These Dreams of You

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One night in Indianapolis forty-one years ago, the rest of the country detonated by the assassination of a black Georgian preacher in Memphis, Jasmine lies on the floor of the hotel room, and on the bed beside her the man who wants to be president against all his own best interests says, Who knows how the country finally will ask for forgiveness, or how that forgiveness might be given? Who knows what historic moment can represent that? The pain that can’t forget must find a way to rain forgiveness on the heart until, against our will, there grows from it the wisdom and grace of God. So tonight we pray for the fallen man and we pray for his family; but let’s say a prayer as well for the country we love.

It’s a country that does things in lurches, but when the high altitude of the great leap — of either faith or imagination, assuming one exists without the other — has given way to the next morning’s bends, the country peers around and wonders where it landed. Be that as it may, Zan can’t relinquish his memory of the melody, can’t bring himself to be unhaunted by it. There’s no other song he believes in more or nearly as much. By the din of circumstance or the roar of other voices or some combination of them, in the void no one else sings anything else as true or worth singing. Zan’s country always has belonged to the rest of the world’s imagination more than its own, and sitting here in an airport three thousand miles away, he still hears the song around him, from London to the ruins of the Berlin barricade once built in a futile attempt to keep the song out.