I said nothing. He sighed as if I was a lousy student.
“D’you understand, nothing?” he said.
I looked at him closely for the first time. I really looked at him as he sat, naked and awkwardly, on the grey silk counterpane of his king size bed in the exclusive five star hotel in its downtown waterfront location. You don’t want to know what he looked like, really looked like I mean. What would be the point? For you, I mean. Like I said, like I told him, there was no backstory.
It would have been better if he hadn’t woken up. I had let myself in, just before dawn, with my very desirable universal pass key.He had drawn the heavy curtains in the room but I could make out his shape in the bed. I had, you know, half expected there to be a woman in bed with him. That would have meant two-for-the-price-of-one. But there was no woman. So, good I thought, he’s alone. He just woke up. Maybe he was a light-sleeper.Maybe old habits die hard. I don’t know.I do know I’d made no noise.He put on the bedside lamp , and sat up and saw me standing over him with the Beretta sticking out from my left hand, longer with the attached silencer screwed on.I waved it at him to make sure he stayed still. He didn’t seem scared. He didn’t panic. That was my problem, right there. He didn’t seem anything. As if it was all the most natural thing in the world. I guess it was for me, too. Only reverse image in the mirror, right? He swung his legs out of the bed and sat there, staring. I shouldn’t have hesitated, I know, but he looked really interested in me, really inquisitive. That was a new thing for me. A problem, maybe.
“D’you know who I am?” he said.
That was the first thing he said, and I said, “No.” Maybe I shouldn’t have answered him in the first place. Then he did all that stuff about the backstory, and I fell for it because I really didn’t have any backstory for this, and maybe, I can see now, I wanted one. Maybe everybody wants one, you know. He’d look at me, and it was almost with pity. It was as if I didn’t have a real enough life without a backstory. He obviously had one. He sighed again.
“OK, I’ll tell you the backstory, then,” he said.
“Fill you in. On what you don’t seem to know.”
“Don’t bother,” I said, and I transferred the gun to my right hand. The palm of my left hand began to leave a fine, damp sweat on the black dimpled stock of the gun. It was hot in the room. He hadn’t adjusted the air conditioning overnight. He seemed cool enough himself.
“I wonder,” he said. “You’re not just some punk, are you? Some clown breaking in for some smash-and-grab robbery, helped by the maid with a key, after cash – you could have that from me, you know – are you?”
I said nothing again.
He said, “No. Pity. I didn’t think so.”
“On the other hand,” he said, “for you to be so ignorant, about me, means, to me, that you’re not really worthy of walking away from this with the only thing really worth having. And that is my very particular backstory. Of which, bird brain, you are now a part, like it or not, know it or not. Now I can live, or die, with all that because, precisely because, I do know. I know it all now. And that includes you. You are just a piece of late debris floating in on the far spectrum of my existence.”
“Not stretching your vocabulary too much, am I?” he said.
He opened up his hands to show me his palms. There was no sweat.
“Let’s look at it this way,” he said. “I could be an accountant, a crooked one naturally, or a politician, bribed and corrupt naturally, or a husband, cheating and caught out of course, or, think of this, you schmuck, an innocent victim of the malign intent of others, for whom you are a handy patsy?”
“Don’t call me a schmuck again,” I said.
This time he laughed. Out loud. I waved the Beretta at him again. Maybe I should have pointed it straight at him. But I didn’t.
“That’s better, pal, isn’t it?” he said. “Get a little heated to get a little light. And my guess is you have more than a glimmer of that, already.”
“See,” he said, “because you say you don’t know a thing doesn’t mean you can’t know a thing even when, strictly speaking, you really don’t know. Only, in your case, I’m saying, surmising if you will, that if you think you don’t know you think you don’t need to care. But then because you may indeed not know what you don’t want to know you didn’t want me to wake up, did you? Because then, O buddy mine, and believe me I can see it’s a problem for you, and I appreciate that, then you, you in particular, really do care, don’t you?”
He was beginning to look smug. He was beginning to annoy me. He was not going to stop. I could see that. He’d have to be stopped. Some time soon. He was still asking questions.
