These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

He waves this away like it’s the least sensible thing anyone has said in a while. “Oh but I learned long ago I’m not who I think I am, I’m who the public thinks I am or I’m not anyone, am I? I steal everything, don’t I? And someday, somebody shall steal me—put me in a movie or novel and,” he cackles maniacally, “I’ll be bloody indignant!” He says, “Tell me, luv, if I may ask. Where are your people from?”

“Ethiopia,” she says.

“Truly? That’s fantastic! Have you ever been?”

“I was two when my parents moved me and my brother to London. I went back for about a week, eight years ago.”

“Fantastic, fantastic,” he keeps muttering, “how perfect it is, then, that you’re from there and now you’re here.”

“Perfect?”

“Abyssinia! The beginning of time, Ethiopia, and L.A. is the end of time, and this,” Berlin at his fingertips, “is time in the crosshairs, where the latitudes intersect.”

“On what map?”

“Not any map you look at, Jasmine,” he says, “the map you hear. Come on, don’t you like me by now? A little?”

“I’ve actually come to quite like you.”

“There, you see? I’m so very, very glad to hear it,” he says so wholeheartedly that she can’t help being moved.

“You’re not a Nazi,” she points out.

“No. Thank you.” He picks up the thick novel again. “I’ll never live that down and,” he says quietly, “probably don’t deserve to.”

“Probably not.”

“Well, no more headline chasing for me, for a while. I’m laying low. An Old World man who plunged into the heart of the New and it almost destroyed him.” He tosses the paperback to her. “Try not worrying too much what the words mean. They’re just notes. It’s all really about the Old World discovering the New and waving goodbye to itself.”