These Dreams of You

by Steve Erickson

  “When is the tour over?”

  “Tonight’s the last night. He’s in . . . Denver? How he’s managed to pull it off this long nobody can figure. Gets back day after tomorrow.”

  “Mind if I go meet his flight?”

  “Flight?” Anna laughs again. “My dear, Mister Twenty-First Century travels by good old fashioned train.”

  Two nights later at Union Station, Jasmine waits at the end of the long amber tunnel beneath the tracks that funnel from the trains to the lobby. Disgorged passengers flood the exits. Only when everyone else is gone do two men appear, one small and wiry, cropped dark hair with a cap, the other emaciated in a black overcoat. The ends of his flaming crimson hair stick out from under a wide-brimmed black fedora; the last time Jasmine felt a man’s handshake so weak, he changed her life. At first he calls her Anna, then stops with a slight start. “You’re not Anna,” he mutters.

  “Anna’s at home,” she answers.

  “Home?” he says, perplexed.

  “The house. I’m Jasmine.”

  “From the record company?” and then, “This is Jim,” introducing the other man. “Charmed,” says Jim, kissing her hand, not exactly elegant but courtly. On the way back to Doheny the singer with the red hair announces sweepingly that Jim is “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world,” but the only Jim that Jasmine has heard of flashed his willy at a concert years ago and is now dead. “Sings back-up,” Anna snorts dismissively at the house after the two travelers have collapsed, one in the mysterious backroom and the other on the same couch where Jasmine sat a couple of days before. “I seem to remember that was my job before I started sleeping with the star. Jim made a couple of albums with his own band a few years back—lunatics . . . I won’t even go into the fucked up shit that man did on stage. His raggedy junkie ass,” she confirms, “is crazier than the other one,” nodding at the room down the hall. “Was locked up in a mental ward over at UCLA before we sprang him.”

  “You,” Jim announces from the couch without twitching a finger, startling Jasmine who thought he was unconscious, “didn’t spring anyone. He did.”

  When Jasmine returns to the house the next morning, the front door is open. No one answers when she rings the bell. She walks into the house and down the hall, bracing for what she might find, which is Jim sitting in the chair wearing no shirt but owl-rimmed glasses, across from the couch where he passed out the night before. He drinks hot tea and is buried in the Wall Street Journal.

  Five televisions are on in the room, three of them on the same channel, all with the sound down. Jasmine never noticed the TVs before and now that she looks closer she sees there are two more, turned off. She’s trying to compute the incongruity of this not to mention the Wall Street Journal when—having in no other way acknowledged her entrance—Jim says from behind the newspaper, “Little doll with gray eyes. What it is.” The only other person who’s ever commented on her eyes was Kelly. “Primordial,” she called them, “from the beginning of time.”

  “Everything all right, then?” she says.

  “Anna left,” now peering at Jasmine for a moment around the edge of Dow Jones before disappearing back.

  “Left? You mean left left?”

  “Yes she did.”

  Jasmine pokes her head into other rooms. “Why?”

  “You’ll have to discuss that with her or, more likely, him. I believe,” Jim says, “they had a falling out.” He adds, “The Communists won an election in Italy.”

  “They had a falling out because the Communists won an election in Italy?” Jim looks at her around the newspaper again to see if she’s kidding. “Shots weren’t fired?” she says. “Knives drawn?”

  “Oh, worse,” Jim answers, “words were spoken. Everyone’s still alive, though, if that’s what you mean—or she was, anyway, last I saw her. Being the shiny red cockroach of rock and roll who will survive atomic meltdown, he is as well, I assume.”

  Jasmine walks down the long hallway to the room in back and knocks on the door. “Hello?” Pressing her ear to the door she can hear music playing, and knocks again more assertively. “Are you all right in there?” The song she heard before begins playing again. “Look here,” she says, “I’m going to have to ring the police if you don’t answer—”

  The door opens abruptly. He wears a thin burgundy robe undone at the waist that he ties now; in the dim hall he shields his eyes as if from some blinding light, though she can barely see in front of her. “Oh,” he mutters. He pulls open the door.

