These Dreams of You

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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.