chunnel, once the express finally begins to move.

  Not even taking into account the time they’ve been stuck under the Channel on the Eurostar, the folly becomes more evident in Paris with the father and son’s arrival. Thirty minutes to not only change trains but stations? A vanity, Zan understands now, born of younger days and a sharper mind back when—long before Viv and children—he lived in Paris with crazy taxi-life Trotskyites and their aristocratic tastes, who thought, like Ronnie Jack Flowers in L.A., that all the proletariat should have Blaupunkt sound systems. That was when he could have been airlifted into Paris blindfolded and determined within five minutes exactly where he was.

  Ascending the vertical Gare du Nord with its transparent tubular walkways, Zan and Parker take half an hour figuring out where to exit. I’m becoming, the father tells himself, a confused old fart. Turning toward the Gare de l’Est, he and his son dart through the twilight across the rue Dunkerque between cars, Parker a few feet behind Zan, when a taxicab, the driver apparently beyond the control of anything but unexplained fury billowing from the exhaust pipe, barrels toward the boy.

  Zan grabs Parker’s hand so hard he can feel some small bone crunch. He remembers that this was the hand Parker broke the night he took the boy to the emergency room and then lost his car keys, railing about it afterward when his supernaturally wise daughter advised him from the backseat, “Poppy, let it go.” Zan yanks Parker from the path of the cab much like a young black female hand once yanked him from a surging crowd except that, given the difference in years between older man and younger boy, the force is exponential.

  The cab flies into the back of a limousine. Dimly through the cab’s back wi
ndow, the cab’s passenger flies into the seat in front, grabbing her head; then the cab backs up and, the gear first thrown into reverse then into drive, hits the limo again. Then it backs up and slams into the limo still again. “Are you all right?” Zan says to Parker, who nods in shock; the boy is too wide-eyed at the spectacle of the cab reversing and crashing into the same limo over and over to bother holding his throbbing hand. Everyone stops to look. Finally the cab’s passenger flees out the other side, leaving the back door open behind her. Later Zan realizes that in his own country, this scene wouldn’t be nearly as insane, or rather it would be insane in a distinctly familiar, new-world way.

  By the time they reach the Gare de l’Est, the last night train to Berlin has departed. Zan and the boy check into a no-star hotel on the rue d’Alsace that overlooks the trainyards below and a stubby stone wall that runs alongside. In the difference between the two stations, ten minutes by foot, lies the division between centuries and longitudes, the high-tech Gare du Nord they just left full of young people, western and futurist, the Gare de l’Est shabby and old like its travelers, refugees from Old Europe or those returning to it, fleeing millennial overload. Unable to find ice in any of the stores or bars, Zan wraps Parker’s hand in a wet towel, his son finally slipping toward an ibuprofen sleep.