Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

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.

She means to have her daughter in London but gets as far as Paris and a flat in Montparnasse. A New Jersey punk poetess’ record plays through the window of another apartment across the courtyard. No sooner has Molly slipped into welcoming hands than the midwife holds her up astonished at the hum from her little body; already the baby transmits on Molly frequency. For six months she has her mother’s gray eyes, before they turn brown.