Making History

by Stephen Fry

  “Deal,” I said.

  I was relieved to arrive back at Henry Hall. The sight of so many students in the Rotunda at the Student Center had unnerved me, reminded me of how adrift I was, how alienated. The particu­larities of foreign food, foreign ways of serving it, foreign money, foreign shouts and calls, foreign laughing, foreign smells and for­eign looks . . . they had hemmed me in on all sides until I wanted to scream. My room in Henry Hall, so strange to me this morning, now took on all the comfort and familiarity of an old pair of Dock-Sides.

  We dumped the brown paper bags of food onto the desk by the window. It was still light, but I wrestled with the blind rod until the slats closed and switched on a lamp. There was a feeling I had, a hunted feeling, a need to nest down.

  As we chomped on our wedges of pizza I looked up at the walls.

  “These people here,” I said, pointing to a poster. “Who the hell are they?”

  “You kidding?”

  “No, really. Tell me.”

  “They are the New York Yankees, Mike. You take a train to Penn Station to watch them play most every time you can.”

  “Oh, and them?”

  “Mandrax.”

  “Mandrax,” I repeated. “They’re a band, right?”

  “They’re a band.”

  “And I like them, do I?”

  Steve nodded with a smile.

  “They look like the saddest load of old farts I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Are you sure I like them?”

  “Sure,” he nodded. “They’re neat.”

  “Neat, are they? Well, if they’re neat I must be crazy about them. I happen to love neat. How about the Beatles? Do I like them? The Rolling Stones? Led Zeppelin? Elton John? Blur? Oily-Moily? Oasis?”

  I laughed with pleasure at his blank stare. “Christ, I am going to make a killing.” I giggled. “Here, listen to this. Ha-hem! Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away! Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh I believe in yes-ter-day. What do you reckon?”

  “Ouch!” said Steve, his hands over his ears.

  “Mm, you have to hear the harmonies, I suppose . . . what about this, then? Imagine there’s no heaven . . . No, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I’ll need some time alone with a synthesizer.”

  I stood and walked around the walls. “Who’s this then?”

  “Luke White.”

  “He’s a singer?”

  “Get outta here! He’s a movie star.”

  “Hm, rather cute, isn’t he? Why’ve I got him up on my wall?”

  “That’s what a lot of people would like to know,” Steve said, and then turned a furious shade of red.

  As he tried to cover up his confusion by concentrating on the inte­rior of a doughnut, a thought that I had been carrying at the back of my mind forced itself upon me.

  “Um, Steve. This is going to sound like a really stupid question, but I’m not gay, am I?”

  Steve frowned. “Gay? Sometimes, I guess. Sure.”

  “No, no, you misunderstand me. Am I . . . you know, like . . . um, you know . . . ?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know! Am I . . . a fairy? Queer?”

  Steve went absolutely white. “Fuck’s sake, Mikey!”

  “Well, it isn’t so strange a question, is it? I mean, you know. You said I didn’t have any girlfriends. And then I thought, well, these posters . . . I just, you know . . . wondered, that’s all.”

  “Jesus, man. Are you crazy?”

  “Well, I know I never used to be, in Camb . . . in my memory, that is. At least I don’t think I was. Particularly. You know . . . any more than normal. I had a girlfriend, but frankly, it was a pretty weird relationship in some ways. She was older than me and it was as much convenience as anything, sharing a house, that sort of thing. I mean I loved her and everything, but I often used to envy James and Double Eddie slightly. Perhaps all the time I was . . . hell, I just wondered, you know. I expect it’s normal. No big deal.”

  Steve was staring at his Coke can as if it held the secret of life. “No big deal?” he said unsteadily. “You shouldn’t talk like that, Mikey. You’ll go getting yourself into trouble.”

  “Into trouble? You talk about it as if it’s a crime. I mean, all I’m asking is, am I now, or have I ever been . . . oh my God!” I broke off abruptly, the rhythms of that old McCarthyite mantra causing a sud­den terrible understanding to dawn. “It is, isn’t it? It’s a crime!”

