These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  Hello, luv.

  Quick note to let you know that Jim and I are here in the Chateau Heroesville (sp?) north of Paris in Pantoise working. Delighted to receive your letter and look forward to joining up with you in Berlin in the next week or so or as soon as Jim disentangles himself from his dalliance with a beautiful asian who rather inconveniently is married to a French actor. I suppose he shall get a good song out of it if nothing else. The flat sounds suitable indeed and as I believe has been said we don’t need or want anything luxurious. It is properly heated? is my only concern—the chateau where we record now is drafty and damp and I suppose I got more accustomed to all that detestable California sunshine than I realized, didn’t I, even if I never actually went out in it when I was there, ha ha. Since Kill City and its streets strewn with winged corpses we’ve partaken of nothing harder than vino, being the best boys we know how to be. I look forward to Berlin and living as much like a normal person as I can get away with.

  Cheers, D

  Should she note in a letter the bullet holes in the Hansa recording studio near the Wall? Will this be thrilling or frightening or both? In the International Herald Tribune she reads that in five years the assassin of Robert Kennedy will be up for parole; she can’t help regretting that he wasn’t executed, she who might have assumed herself opposed to executions. It’s not a matter of vengeance but rather some rightful order extracted from the anarchy of the world. Everything is personal.

  When she goes to look for the clippings she’s kept these years, beginning with the first she read in London about the trip to South Africa and the others afterward that made their folded way from one volume to another, they’re nowhere to be found among any of her possessions. She’s filled with reproach at their loss. She thinks of the aging clippings hidden forever in L.A. with Kelly, who never will know of them unless one happens to flutter from some book she randomly opens. This is the price, believes Jasmine, of such a cowardly flight, of leaving a woman like a man would.

  On their arrival in Schöneberg, Jasmine realizes the two singers haven’t entirely shed their bad habits so much as downscaled, trading drugs for garden-variety alcoholism. Methodi­cally they carve up the calendar allowing for two days a week of prowling the clubs and bars and strip joints of Kreuzberg–the Exile, the SO36 overrun by German punks–then two days of calm and restitution at the flat, shaking off hangovers over coffee and books. The other three days are devoted to writing and recording at the studio within sight of the wall and its armed East German snipers, who are close enough to pick off one singer or the other and strike a singular blow against western decadence. For a while the two men and woman are tourists, driving in the Black Forest and visiting the Brücke museum, striking poses out of expressionist paintings and snapping photographs with a little polaroid camera picked up in a pawn shop. Sometimes the picture seems to vanish between the click of the shutter and the exposure of the negative; waving his hand, the flame-haired Old World wanderer given to believing such things says, “It’s in the air. A ghost camera, taking pictures of the Old World disappearing.”

  “Yeah,” cracks Jim, “or a camera that doesn’t work.”

  The men sink into the anonymity they’ve craved in their ramble eastward. Turkish immigrants around them trudge westward, worlds passing at twilight, the visibility of each to the other dying at dusk. Session musicians come and go through the cavernous studio, a converted movie set from the silent era before the rise of the Reich where epic visions were filmed of sexy robots in Twenty-First Century Babels. The air fills with the chemical smell of old celluloid rotting in the vaults.

  She’s never seen musical instruments that look like these. It’s as though they’ve materialized from the same silent science-fiction German movies whose rot the musicians breathe in and out as they play; the instruments appear more like time machines, or what she imagines a time machine might look like, transporting the traveler from the execution of a song back to its inception or forward to its completion–bending the music from the end or beginning back into the middle, and bending the music of years from now back to the music of years ago, to produce this music of the moment. It’s as though Jasmine could climb into a song and ride it back ten years to the kitchen of an old Holly­wood hotel, in time to prevent an assassination, or forward twenty years in time to prevent her own.

  The first time that Jasmine sees the Professor, as everyone calls him, it’s the middle of a stormy afternoon. She’s arrived with recording contracts to be signed and finds him alone, hunched over one of the instruments in the barely lit studio; a tinny transistor plays a song from half a dozen years before—and Ray Charles was shot down—another musical age. He’s lost in thought, staring at the studio floor covered with a couple dozen cards that might be from a tarot except without images or icons. Rather they’re emblazoned with maxims and mini-manifestos that barely can be read in the room’s shadows: EMBARRASS YOURSELF and THE SONG HAS SECRETS FROM THE SINGER and DO NOT BE BLIND TO . . . on one card and . . . YOUR OWN VISION on the next. Alone, staring at the floor trying to divine its instructions, when the transistor sings I dreamed we played cards in the dark, and you lost and you lied, the balding man in eyeliner laughs and glances over his shoulder at the radio

  these dreams of you . . .

  then looks up and smiles at Jasmine as though they’ve met many times. Over the days and weeks, sessions spill into other sessions, songs start out belonging to one man and end another’s. More often the music is of a no-man’s land like that which lies between the two western and eastern barricades that have come to constitute in the psyche of the world a single Wall.