“Now why, I wonder, is this? Is it because, underneath it all, you’re just a schlemiel? Nah, I didn’t think so. And it’s not because of my cute face, my enticing voice, my baby blues. And, anyway, you haven’t heard me beg or plead with you, have you, paisan?”
He swallowed. As if there was some neat resolution to this. Other than the one he thought was otherwise coming.
“I’ll tell you why,” he said, “and you won’t like it, but here it is, bozo, it’s because, for you, from here on in, not knowing, and therefore being able to do whatever it is you get to do, is no longer enough. It doesn’t matter about me anymore. This is about us now. You’re a part of me. That’s the backstory which matters, friend. You’re me, too, and you won’t like that whatever happens. You won’t like it, and you can’t stop it. It’s guaranteed. You have my personal warranty on that.”
With that he shifted his buttocks on the bed. He kept his hands on his knees and his eyes on my face. He never looked at the gun. Not once. He was about six feet away from where I was standing. He wasn’t sweating. He seemed in no hurry about anything. I moved the gun back into my preferred hand. Just an instant. I saw his eyes flicker. He saw that I saw that.
“I’m not fucking with you, compadre. That’s just the way it is. For all of us.”
I tightened my finger on the trigger. Time to move on. No backstory, no matter what he thinks. Not for me. And certainly not,anymore, for him. This edition of the story was coming to an end. I think he saw that too. When he spoke now it was in a tone drained of bravado.
“I’m coming at this the wrong way, I can see that now,” he said. “Maybe we should forget my backstory. You’re right about that. What is it to you? What’s done is done and maybe I have no fast-forward button left to push.”
He pointed the index finger of his right hand at me. I didn’t like that. His finger was poised in the air.
“But, what I’m saying is,” he said, “is that you do. Have a future, I mean. What’s it to be? To know that, you have to know your own backstory. “The unexamined life is not worth having.” Do you know who said that first? Socrates. Or rather, Socrates was the mouthpiece for the guy who thought about it. Plato. Greeks. Ancient Greeks. I got to read a lot, hanging around, waiting, in my profession. Excuse me, our profession.
“For a man who reads a lot, you talk too much,” I told him.
That amused him. Perhaps he thought I was hooked.
“So you tell me about your backstory,” he said. “I bet I could guess most of it even. Take those pretty blue scars on your face. Coal miners get those. But you’ve never been underground, have you? Not that kind of underground anyway. But you’ve lived near enough to the life one way or other, haven’t you? It’s a backstory, see. And your accent, not of this city I can tell, even with my tin American ear, but local enough I’d guess, so they knew I’d be coming and they didn’t have time for anyone really from out-of-town. It’s a story in reverse, ain’t it?”
It was my turn to swallow now. Too loud. Too obvious.
“And do you know how and why I can do this, make a guess that connects?” he said. “Because, in essentials, it’ll be the same backstory as mine. Leave or take a few details of no consequence about doting mothers and abusive fathers or crazy bitches or the drone of dreams in some rural backwater or worked-out
coalfield or maybe the Army, or maybe just haywire genes. It’s what happens after all that, isn’t it, which matters. The whys and the wherefores. You know where I’m coming from now, don’t you?” he said.
“This is pointless,” I said. “You’re just prolonging the time left.”
For the first time he looked interested in me.
“Prolong, eh?” he said. “Not pass the time or waste the time, just prolong?”
“Well, kiddo,” he said. “I’m long past the prolongation stage. If this is it, this here and now, so be it. I can cash in anytime. I’ve assembled enough chips to leave with a balance in credit.”
He stopped, quite abruptly, as if the disbelief on my face had really registered with him.
“Oh, God,” he said. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
He shifted uneasily on the bed. His old wrinkled balls seemed swollen, with his penis curled back into the cleft of their sack like a pink slug. He scratched at it, and shuffled a bit more towards me. He took a deep breath as if I was going to be more difficult to reach, in every way, than he’d first thought. He was right about that. I knew that for nothing.
