These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

For a moment she sees the man behind the.22-caliber gun, dark and small, no bigger than his target, twenty-four years old, half of them spent growing up in Palestine and the other half in Pasadena fifteen minutes away. He’s cased the hotel for the last several days; his diaries will reveal that his planning was methodical. In the months to come, Jasmine will try to establish some connection, something about the man to relate to, though why she needs to understand anything about him, she doesn’t know; she wonders what music is in his head when he perforates the target with the four shots from the gun — don’t assassins have music in their heads?

There in the ensuing tumult of the hotel, fear dies along with her dread, and anticipation along with her hope. She feels like she might go under the madness like the teenage boy she pulled from the frenzied crowd a few weeks ago, not caught in others’ current but rather a current of her own in which she now not only expects drowning but desires it. “We’re a great country,” are practically his last words, “we’re a selfless country, a compassionate country,” and before mounting the stage he confides in her, “I’ve finally become who I am”—but in an instant, politics reverts to meaninglessness again. “Don’t think,” she answers to his memory afterward when no one is around, sometime when she’s alone in a room, sometime on a bus, sometime walking along the sea, “that your death inspired anything. Don’t think,” she cries, “that I believe yours was anything but a freak flame in the dark, one random flash of beauty that happens not because it means anything but because in a universe of such chaos even beauty is going to have its moment, by sheer chance,” and finally she slips from his hold on her, mostly.