Uses of History
by Spencer Dew
There is so little reward in it, Ed was telling me. We were at the Bo’s Lounge or the Kitty Club, the Atomic Cowboy or the Gulch – one of those bars like bad situation comedies, senseless and strangely addictive, distracting. The ‘it’ in which there was so little reward was something like virtue, decency. Ed liked the words decency, integrity. He talked too much about past presidents, confusing facts, dates, basic blocks of chronology. He talked about Nixon and the Bomb, for instance, Truman in China. That was a famous one, that flip-up, and I called him on the error, bringing it up in other bars, other nights, around other people, most of whom didn’t get the joke. So little goddamn reward.
Ed was kind of a wreck. This was the night after the night that Becky left him, only hours after I’d found him standing with his Smith and Wesson in the front lawn, hand limp around the gun, gesturing vaguely, trying to talk about suicide but sort of sobbing up the words so the main sound was snot and phlegm and a creepy, infant gurgle of a noise. I took his gun and hugged him for a while, and when I pulled away there was a wet stain on my shoulder. His face was a mess, creased and red. He had no idea how to deal with all this pain, which is what he told me later, after the first few bars, when, with his gun hidden under the spare and locked in my trunk, he began to talk about things, to distance, to philosophize. He told me that Roosevelt faced a similar situation. He told me that there was little reward in righteous living, honesty, or moral courage.
Weeks later, when I ran into Becky with that Indian girl at the Safeway, holding hands even as they picked through the yogurts, looking for plain ones, I just nodded, said hello, acted as if it were natural that my friend’s estranged wife’s girlfriend would tell me to check out the new wine display, how there were yellow labels indicating the rank each bottle got at some recent contest or tasting or magazine-sponsored competition. Thank you, I said, and something stupid and dishonest about how I’d been meaning to get around to buying myself a few bottles of nice red wine, for the next dinner party I threw.
Ed started quoting examples from foreign history: Napoleon, Catherine the Great, Saladin. He bought some books, I think, after Becky left. Maybe he just watched a lot of cable. In any case, he expanded his repertoire, drew broad parallels: Waterloo and Little Big Horn; the Council of Trent and the founding of Rhode Island; Istanbul, in general, as a kind of dark metaphor for Denver. He started quoting old poems, the kind with archaic words and formulas in them, ye this, thou that. Maybe he quoted the Bible, too. I wouldn’t know. He never asked for his gun back, though, and he never mentioned the pills, which came as a shock to everybody, as he’d always refused medicine, hated doctors and hospitals. To die with the tube of a stomach pump wedged down his throat must have been a double offense.
Lincoln felt the same way, he told me once, back before the thing with Becky and that girl, back in the so-called happy times, after things were finalized with Eileen and our furniture had been moved away and I was a bachelor again, living like one, sleeping on the floor and keeping only beer and eggs in the refrigerator. I’d come over a couple times a week to watch Ed burn meat on the grill, to get drunk on tequila and watch the stars, the black silhouettes of the mountains, to hear Ed talk about lessons learned from dead presidents. Lincoln couldn’t stand the medical establishment, the medical industry. He was, foremost, an honest man – so Ed said, of the Great Emancipator – and doctors make their living through secret knowledge, deception.
I never quite understood Ed’s moral system, but it made sense to him and he stuck with it, praising consistency by name, and standards, and tradition, though I don’t know what kind of tradition he appealed to, unless maybe he meant history, in highlights, sometimes absurdly distorted, misunderstood. He told me that Vichy was the true name of the Third Reich, that the Pope ruled as secret Fuhrer, that Jimmy Carter was elected by mistake, a numerical error – a typo, really – on the part of the guys in the machines that orchestrate all of this. That was his phrase. He didn’t use the word aliens in case they were listening.
The guys in the machines have it all mapped out, he said, late that night after the night that Becky left him. He said he didn’t know how to go on, or what to do, told me he missed her, started crying, suggested that maybe, just maybe, everything could break free, if, for instance, we were able to load the entire moon with nuclear warheads, let her rip. If we could ride out that shockwave, he said, and keep our honesty, our integrity, our moral fiber.