  “Sorry to bother, just want to make sure you’re all right then . . . Mister—”

  “No, no, not Mister Anything,” and he has to muster up a tone of insistence, “come in.” There’s the scent of smoked Gitanes, and on the drawn window blinds that allow only a brown light, pentagrams have been scrawled. One is drawn on the floor as well. A row of small stubby candles burn on the shelf perilously near books that age has rendered immediately flammable; a couple of other candles burn on the floor. A guitar resting against the wall doesn’t appear to have been moved in a while, and there’s a small synthesizer keyboard. The music comes from a turntable on a wooden chest beneath the windows, hooked up to two small speakers, the cover to one of which has a gouge administered by something sharp. He says, “Right. Jasmine,” demonstrating a memory more acute than she would have predicted.

  “Where’s Anna?” she asks.

  “Anna has left.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Jasmine,” he almost drawls, “you seem very pleasant but I’m not sure that’s your business, is it?”

  “Rather it is and rather it isn’t. Your management has asked—”

  “Yes, I just fired them,” and he looks at a dusty telephone that shows no sign of having been disturbed. She can’t be certain if he’s high or exhausted; everything seems to take an effort. “Before you came. I need you to work for me now.”

  It’s hard to tell whether he’s thought of this on the spur of the moment or it’s something he’s been considering more than five minutes. “I shall pay you better than whatever they—”

  “You fired them?” she says. “What for? And don’t tell me it’s not my business.”

  “They were . . . ” He shakes his head and looks at the phone with dread. He says, “People . . . have been ringing me up . . . I don’t know how they found me here . . . ”

  “The management?”

  “Ringing me up . . . no, not the management, uh . . . need to put a stop to it. Need to stop with . . . ” he waves his arm at the pentagrams on the floor and blinds, “ . . . all this. It’s . . . stirring up what should be left unstirred and now they’re ringing . . . excuse me,” and at the turntable he puts the stylus back at the beginning of the record he’s been playing. The song begins again. He looks up from the chair. “What were we—”

  “You fired—”

  “Yes. Well, they really weren’t handling my affairs properly, were they? I believe that they’re stealing my money. It’s happened before, you know. It’s my fault, really . . . I signed the contract, knew I shouldn’t . . . ”

  “That’s why Anna left?”

  “Anna . . . no, Anna and I . . . that’s not why. This is fantastic,” he says, leaning toward the record that’s playing, “I’m thinking of covering this song,” and now there’s a spark of something in his speech, “it’s from an old . . . what was his name . . . played Zorba the Greek, and Gauguin. Anthony . . .” He’s wracking his brain. “God I hate it that I can’t remember anything. Anyway it’s from a movie with him and . . . Anna Magnani perhaps? Of course I can never do it like Nina Simone, I wouldn’t bother trying. That’s about as perfect a vocal as anyone is going to sing—no affectation, no posturing, not a false moment. Perhaps I’ll do it like, you know . . . Neu! or one of the German bands . . . are you familiar with the German bands?”

  “No.”

  “Most Yanks aren’t. Bloody stupid. Not you, of course, but then you’re a homegirl, aren’t you,” he smi
les.

  “London.”

  “There you go . . . but that’s why I need you, you see? There they are, all the reasons . . . for your very, very, very, very special combination of, of, of, of, of, of, of . . . attributes . . . ”

  “I’m certain I don’t know what combination that might be,” says Jasmine. “What happened with you and Anna has nothing to do with me, does it?”

  He looks at her completely mystified. “Why would it have anything to do with you?” He thinks. “Didn’t you and I just meet?” as though the possibility occurs to him, with some horror, that maybe they’ve known each other for years and he doesn’t remember. “I mean . . . ” slightly alarmed, “ . . . didn’t we?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “That’s what I thought. At the train station, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  He’s relieved. “Yes.” Then, “So what do you say? I’m leaving Los Angeles, of course.”

  “You are?”

  “Oh yes. Didn’t I say?”

  “No.”

