These Dreams of You

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There’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.