“Let us assume,” he said, “that our positions were reversed. Retro. Verso. Then, you might ask, would I need to know your backstory? Or want to? And you’d be right, except for idle curiosity, which I’ve never had. I would not. Are we converging on this?”
“No,” I said.
He said, “Mmm. OK. Well, let’s put it another way. The older you are, like me, the more interested, in a deeper sense than being curious, you are about what is past. Because what is past will certainly be more than what is yet to come. Even, in this sense, your past, for me. That past, shall we say, is what is sustaining this particular moment in present time. It certainly, how did you put it? prolongs it. So, yes, I’d say, if positions were reversed you would like to know my backstory and, since they are not, as yet, I’d be happy to learn more about yours than anything, I might guess.”
“Want to try?” he said. “Show me yours and I’ll tell you mine, and all that malarkey.”
“No,” I said.
I think he was enjoying himself. That he could see that the kind of prolonging which he wanted was happening after all.
“Can’t blame me for trying, can you?” he said.
I shrugged. Trying was not the same as succeeding was what I thought.
“Besides”, he said, and very smartly this time, “you haven’t ended our conversation yet, have you? Why not?”
That was a dangerous question to ask. The truth was I didn’t know why not. Perhaps it was because I hadn’t had any kind of conversation in quite a while. I hesitated, and then I said:
“You’re not what I expected.”
“I’m not what you expected,” he said, “and what exactly, by the way, were your expectations?”
“That it’d be over by now. All over, I mean,” I said.
“Dead is what you actually mean,” he said. “That I’d be dead, never having woken up.”
He got the hole in one with that. The waking up part, I mean. That had changed the game. Usually, they were too distant or it was too quick to bother me. His waking had spooked me. He kept his stare too long for my liking. The time of his particular time, oh boy, that was ticking fast.
“Wait,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something important.”
“Bear with me”, he said. “I’m just trying to think of how best to tell you, to explain it to you. So, I’m going to try an analogy.”
I knew what that was. I didn’t know why I wanted to hear it.
“You know what an analogy is, don’t you?” he said. “Well this one is about another kind of encounter. A battle. One without obvious winners and losers at the start. Though, for sure, there will be a pre-destined winner and a doomed loser by its end. And the reason for that is not just what actually happens in the encounter, in the battle, but what makes it happen at all, what frames its outcome. Heroism. Decision. Sacrifice. Mistakes. Yeah, all that, of course, but can it alter things without, you know what I’m going to say, a backstory?”
He made a fingertip cathedral arch, and examined it. He unfolded it and put his hands, palms down, on his thighs.
“I’m a student,” he said, “or, you might say, an old buff, an obsessive, about the Battle of Gettysburg, July first to July third, 1863. Pennsylvania. The bloody, bloody American Civil War. That battle, did you know, was the last time that sovereign United States territory was invaded. By the Army of Northern Virginia, the name used, with all its local pride and limitations, for the whole of the invading force which was, indeed, the Grand Army of all of the states who had seceded to form the rebel Confederacy in 1861. There were about eighty thousand fighting men, with around another twenty to thirty thousand non-combatants, mostly blacks, negro slaves, working as cooks and porters and general factotums. The Army, that proud instrument of Alabama as well as Virginia, of Texas as well as Georgia, of the Carolinas and Mississippi, and all of that honourable, self-deluding culture that was the South, was led by the incarnation of that South: the fifty six year old Robert E. Lee, Christian gentleman of Virginia, outwardly reserved, inwardly cavalier, and the era’s most dazzling, professional commander.”
I looked at him again. At the fuzzy muss of his white hair and the grey stubble of his early morning beard and the watery pale blue eyes that were seeing something outside the room. I thought, old man, you’re at least fifty six and you’ve never been anything like Robert E. Lee. He didn’t seem bothered either way. It was his story, and he was going to tell it. If I let him.
