In the late-night light with everyone else on the train asleep, it sounds louder than he actually says it, and the reporter looks up at her and all the reporters turn to look at her; and everyone wants to take back what’s been said but they can’t. The reporter’s eyes are wet. He looks at her, they all look at her, then he looks back at his cards. “Someone’s going to kill him too,” he says again with quiet fury, “and everyone knows it, and it’s all just a dirty trick, him running like this, him raising people’s hopes, as though his election is a scenario the country can actually believe in.”
“Don’t,” she whispers again, too late.
~ ~ ~
South Africa, he said to her that night in London that she first met him — the glint of his blue eyes catching some light off the street — with every intent, whether he realized it, to infuriate her: purely an act of provocation; and now she watches him provoke everyone, most particularly those who would presume to be on his side, those who would presume he’s on theirs. Those who would presume to take any sort of comfort in their own righteousness or liberalism: He would make the world as anguished as he is, not out of narcissism but because no truth is worth anything to him without anguish. Everything that would presume to be true must prove itself to him by fire. He no longer accepts that, in political terms, he’s no one if he’s not who the public thinks he is. He’s come to insist that he’s who he thinks he is.
He provokes those who would presume to be indifferent. “There are more rats in New York,” he tells one audience in the Midwest, “than there are people,” and they think he’s joking until they laugh and he hisses, “Stop it.” He provokes those who would presume that he’s indifferent. Meeting militant blacks in California, he stoically submits to their torrent of abuse until it’s exhausted and they’re left with nothing but their respect for him and the exceptional instance of a white man who will come to them alone and listen, and listen, and listen.
~ ~ ~
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.
~ ~ ~
Of course she’ll remember all of this on the night in Los Angeles two months later, in the back kitchen of the old L.A. hotel where the Academy Awards were held several decades before. She isn’t sure whether she actually hears the shots or just imagines hearing them, not knowing exactly where they came from except close by; the one thing that the television footage can’t or won’t capture is the amount of blood a single handgun can spill. “Is there a doctor in the house?” someone with a microphone screams over and over; and over and over are the wails of “Nooo, noooo!” and “How could this happen?”—but how could it not? will be the question later.
~ ~ ~
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.
~ ~ ~
At first she’s determined to remain in Los Angeles, but at the request of the campaign, purely for organizational purposes she accompanies the body on its flight back to New York to lie in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which she can remember walking by during the short time she lived there, never suspecting this. Four days after his murder the coffin is carried by train from New York to Washington and she tries to hide herself in one of the cars, hide from the widow he married after dating the actress who played his dead sister, hide from those who were part of the campaign, hide more than anything from the hundreds of thousands along the track, old men with flags saluting and boy scouts with caps over their hearts, homemade signs that urge GOODBYE GOODBYE GOODBYE to the train that only proceeds more slowly as the crowds swell. Those are the ones she can’t stand to look at — until finally she looks and it’s at the sight of wet black faces sobbing more for him than any white man in memory that she bursts into tears. When the train passes an anonymous young woman fallen to her knees in the grass holding her face in her hands, Jasmine wonders, Do I have the right, as a woman from another country who hasn’t borne what they have, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks No, and holds her head anyway.
~ ~ ~
In the late hours the train arrives in Washington and the coffin is eased from its car and taken from the station down Constitution Avenue along the Mall’s northern border to the Lincoln Memorial where people sing, then to the cemetery to lie alongside the buried brother. She’s never seen a night funeral before filled with torchlight: All funerals should be at night, she concludes, it’s the only beauty bleak enough to be worthy of funerals. Next to a plaque that quotes from the speech he gave in South Africa two years before, in that moment that first so alienated her and then so moved her to give him her heart, there’s only a small unassuming white cross.