  “That was part of it with Anna.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m leaving this very, very vile place full of very, very vile people,” he says. “Vile. Place. Full of. Very. Vile. People.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “If I stay one more moment, I’ll be very vile too. Perhaps,” his voice falls to a hush, “I already am.”

  In the same hush he says, “I’m holding onto reality by a thread, really. Don’t you know? And, and, and sometimes, sometimes I think I’m getting through, I think I’m getting things done, I think the work is happening . . . and then,” he says, “then I realize, you know, hours have gone by, hours and hours and hours, and I’ve written, like, three or four or five bars of a melody and that’s all. It’s all I’ve done. It feels like I’ve written an entire song in minutes, when I’ve taken days to write the fragment of a single verse, and then I’ve written the fragment backwards and from the inside out and upside down. Do you know who I met here?”

  “Are you going to answer my question?” she says.

  “I am answering your question. Wait a minute. What question?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Yes, that one. I am answering. Don’t get tough with me, young lady,” he says, half mocking, “I run things around here.” He laughs. “Do you know who I met?” He picks the needle up from the record and begins playing it again. “Can’t get enough of this bloody song,” he mutters. “It was in a movie—perhaps not Nina’s version, I’m not sure. Who was in that movie . . . ?”

  “Who did you meet, then?” trying to keep him on any track at all.

  “I said that, didn’t I. About the movie. Sophia Loren. No, Anna Magnani.”

  “You met Anna Magnani?”

  “No.” Worried. “Did I?”

  “Someone vile, you said.”

  “Not vile—very vile. Anthony Quinn. Mid-Fifties. No, not everyone here is very vile. Not every single last someone. Christopher Isherwood. Do you know who he is?”

  “A writer?”

  “My God! Another literate person in the music business, besides Jim and myself, that is.”

  “Can’t say I know his work, mind.”

  “That’s three literate people in the music business and we’re all in the same house. An aeroplane crashes into this house and the literacy level of Los Angeles plummets . . . ” He shakes his head, the math eludes him. “ . . . plummets . . . three hundred percent. By the way, I see that look on your face. Don’t discount Jim,” he nods toward the living room from where Jasmine came, “when he’s not being his iguanan self onstage, he’s better read than the two of us put together. Well, not me.”

  “He was deep in the Wall Street Journal when I came in.”

  “There you are,” he nods.

  “Are you two . . . ?”

  For a moment he’s waiting for her to finish the sentence, then, “What? Oh. No! No, we’re just trying to keep each other out of trouble. When we’re not getting each other in trouble. And he’s a huge talent. Huge influence on me, so if I can, uh, help . . . ” He shrugs.

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Well,” he shrugs again. “Jim is his proper name, of course.”

  “Are you going to tell me, then, where you’re going? When you leave L.A.?”

  “I was telling you. Christopher Isherwood used to live in Berlin. Back before the war. Wrote some very famous stories.”

  “Is he a Nazi too?”

  He stops. “Of course he isn’t a Nazi. ‘Too’?” Jasmine doesn’t say anything. “I’m not a Nazi,” he says quietly. “Would it matter if I blamed it on the drugs?”

  “No.”

  “No,” he shakes his head, “quite correct. You’re absolutely right. I made the choice to take the drugs, didn’t I, so whatever bloody stupid things I do or say when I’m on them, well, then it’s on me, isn’t it.”

  “That’s actually very sensible,” she says.

  “I’m . . . I’m . . . sabotaged by my impulse to be flamboyant about everything. But that whole sodding business about that so-called Nazi salute at Victoria Station,” he argues fiercely, “was bollocks! On the life of my four-year-old son, I was waving to the crowd. Look at the fucking photo! Look at my bloody hand—it’s no Nazi salute. A wave. Whatever other awful thing about me that you believe and that I no doubt deserve, you must believe at least that.”

  Impressed by the ferocity of his defense, she says, “I do.”

  “The whole Nazi business . . . ” he says, trying to shoo it away like a fly, “I was just fascinated by . . . by . . . by the . . . romanticism of it—”

  “Romanticism?”