  It’s a music of breakdowns and blackouts and “futuristic rhythm and blues”—the singer with the red hair calls it—about lovers in the Wall’s shadow, and sons of the silent age and electric-blue rooms that no one leaves. “Fritz Lang’s Metropolis starring James Brown!” the singer tells Jasmine excitedly one evening; she’s actually come to find such grand pronouncements rather endearing. While she isn’t sure she fancies the music or understands it, she senses it’s not to be dismissed, though she’s not inclined to let him know that. In the Schöneberg flat, the nearby table is stacked with art catalogs, jagged little polemics on aesthetic theory, modern novels. “You’re really reading that, are you?” she says to him behind the thick paperback.

  He shrugs, “I’m half Irish—me mum,” and laying the book on his lap says, “Do you worry, luv, whether every note of an Ornette Coleman piece has meaning?”

  “Maybe I do,” she says, but she doesn’t really listen to Ornette Coleman.

  “Of course you don’t. It’s simple, really, a very simple tale—man sets out on a twenty-four-hour walk looking for home and, riding a wave of notes, finds the New World. It’s a song we’ve all sung, haven’t we? In this case it’s Dublin but it could be Berlin or London or L.A.”

  Whatever his faults, a lack of graciousness isn’t one, nor a lack of patience with anyone but himself, for whom he has none. “When Miles started doing funk-Stockhausen,” he tells her, “did someone say suspiciously, Gone all musique concrète on us then, have you?”

  “Probably someone did,” she says, “or perhaps they just called it futuristic rhythm and blues.”

  “Look, the whole century has been about black and white fucking,” and leaning in the doorway of his room she raises an eyebrow but he won’t back down. “Absolutely! I’ll bet,” he says of the novel, “Molly Bloom really is a black girl and he just doesn’t tell us. New York Jews like Gershwin, Kern, Arlen cumming southern Negro music while Duke Ellington ravishes Nineteenth Century Europeans like Debussy—rather the whole bloody point of it all, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “But of course,” he insists, “and I’m the new white Duke for the Old World in a new century, stealing the remains of black music and smashing it for good. Writing and singing it like a white limey, because what could survive that? And I should bloody well hope some Yank spade out there is doing the
same to the remains of white european music. To everything there’s a reaction. Anticipate the reaction.”

  “That sounds like something from one of the Professor’s cards.”

  “First rule of cultural warfare.”

  “Perhaps you should just be the You for a new century.”

  He waves this away like it’s the least sensible thing anyone has said in a while. “Oh but I learned long ago I’m not who I think I am, I’m who the public thinks I am or I’m not anyone, am I? I steal everything, don’t I? And someday, somebody shall steal me—put me in a movie or novel and,” he cackles maniacally, “I’ll be bloody indignant!” He says, “Tell me, luv, if I may ask. Where are your people from?”

  “Ethiopia,” she says.

  “Truly? That’s fantastic! Have you ever been?”

  “I was two when my parents moved me and my brother to London. I went back for about a week, eight years ago.”

  “Fantastic, fantastic,” he keeps muttering, “how perfect it is, then, that you’re from there and now you’re here.”

  “Perfect?”

  “Abyssinia! The beginning of time, Ethiopia, and L.A. is the end of time, and this,” Berlin at his fingertips, “is time in the crosshairs, where the latitudes intersect.”

  “On what map?”

  “Not any map you look at, Jasmine,” he says, “the map you hear. Come on, don’t you like me by now? A little?”

  “I’ve actually come to quite like you.”

  “There, you see? I’m so very, very glad to hear it,” he says so wholeheartedly that she can’t help being moved.

  “You’re not a Nazi,” she points out.

  “No. Thank you.” He picks up the thick novel again. “I’ll never live that down and,” he says quietly, “probably don’t deserve to.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, no more headline chasing for me, for a while. I’m laying low. An Old World man who plunged into the heart of the New and it almost destroyed him.” He tosses the paperback to her. “Try not worrying too much what the words mean. They’re just notes. It’s all really about the Old World discovering the New and waving goodbye to itself.”

  Has he forgotten that on the opening blank page of the paperback he’s drawn a picture of her, one day as he sat in the recording studio gazing out the window at a couple by the Wall? He was a painter once, back before the music, before he concluded there was no future in painting. Or does he remember perfectly well and, very calculatedly, finds this an off-handed way of showing her? Whichever: Later when she opens the book she can see that the sketch on the inside is unmistakably her, in all her shades of brown but for the misplaced gray of her eyes.

  She doesn’t remember him drawing her, doesn’t remember being in the recording studio when he did it. Was it absent-minded on his part, his eyes happening to fall on her as his thoughts drifted; or if she wasn’t in his presence, was it therefore more conscious? If she wasn’t within sight, then she would have to have been on his mind. She has no particular interest in him that way and hasn’t been aware that he has any in her; she has no interest in any of them—him or Jim or the Professor—and still hasn’t on the night that it happens, she and the three of them. But she doesn’t give the book back and in a few months when she leaves on the run she’ll take it, with the sketch of her on the front page and carrying inside her belly the daughter named, by coincidence perhaps, since she never really reads the book, after the woman who voices the century’s greatest yes.