  He turned to me and I could almost believe that there were tears in his eyes. “Of course it’s a fucking crime, you asshole! Where the hell have you been living?”

  “Well, that’s just it, Steve,” I said. “That’s just it. You see, where I come from it isn’t a crime.”

  “Oh, right. Sure. Like on Mars, in the valley of the Big Rock Candy Mountain where marshmallows grow on the candy-cane trees and everybody skips and jumps and bakes cherry pie for strangers.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Steve finished the Coke, pressed the sides of the can in with his thumbs and fumbled for a cigarette.

  I lit one too and cleared my throat, hating the silence. “I assume that we’ve never . . . that is . . . the two of us . . .”

  He glared at me furiously.

  “Mm. I’ll take that as a no then.”

  He leaned forward in his chair and looked down between his legs at the carpet, his hair flopping straight down and obscuring his face.

  Once more silence reigned.

  “Look, Steve,” I said. “If I told you that I did come from Mars, you’d think I was mad, wouldn’t you? But suppose, just suppose I came from . . . another place, just as strange, from a culture quite dif­ferent from your own?”

  Steve said nothing, just continued to scrutinize the carpet.

  “You’re a rational man,” I went on. “You must concede that what has apparently happened to me is hard to explain. The way I talk, it’s not put on, you know that. Even Professor Taylor saw it and he’s genuinely English. Well genuinely over-English, frankly. You’ve seen me change, in a second—one sudden nanosecond, against a wall in Palmer Square—change from the guy you knew, all-American, philosophy-majoring, baseball-pitching, tooth-flossing, regular old Mikey Young into someone completely different. I’m not different on the outside, but on the inside I am. You can’t deny that. It’s as plain as the hair on your head, which for some reason is all I can see of you at the moment. I know thousands of things I never knew before, but thousands of things I should know—I don’t. I don’t know who’s president of the United States. I don’t know where Hertford, Con­necticut, is, I’m not even that sure where Connecticut itself is, come to that—somewhere on the right-hand side, that’s all I’m sure of. I had never seen this campus before in my life until this morning, you know I wasn’t faking that. But I can tell you things about European History before 1920 that I couldn’t possibly know unless I’d studied it deeply. Here, I’ll prove it. Take this book and ask me any fact. Anything.”

  Steve took the proffered book doubtfully. “So maybe you know stuff about Europe. So what?”

  “You know me pretty well . . . you think you know me pretty well. Look around you at my bookshelves, not one single history book. Did I do any history in my first two years? Take any courses in it?”

  “Guess not . . .”

  “Right. So test me. Anything from before 1930, say.”

  Steve flipped through the book and stopped at a page. “Okay then, what was the Holy Alliance?”

  I smiled. “Sir, please sir, easy-peasy, sir!” I said, shooting my hand up in the air. “The Holy Alliance was the name given to a compact, sir, a compact signed by the extremely unholy trinity of . . . let me see, the Tsar of Russia—that would have been Alexander the First—and by Friedrich Wilhelm the Third of Prussia and by the Holy Roman Emperor, F
rancis the Second, though of course he was just plain old Francis the First of Austria now, wasn’t he?—what with Napoleon’s arse being whipped at Waterloo and all.”

  “Who else signed it?” Steve was studying the book carefully.

  “Well, sir, Naples, sir, Sardinia, sir, France and Spain, sir. It was subsequently signed and ratified by Britain—the Prince Regent, later George the Fourth, his father being potty at the time of course, though Britain was part of the Quadruple Alliance which was quite different. And the Ottoman Sultan signed it too. Though I’m afraid to say I can’t remember his name, if I ever knew it, and of course the pope blessed it with a great blessing. The compact was signed in 1815. For an extra ten points and the holiday in Barbados I would go for twenty-sixth September. Am I right?”

  “Okay, okay . . .” Steve rifled through the book again. “How about . . . Benjamin Disraeli?”

