These Dreams of You (19 page)

H
e already looks like a phantom, and on the campaign trail over the next four months, he forever seems on the verge of falling apart. When he speaks to crowds he shakes, rushing through speeches when he's not stumbling; sometimes the words run into each other as if spoken by a drunk man or, worse, a man seized by a stroke. On planes and buses after each rally, he crumples into seats, passing out in a sweat, fevered by dark providences and the irredeemable. He's bleached of color, seems to be disappearing before everyone's eyes. He already was old before his time when she met him in London nearly two years ago and now he's older still.

B
ut then he gathers intensity, prying himself loose from the grip of whoever he was in the past, now in pursuit of something inside him that he no longer can refuse to believe in—and finally catching it, though he can't be sure that it hasn't caught him. He holds out to the crowd his open hand as if it's filled with a beating heart pulled from his own chest, and his persona is made raw; the motorcade moves down the street and men twice his size, their knees and hands bloodied, have to hold him around the waist so he's not pulled away by the crowd who would disrobe him, pick him clean of his cufflinks and tie and shoes, benignly strip him as naked as their feelings for him and his for them or, more ferociously, divide him up among them in pieces. He refuses to allow about the campaign the air of celebration on which campaigns depend. When he whispers to her at a rally in Los Angeles,
These
are my people
, it's not a boast; he derives from it as little exhilaration as he does from the rest. He won't reconcile himself to the old rituals of politics or to even the rituals of new politics that he in part invented. He's come to be mortified by the political truisms to which he once devoted himself.

T
he campaign is shambolic, a moving pandemonium. More than anything it resembles an act of penance, the lashed slog from one station of the cross to the next; when he unconsciously touches the heads of poor children, brushes their cheeks with a finger, it's more priestly than political. Jasmine can't imagine how, if he manages to get elected, he'll survive the job—not because he isn't tough enough, certainly not because he isn't committed enough, but because he's altogether too committed, because he gives altogether too much, beyond what any sane self can stand or give. Retreating to the edges of staff meetings where he lies on a couch saying nothing as some point of strategy is hashed over, he ends arguments with decisions so succinct and raging (“Indiana is essential, we need to not just win there but
crush
”) that Jasmine can only be mystified by the method and math of democrazy that she's come to spell with a z.

Wild and frenzied from kansan desolations that no foreigner can imagine short of the moon, where white college students chase the bus and train just to call to him the goodbyes that will be unbearable to remember in three months, to indianan victories not crushing enough, to oregonian defeats that leave him precarious on the edge of political oblivion, little of it seems to have bearing on what he speaks of to privileged and working-class alike: the rats of the black tenements and the self-killing grounds of Indian reservations, delano daughters with hands stained by the vineyards on which they barely subsist and delta sons with bodies misshapen by hunger. This is prosperity, he bays at them beneath montana nights, calculated as much by what's polluted, what's killed, what's secured and incarcerated, but never by a child's delight, a poem's spell, the immutable power of a kept promise. It's a prosperity that measures everything that means nothing and nothing that means everything. It tells all of us, he concludes to the crowds, everything about our country except why it's ours.

T
here's another sort of murder, he warns—and does he intend it as prophecy? or does the prophetic just come naturally, not by virtue of what he foresees but what he knows in his bones—a sort of murder as fatal as the sniper's gunshot, and that's the violence of the institution that never sees the poor in their rags or hears the sob of the hungry or feels the touch of the forsaken. This violence shatters the spirit. It not only accepts but advances the premise that this is a country where it's acceptable to succeed by destroying people's dreams and breaking their hearts.

Jasmine has no way of knowing that this campaign is singularly different from any other. It reminds her more of a concert tour not just in its organization but its entropy. Glumly assessing a campaign poster of himself, he says, “Am I a Beatle?” and winks at her about the inside joke; but when the crowds tear his clothes and steal his shoes, wanting a handful of his hair that grows longer, she realizes this is on another level from what she's expected let alone known. “Are all campaigns over here like this?” she finally asks an aide in one of the Los Angeles suburbs. This is on an afternoon when, casting aside her clipboard, she pulls to safety a teenage boy a few years younger than she is, who's been lifted off his feet by the crowd and nearly pulled under to be trampled or crushed. The aide doesn't have to answer, given the look on his face, but does anyway. “No campaign,” he says, “has
ever
been like this,” and in his face she sees the terror at what's been unleashed that no one can control.

P
ulled from the crowd, the teenage boy hears Jasmine—leaning close to his face—whisper in his ear a single word; and though Jasmine wouldn't dispute that she did so, she has no distinct recollection of it though it isn't a word that would surprise either of them if they could relive the moment, stop and catch the word in the air and hear it again.

There's more than one of me, she said to him that afternoon months before, back in the capitol, and he answered, “Try being me,” and she sees all the versions of him in the room of an Indianapolis Marriott on an early-April night of murder that can't help feeling to everyone like a foretelling. The network reportage from the television in the other room is on a kind of loop, delivering the same news over and over so as to try and shake off the shock of it; and dozing on the bedroom floor she still can hear people crying in other parts of the suite but she's moved most by the silence from outside, since alone among all cities tonight, on this particular night this particular city isn't gripped by riot because the man who lies on the bed a few feet away in the same room dared to go break the news to a black crowd in the ghetto a few hours ago, a few miles away.

I
t was cold that night but the rain was fine and dry like ash blown in from the southwest all its way from that motel balcony in Memphis, and the torchlight was still the red haze of the mind's fires not yet lit. When they first drove up to the rally it wasn't clear how many had heard the news, only that most hadn't, especially those who came early so they could be within touching distance, or spitting distance a few feet back, or shooting distance a few more feet back.

An aide hurriedly scribbled some brief remarks for him—
and then please Senator let's get the fuck out of here
. But stepping from the car, taking the first step up to the platform to address everyone, each and every face before him black, he crumpled the speech and stuck it in his overcoat pocket and just went up and told them. He's dead. Shot and killed tonight, he told them—and then he talked not for a minute or two or five but nearly ten, talked over the roar of gunfire heard in his mind's ear four and a half years since Dallas, “so go home tonight,” he told them, “and yes say a prayer for Dr. King and his family, but say one too for our country that we love,” and for those close enough to see, the pain in his eyes was his passport to theirs, the signal of truth and his right to say it and theirs to hear it.

T
hen 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.

A
ll 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.”

O
ne 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.

S
outh 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.