  But if there’s truly truth in wine then she must wonder what really she feels on the night it happens, because there’s so much wine that night, Jim having brought up from the club in Kreuzberg five bottles of a French vintage, trying hard as he is to stay away from the smack. And if there’s not the wine then there’s the marsh of the city in late summer, the body of Berlin swathed in ponds, the Havel and Spree rivers overflowing until by the fourth bottle the waters are splashing over the window sills of the upper flat above the Turkish garage.

  By the fifth bottle Jasmine can perfectly see the submerged garage below, Turkish men and women and children floating among the automotive shrapnel. The sirens of distant Neuköln drone in the fog, yearning for the space age. About the time that Jasmine takes off her clothes and lies across one bed or another in one room or another of the flat, wrapping her naked body in a string of pale-blue beads until she’s rendered herself Berlin and its ponds, made herself into the city, with the hinge where her thighs meet rendered the Wall mined with bombs, it’s occurred to her that Jim somehow has hallucinogized the wine.

  She’s shocked at herself. She doesn’t know herself at this moment, or what to make of the person she is right now; she’s never done this before or anything remotely like it, even in her rock and roll life in L.A. and London where she was conspicuous for her sexual reserve. Istanbul hashish ground to a fine powder, she thinks, whispering, “Jim, Jim, you bastard,” in the dark from one bed or the other in one room or the other, and someone whispers back, How’s that, luv? or is it the Professor, whom she immediately knows in the intuition born of such wickedness is the most depraved of all. “That you?” she murmurs again but can’t be certain to whom. As the song that snakes up the center of her to the back of her mouth shifts from the alien’s croon to the iguana’s deeper baritone, the touch must be the time traveler’s, fingers spinning her red dial forward to the future—or perhaps she succumbs to her assumptions too easily, perhaps the Professor sings and the alien touches . . . until in the dark she’s only confused. When it’s over, swollen from their occupation and listening to the cascade of white waves inside her like the lapping of the Spree at the garage below, she muses dreamily ah well they’ll sort it all out down there, won’t they? and a few hours later, all tides receded, Schöneberg streets revealing barely a drop of the night’s flood, she wanders the flat in blue morning light looking at each of the three men passed out on their beds in their rooms and wondering which of them made it across the Wall first, when she already knows quite certainly that she’s pregnant with Molly.

  It isn’t only because the paternity is destined to be ever so unspecific. Jasmine would just as soon believe that among the three men, one is as much the father as the other. It isn’t because any of them would reject her or paternity; rather it’s because any or all might accept paternity that she leaves. This is something she prefers to do on her own.

  She begins planning her getaway the afternoon that she and the two singers are driving down the Ku’damm and the crimson spaceman behind the wheel of the car spots out of the corner of his eye a stranger in the street getting in another car—who, will never exactly be clear. To an extent, Jasmine realizes, she’s responsible: Flushed with some soup of hormones, bad dreams, unfounded premonitions and half-digested newspaper articles, she’s convinced for a split moment that the stranger getting in the car is the assassin himself, the man behind the .22-caliber gun she read in the newspaper some months ago would be up for parole in five years. “It’s him!” she cries, surprising herself.

  “Yes!” agrees the spaceman next to her. “It is!”

  What? She looks over. “It is him!” he says again, by which he means a dealer who sold him bad drugs or a businessman who cheated him in a contract or someone who slept with his wife (whom he isn’t sleeping with anymore anyway)—none of them necessarily more or less likely than the man Jasmine has mistaken the stranger for; in fact the man in the street is a cabbie, getting in his taxi. Regardless, he’s the object of no small ire, as becomes clear when calmly, with the tremendous focus and determination that the driver next to her brings to anything he wants to, he aims his car at the other and plows into it.

  Jim cries out from the back. Of course there’s an outburst from the surrounding throng on the busy boulevard and particularly from the cabbie, who leaps from his taxi and then, mid-protest, bolts, leaving the singer with the bright red hair to reverse the car, back up and then plow into the other again, and to keep doing it again and again.
In the passenger seat in front, Jasmine grabs her belly so instinctively and protectively that had either man noticed, immediately he would have known; but the driver is only intent on demolishing the other car even as he demolishes his own, and his cohort in back is only intent on surviving the onslaught. “Stop!” is all she can keep saying.

  The singer has brought with him back from L.A. a new-world madness to mix with the old-world’s. “Don’t tell me I’m not insane,” he says to her the next blue morning, not unlike the one when she knew she was pregnant; she finds him standing in a window muttering.

  “Right,” she says.

  “I know about insanity, don’t I,” he says matter-of-factly, “I have a brother who’s insane, it runs in the family. My good fortune was I found a method for my madness,” and he looks at her and says, “I’m going to be the first rock star assassinated.”

  “Brilliant,” she sputters, “we’re grabbing headlines again, are we?”

  “It’s not a romantic notion,” he insists.

  “Look here,” she says, “I won’t try to tell you about insanity if you don’t try to tell me about assassinations. And just how disappointed will you be, mate,” she adds scornfully, “if it doesn’t happen?” But she feels the chill, and when she leaves forty-eight hours later, the only thing she takes that doesn’t belong to her is the paperback with the portrait of her that he drew, some mysterious moment when she wasn’t looking.