The guy at the pawnshop knew him, knew the gun, told me he and Ed had a sort of routine, that Ed had hocked the gun dozens of times, that he was worried about being traced, that maybe the guys in the machines had a homing beacon in the barrel. They don’t like it when we’re armed, the pawnshop guy told me, though it wasn’t clear if he was just quoting Ed or agreeing with him, keeping the faith alive.
It didn’t matter to me anymore. I stayed honest, silent, just nodded and took my cash, holding the bills with my thumb over the pyramid, as Ed had taught me to do. That night – the night after I sold the gun, about a week after his funeral and maybe as much as three weeks after Becky left him for that Indian girl – I stayed in and drank wine labeled by the Safeway as a 93 out of a hundred, whatever that means.
I sat in my one chair – a molded plastic patio model. I watched a show about Thomas Jefferson, his architectural work, that school in Virginia, Monticello, the Great Wall of China, the meaning of the different degrees of Masonic Lodges. I drank my wine, 93 out of a hundred, and later there were Vikings on the screen, carving crystals into the components of rudimentary lasers, using these lasers as navigational devices, traveling forwards or backwards through time, at intervals of about half an hour a burst. This, the TV told me, was the secret of their notorious ambushes, their blitzkriegs, their surprise attacks. After that, something about the Druids, but I kept the volume off because the sun was about to come up and I always like to be quiet when the birds begin, to hear the way they do it, in waves, slowly building.
I went out to the porch and looked to the mountains glowing pink in reflected light. The sun was behind the house, and I waited out there listening to the birds and finishing the second bottle of wine as it rose and rose and broke over the roof and spilled down solid against the mountains, or almost solid, only slightly veiled in smog.
I’ve never managed to be satisfied by the way they look in the daylight, those mountains. They’re not big enough, crazy as that sounds, or maybe they’re just too far away, too spread out, too random in their inclines and peaks, with too much prairie and pollution between here and there, too many unexplained military helicopters hovering, too many no-account towns full of half-nude girlie bars and cut-rate liquor outlets.
When we moved out here, Eileen complained about the homeless, how they leered and persisted and wore heavy-duty coats. But it gets cold, I told her. I tried to explain that we shouldn’t spite them their coats, but she was right, her immediate revulsion, visceral and true. The town is full of bums with fur collars, open sores, religious tracts. I’ve begun to pick my liquor stores based on the population of the parking lot. I’ve begun to pretend, sometimes, that I only speak and understand some other language, an extemporaneous tongue, sounding like I figure Swedish must sound, based on that puppet from that old television show.
Meanwhile, in Stockholm, managing her gallery on a side street free of beggars, probably scrubbed with little bristled machines, twice daily, does she ever think of me, here, the emptiness of the rooms, the inadequacy of the edge of the Continental Divide?
According to Ed, all of this has been predetermined since the dawn of geologic time, since the arrival of the machines. Before the Incas, he told me, once, under some stars, in some bar, some place, the air too thin, disappointing. Before the Incas, before the Egyptians, before the cave dwellers, the tyrannosaurs – before all that, it had been voted on, in conference, decided, books shut, course locked.
There is a real comfort in it. I’ll admit. That miles and miles above us are beings with private reasons for why Becky left him, for why Eileen insisted on shipping the furniture to her mother’s retirement community in Phoenix. The idea that history makes sense, whether crossing the Delaware or leaving a plastic patio chair behind. The fatalism of it, the ease of surrender. The certainty that it doesn’t matter, anything you do; no matter how right or good or honest or brave you might be, someone else is calling all your shots, has already called them, has already figured all the consequences, ramifications.
Study it if you want to, he told me, the night after the night she left him. The clues are all there, trillions of them, shifting and intersecting. But there’s no reward in that, either, because there is nothing more to figure out. Just accept it, he told me, his hand on my shoulder, trying to shake me, but with no strength left in his grip. Just submit, he said, submit.
Spencer lives in Chicago. Some of his recent work has appeared int Girls with Insurance, Juked, Thieves’ Jargon, and Turk Magazine.