“Kid”, he said, “Lee felt the whole thing falling into his hands. With one effort, of power and genius, he could turn the war. Threaten Washington, just up the road, and make Lincoln sue for peace. The Armies were converging. Just as he wanted. Soon at that insignificant cross-roads town, a burg really, of Gettysburg, he would be opposed by the Army of the Potomac, another geographically restricted name for the major armed force of the Union’s battered administration. It would march towards Lee’s unexpected concentration, and do so under the command of its new, very new, just a few days in fact, leader. The decidedly uncharismatic, untested, extremely cautious, General George Gordon Meade, forty three years old, and like Lee a pre-war Democrat, albeit of the Union kind, but, for sure, no Republican, a reluctant warrior, like so many of the top brass in his Army.”
He looked straight at me again. Back with me. He clasped his hands together, and wrung them gently.
“Don’t worry. I can see you don’t want to waste time. And I have no intention, even in the interest of my prolonged good health, to turn into the Scheherazade of Gettysburg as you beg for more and more detail, eked out over a thousand nights. I’ll pare it down. To the bone, OK, Reb?”
I’d decided there was no rush. It was decided. I’d not retreat.
“Right”, he said. “What came together were two mighty forces, but one by choice was there and the other was drawn to it as if by a magnet. Lee had gathered up all the strength, in arms and men, that he could muster, in order to take the war to the Yankees, to the Union states across the border, and in their own territory. Only a resounding victory, he had argued, would confound the enemy who, otherwise, would eventually out-muscle and out-wait the poorer South. If he could win, no, he must win, Lee felt northern public opinion would become so restless that the unpopular Lincoln would be forced to make a peace overture. One that would lead to the agreed independence of the Confederate States of America. What a world-changing moment that would have been, huh?”
Since I said nothing, he looked to engage me another way. To bring us together, in spirit, or practice at least.
“You must read, don’t you? I mean in our profession there’s a lot of waiting about, isn’t there? Or maybe, I forget about the young sometimes, you just play some mindless game or other. Pity. Because, Einstein, if you bothered to read you might have read that inspirational sot and Nobel Prize Winner, William Faulkner w
hose great grandfather, William T. Falkner of Mississippi, fought in that battle, when Lee on the final day sent General Pickett’s massed infantry across the fields and up to the ridge where Union guns halted their wave after wave and sent them crashing back in disarray to defeat. But when they set out, thousands upon thousands of them in their homespun butternut grey, shouldering their rifles, keeping in step as their comrades randomly fell by their side, when they started out in the heat of that July afternoon, everything, I mean everything, was still at stake, still to play for. That’s why the great novelist, the great grandson would say, speaking for all his lost kind, that for every Southern boy it was still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 and no, he means, nothing had been decided, and yes, he means everything had been so decided. All of subsequent life, even as it was weighed in the balance.”
“You see,” he said, “the gallant Pickett did charge because the driven Lee wanted it so, but Lee’s second-in-command, General James Augustus Longstreet, who did not want it so, delayed and delayed in releasing Pickett, until some thought and think, he’d left it all too late. Longstreet had thought they were to fight a tactically defensive, attritional battle with the Federal forces, not an aggressive, full-frontal attack, a gamble for glory or disaster. Lee gambled, and Lee lost.”
“But here’s the rub,” he said. “He might never have gambled if, on the first day, as the rival armies found themselves unexpectedly meeting up, a Union Major-General, John Reynolds, dead on the battlefield at forty three, had not intervened to hold up Lee’s advance brigades, despite the few mounted troopers at his disposal before Meade’s sluggish main body of infantry and artillery, could turn up.”
He wiped his lips with his left hand, and used his right to wag that index finger at me. Too many people had done that to me, all my life. Did he know that, too?
“Reynolds was just,” he said, “with an advance cavalry detachment as a probe, scouting ahead, when he stumbled across the forward troops of the entire Army of Northern Virginia on the first of July. The logic would have been retreat. But Reynolds saw that if he did not hold his ground for a few hours in the town then any retreat after that to the desirable hills and ridges around the town to the south and east would be over-run, and those sweet heights would be in Lee’s hands. The heights, Cemetery Hill and Seminary Ridge, where Pickett’s charge would die would instead serve Lee to rout Meade’s oncoming army.
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