She says, “Times change?”
“Yes times change,” he agrees, “but the system changes last, after everything else. If I run, it will be Bad Bobby again. Ruthless Bobby. Everything that those who hate me have ever said about me, it shall all be true. Selfish Little Son-of-a-Bitch Bobby who can’t wait to get back in the White House. Every damned office-holder of my party, which is to say those who control the party, will hate me because it will just complicate the hell out of their lives and their own political fortunes. And when people are for me, they won’t be for me. They’ll be for him.”
“You’re wrong,” she shakes her head.
“On the other hand, there’s Dante.”
“Dante?”
“Uh, ‘the hottest place in hell. . ’ etcetera.”
“Etcetera?”
“Is reserved for those who do nothing when faced with a moral choice.” He blurts, “Whatever I do, I need your help.”
“Right. Of course. I would be honored.” It sounds funny but she means it.
“Not too honored. I don’t deserve that.”
She rises from the chair and at the door stops, the thought tripping her up. “Is it because I’m black? I mean, I don’t know what you have in mind, do I, but whatever it is—?”
“How can you wonder that,” he says, “if neither of us knows what I have in mind?”
“I’ve never been all that conscious of that part of me. With these white woman’s gray eyes, I suppose.”
“Ethiopia.”
She’s impressed. “Did I tell you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Folks moved my brother and me when I was two — Dad was a med student. As I always heard it, the idea was eventually to come on over here. They got as far as London before they split up.”
“If we do this, remember to bring the angry woman with you. I’ll need her.”
“I’m not an angry woman.”
“Bring the one with the sense of humor then.”
“I’ll bring them all,” and with a start she’s unsettled by how much he already looks like a phantom. “There’s more than one.”
“Yeah? Try being me.”
~ ~ ~
He already looks like a phantom, and on the campaign trail over the next four months, he forever seems on the verge of falling apart. When he speaks to crowds he shakes, rushing through speeches when he’s not stumbling; sometimes the words run into each other as if spoken by a drunk man or, worse, a man seized by a stroke. On planes and buses after each rally, he crumples into seats, passing out in a sweat, fevered by dark providences and the irredeemable. He’s bleached of color, seems to be disappearing before everyone’s eyes. He already was old before his time when she met him in London nearly two years ago and now he’s older still.
~ ~ ~
But then he gathers intensity, prying himself loose from the grip of whoever he was in the past, now in pursuit of something inside him that he no longer can refuse to believe in — and finally catching it, though he can’t be sure that it hasn’t caught him. He holds out to the crowd his open hand as if it’s filled with a beating heart pulled from his own chest, and his persona is made raw; the motorcade moves down the street and men twice his size, their knees and hands bloodied, have to hold him around the waist so he’s not pulled away by the crowd who would disrobe him, pick him clean of his cufflinks and tie and shoes, benignly strip him as naked as their feelings for him and his for them or, more ferociously, divide him up among them in pieces. He refuses to allow about the campaign the air of celebration on which campaigns depend. When he whispers to her at a rally in Los Angeles, These are my people, it’s not a boast; he derives from it as little exhilaration as he does from the rest. He won’t reconcile himself to the old rituals of politics or to even the rituals of new politics that he in part invented. He’s come to be mortified by the political truisms to which he once devoted himself.
~ ~ ~
The campaign is shambolic, a moving pandemonium. More than anything it resembles an act of penance, the lashed slog from one station of the cross to the next; when he unconsciously touches the heads of poor children, brushes their cheeks with a finger, it’s more priestly than political. Jasmine can’t imagine how, if he manages to get elected, he’ll survive the job — not because he isn’t tough enough, certainly not because he isn’t committed enough, but because he’s altogether too committed, because he gives altogether too much, beyond what any sane self can stand or give. Retreating to the edges of staff meetings where he lies on a couch saying nothing as some point of strategy is hashed over, he ends arguments with decisions so succinct and raging (“Indiana is essential, we need to not just win there but crush”) that Jasmine can only be mystified by the method and math of democrazy that she’s come to spell with a z.
Wild and frenzied from kansan desolations that no foreigner can imagine short of the moon, where white college students chase the bus and train just to call to him the goodbyes that will be unbearable to remember in three months, to indianan victories not crushing enough, to oregonian defeats that leave him precarious on the edge of political oblivion, little of it seems to have bearing on what he speaks of to privileged and working-class alike: the rats of the black tenements and the self-killing grounds of Indian reservations, delano daughters with hands stained by the vineyards on which they barely subsist and delta sons with bodies misshapen by hunger. This is prosperity, he bays at them beneath montana nights, calculated as much by what’s polluted, what’s killed, what’s secured and incarcerated, but never by a child’s delight, a poem’s spell, the immutable power of a kept promise. It’s a prosperity that measures everything that means nothing and nothing that means everything. It tells all of us, he concludes to the crowds, everything about our country except why it’s ours.
~ ~ ~
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.