Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

“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.

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.”