Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

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 there 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.”

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.