  “Of course. Nazism is extraordinarily romantic. It’s King Arthur and all that . . . and what was King Arthur anyway but Jesus in armor, with his twelve knights? I understand how grotesque and destructive it finally all became . . . ” Defeated, he sees the look on her face. “I know it’s evil. I know what happened. Bloody hell,” he continues quietly, “look, Jasmine. Can I call you Jasmine?”

  “You know you can.”

  “I need to get out of this steaming shit pile of a city,” he says with new intensity, “away from the coke, away from the pills. Away from the sirens, the fucking limos cruising the Strip . . . get to Berlin where I can clean up—”

  “Think they don’t have any drugs in Berlin, do you?”

  “Yes, yes, I know—they have drugs bloody everywhere, don’t they? But Berlin is . . . ” He ties his robe around him more tightly and for the first time doesn’t start over the record on the turntable. “ . . . attached to the rest of the western world by a thread of track and highway, like the balloon on the end of a string, isolated, besieged. Haunted, insolent, bold. Divided down the middle—like me. Listen, Jasmine. I need you to fly . . . do you fly? . . . to Frankfurt and take the train to Berlin and find a place for us to live. For you and me and Jim, I mean. Somewhere not too far from the Hansa studios . . . do you know Hansa?”

  “A German label, isn’t it?” she says.

  “They have their own studio at the south end of the Wall so we need something accessible. Of course I’ll pick up your expenses and you’ll have a month to track down something simple, in an interesting part of town but functional, anonymous, where one can go to a market and buy tea. Nothing extravagant, nothing rock-star. I mean that. I’ve never meant anything more seriously.”

  “Wait.”

  “Jim and I will be in France a bit, another studio north of Paris where we’ll be laying some basic tracks . . . but we’ll be coming—”

  “Wait!”

  “—by train and boat. What?”

  She realizes she doesn’t know what. “Nothing.”

  “Right, then. A new chapter! a new town, new career . . . ”

  “On one condition . . . ”

  “Oh yes, yes, I know,” he says impatiently, waving it away, “listen,” and in the brown light through the blinds h
e looks at her, “I can only guarantee that’s not my intention and I shall never, never, never . . . ” he waves again. “Just . . . I’ll never, that’s all. I’ll never. Whatever. Who knows, right, luv? And Jim’s a perfect gentleman, I might add, for a bloke who has the biggest cock in the history of rock and roll, and that includes Jimi.”

  “Should I even ask how you know this?”

  “Luv, everyone knows this.”

  Within a single breathtaking hour she has in her possession a cashier’s check for $15,000. Bundling up the books and records she can’t bear to part with and sending them onto Berlin, Jasmine has the idea to give the rest to Kelly; but sitting in her car watching the house where she lived for three years, trying to summon up her courage, she hits the gas at first sight of the other woman. She listens for the tune of “Tezeta” coming from her womb, but hears nothing

  She leaves like someone who’s set fire to the building. Spends the night in the car before dropping it off with the Korean couple to whom she’s sold it, then the last fifteen hours in the Lufthansa terminal waiting for her flight. When the plane stops over in London, she’s mildly startled that her old city fails to beckon; from Frankfurt she takes the train through the long hundred-mile outdoor tunnel that runs from West Germany to Berlin. She takes a room at a small hotel off the Kurfürstendamm and retrieves her books and records.

  She writes to him, I’ve spent most of the past month familiarizing myself with a city that’s desperate and alive, and finally yesterday located a residence that I hope both you and Jim find adequate. It’s above a motor vehicle repair shop, very basic but comfortable enough, six or seven rooms with sky-blue walls and doors that open onto a small balcony overlooking a side alley. The floors are tile from before the War and there are carved high ceilings and a yard in front enclosed by an old iron gate. It’s in the Schöneberg district on the Hauptstrasse, a short ride on the U-Bahn from Hansa Tonstudio 2, and mostly the people are working-class Turks which means . . . Turkish coffee! Christopher Isherwood lived in Schöneberg as well as Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Klaus Kinski (cracked German actor I’ve not heard of but you probably have) and now someday someone shall write a letter to someone saying you lived here as well.