These Dreams of You

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But 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.