  “Benjamin Disraeli? What can’t I tell you?” I was just humming now, in my element, skating elegantly on thick ice. “Born 1804, twenty-first December, I think. Coined the phrase ‘the greasy pole’ to describe his rise from humble Jewish origins to the Prime Ministership of high Victorian England and Empire. Son of a Sephardic dilettante, writer, antiquarian and sweetie by the name of Isaac who converted his whole family to Christianity in 1817. Ben started off as a law apprentice, dropped a bundle on bad investments and so turned him­self into a novelist and wit to fund his dandy lifestyle and political aspirations. Wrote a series of books known as the Young England Novels, notably Coningsby, or the Younger Generation and Sybil, or the Two Nations. He’d been first elected to parliament a few years earlier, round about 1837, I think, his fifth attempt at a seat. Anti-Whig, anti-utilitarian, he made a name for himself attacking his own government. He coined the phrase ‘organized hypocrisy’ to describe Robert Peel’s attempts to repeal the Corn Laws. Hung around for years after that as leader of the party, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Derby, framing the Second Reform Act of 1860, which extended the vote to borough householders. Briefly became Prime Minister in 1868. Finally won an election against his great rival, William Ewart Gladstone in 1874, first Conservative win since 1841. Shoved through a load of trade union and social reforms, borrowed four million quid to purchase the Suez Canal for Queen Victoria, who was crazy about him, especially after he gave her the official new title ‘Empress of India.’ He returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 claiming ‘Peace with Honor,’ not unlike Chamberlain after Munich—though that won’t be in your book, I’m afraid—was cre­ated the First Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, having turned down a dukedom earlier, died in 1881 after being booted out of office the previous year. Nineteenth April was the day he died, eight years and a day before the birth of Adolf Hitler, of whom you’ve also never heard. His followers call themselves the Primrose League and to this day go on about One Nation Conservatism. His wife called him ‘Dizzy,’ and she was famous for her devotion, lack of tact and gen­eral goofiness. Once traveled with him in a carriage to Parliament with her fingers jammed in the door in agony and never told him because she didn’t want to put him off his preparations for a big speech. Another time, she was in a garden with a couple of Victorian ladies and they tittered blushingly at a naked male statue’s generous endowment. ‘Oh that’s nothing,’ she said, ‘you should see my Dizzy when he’s in the bath.’ He described his final years as being his ‘anecdotage.’ What else do you want to know?”

  Steve didn’t look up from the book. “Give me the titles of some of his other novels.”

  “Phew, don’t want much, do you? Well, his first was called some­thing like Dorian Gray. Obviously not that, but something like it. Vivien Gray? Was that it? There was another called The Young Duke, his last was Endymion, I know that. Wrote it in 1880. And I’m pretty sure there was another one with a woman’s name in the title . . . Henrietta, I think. Henrietta Tempest, something like that?”

  “Henrietta Temple, actually,” said Steve, closing the book. “Okay, so you know some history. What does that mean?”

  “You tell me,” I said. “Does it square with what you know of me? Let me tell you every American president this century.”

  “Oh, like, big deal. Every schoolkid of ten can do that.”

  “Listen,” I said. “William McKinley (assassinated 1901), Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Har­ding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, FDR, FDR, FDR, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eisenhower again, John F. Kennedy (assassinated ’63), Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Nixon again (resigned ’74), Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Rea­gan, Reagan again, George Bush and finally, ladies and gentlemen, the forty-second president of these United States, Bill Clinton of Lit­tle Rock, Arkansas. How’s that?”

  There was a puzzled look on Steve’s face. “I kinda got lost some­where in the middle.”

  “Of course you did, after FDR, right?”

  “Right. There was a whole load of names there I never heard before. And you said Nixon resigned?”

  “So you’ve heard of Nixon then?”

  “Come on, Mikey. Get real.”

  “Richard Milhous Nixon, Tricky Dicky. Resigned in disgrace to avoid impeachment in 1974.”

  “For your information, Richard Nixon was president three times from 1960 to 1972.”

  “I see. But Kennedy, Carter, Bush, LBJ, Clinton . . . they mean nothing to you?”

  “My little brother is called Clinton, but he sure as hell isn’t president.”

  “There! You see?” I lit another cigarette and started to pace up and down. “Everything you know is different from what I know. How can that be?”

  “Your accent is different than it was yesterday. Some ways, you’re a different person than you were. I see that. But, Mikey, it’s your head. It’s all in your head.”

  “Oh, and a crack to the skull gave me a scholar’s knowledge of European history, did it? It gave me the details of American presi­dents you’ve never heard of and about whom I could talk in front of a lie detector for two hours without causing the needle to tremble once. It filled my mind with movies and songs and stories you’ve never heard before? Play it again, Sam. I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. The force may be with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. The Truth Is Out There. Hasta la vista, baby. Catch-22. There will be no white wash at the White House. The Tin Drum. What’s the Story, Morning Glory? Schindler’s List. The name’s Bond, James Bond. Ich bin ein Berliner. Catcher in the Rye. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Perhaps some day you’ll join me, and the wo-o-o-rld will live as one. Beam me up, Scotty. I shall return. Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Never, in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few. One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. From Here to Eternity. Never mind the bollocks, here’s the Sex Pistols. The Bridge on the River Kwai. Marlene Dietrich. E.T., phone home. What good is sitting, alone in a room, come hear the music play, life is a cabaret, old chum, it’s only a cabaret. The Zapruder film and the grassy knoll. The Dirty Dozen. They think it’s all over . . . it is now. Where Eagles Dare. I smoked it but I didn’t inhale. Where’s the beef? Read my lips, no new taxes. Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you? We’ve got some work for you now. There!”

  I paused for breath, sweating from the combination of effort, exhilaration and hot pepperoni. On Steve’s face I saw an expression in which admiration, astonishment, amusement, bafflement and fear were racing for the lead. Astonishment was ahead by half a length, but the others were pressing hard.

  “Face up to it, Steve, I’m giving you a problem here that you can’t solve by talking about bumps and amnesia. I come from somewhere else.” I ruffled my hair to allow air to pass through and cool the sweat. “Don’t think I don’t know how mad I’m soundi
ng. God knows, I’ve seen enough movies to know how hard it is for the alien time-traveling hero to persuade anyone to listen to him. They usually end up by turning him in.”

  “Time travel?” Steve closed his eyes tight in despair. “Oh Jesus, Mikey, you need help. You can’t be—”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Let me call Doc Ballinger,” he pleaded. “Mikey, I don’t know what’s happening, but . . . I care about you, I mean I care about what happens to you, I don’t want you to go nuts.”

  “I know what you mean, Steve, but please, just listen. That’s not what I’m saying. I haven’t traveled in time. That is, not exactly. It’s just that time has . . . time has traveled in me. No, that’s not right. Listen to me, will you? Just listen. I’ll tell you a story. Imagine it’s just an idea, okay, a plot for a movie, something like that? Hear it with open ears . . . what’s the phrase? Without prejudice. Hear it without prejudice. Interrupt only if something is unclear. And when you’ve heard it, then you can decide what to do. Deal?”

  “I guess so.”

  I moved the books and carts to one side of the desk and hauled myself onto it, swinging my legs below me. Steve sat on the floor tailor-fashion, looking up at me like a toddler on the play mat at story time.

  “Okay,” I said. “Imagine a guy. A youngish guy. English. About my age. He’s researching for a history doctorate in an English uni­versity town. Let’s call it Cambridge . . .”

  Time passes. The sun sinks slowly in the west. Sounds penetrate the room. Basketballs slapping on the corridor floor. The squeal of skid­ding trainers. Bluegrass music playing in the room above. Doors slamming. Shouts. The flicking of towels on flesh. A badly tuned gui­tar across the hall. Distant bells chiming the hours that slip past unheeded.

  “. . . a pizza, some Coke and some absolutely disgusting jam dough­nuts and came back to this dorm building, this Henry Hall. There he decided to tell his new friend Steve everything that had happened, telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God. The End.”