A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

by T Cooper

  Dad finds me in the morning, sound asleep at the table.

  Vaguely, I remember him lifting me and carrying me back to bed.

  Mom fixes us blueberry pancakes for breakfast and Debbie leaves for home about 10. When I return to my room to make the bed, I spot the diary key. Then I recall writing page after page about Mr. Sakov. Debbie is right, it helped relieve my worry, helped me fall asleep.

  The Sakovs move out on Halloween. I won’t be trick-or-treating tonight, not even to the I Like Ike households. Debbie hasn’t talked to me forever. I only know part of the story, from eavesdropping on my parents’ arguments, but I know enough.

  After Dad reads my diary, he contacts the high school principal and our Congressman.

  Debbie tells Bobby Romano her family is returning back East to care for her sick grandmother.

  “And you never heard from them again?” Jay was astonished. Whether more amazed by her mother’s callowness or the absurdity of the Communist boogie man, I don’t know.

  “Actually, years later,” I sighed, suddenly craving a Scotch, but knowing I didn’t want to follow my father down that path. “Well, when my first book came out, I got a note from Herb Sakov.”

  “You did?” Her green eyes widened. “What did he say, what happened to him?”

  Behind her, I imagined the darkened lake, watched the lights blinking across the water from Seattle.

  “In that first letter, he simply congratulated me on the book. Said he always knew I would become a doctor, or a professor, or a Senator, or an artist.”

  “I remember,” she said eagerly.

  I studied her animated face, amused how the story was hers as well now, touched by how good that made me feel. My daughter. My confidante.

  “So I wrote, thanking him for the note. Apologizing, and asking his forgiveness. Inquiring about him and his family.” I stared into space, following the long dark pigtails of a ten-year-old girl on a blue Schwinn bicycle.

  “And?”

  “Well, he wrote back, in a kind of summing-up way. I could tell he didn’t want to revive an old friendship so much as close a chapter. He accepted my apology. Said one has to forgive oneself for being young. He started teaching again. The first few years back in New Jersey, Mrs. Sakov got an office job and found she liked it. Then he worked in a bookstore. Eventually, he started tutoring and returned to high school teaching a few years before retiring.” I smiled thinly. “Debbie grew up, of course.”

  “Wow, so it all turned out okay. In the end.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, Mom. He’s right, you know, you were just an ignorant kid. You were anxious. By the way, that’s still one of your probs.”

  “Hmmm.” I looked past my wise and beautiful daughter, staring again at the glittering skyline.

  “Those must have been scary times. We studied ‘Reds under the beds’ in school when we read The Crucible. A lot of people were frightened. I’m sure Debbie ultimately understood. So what happened to her, anyway?”

  “She became a high school teacher,” I said quietly. “History.”

  She took it in. Then a beat later, she grinned broadly. “That’s really something about Patrick. Arrested. He’s such a straight arrow, you know.”

  2011

  THE ANODYNE DREAMS OF VARIOUS IMBECILES

  BY DANIEL ALARCÓN

  THE ANODYNE DREAMS OF VARIOUS IMBECILES

  In the second year of the war, the President of the United States was accidentally shot while hunting at his ranch. The hapless hunter at fault was an invited guest, a sheepish Senator from Arizona, for whom the President had recently named a Western lake. There was quite a commotion when the President fell. He was wearing a bright orange hunting cap. It was winter, and the trees and hillsides were bare. The bullet lodged in his upper thigh and shattered his femur. There was much blood and unpleasantness. The hunting holiday ended abruptly, as the Head of State was taken by train to Washington. There, the President refused to see a doctor. The wound neither worsened nor improved, his right leg still attached by a filigree of tissue and muscle. The President made a few speeches from behind his desk in the Oval Office, but otherwise stayed out of the public eye. People said he was depressed.

  Meanwhile, the war was proceeding haltingly, almost comically: a bomb here, felling a bridge in Montana. A bomb there, in downtown Los Angeles, destroying an abandoned building where a few addicts sometimes slept. No one would miss these constructions, certainly not the President. “We have so many bridges! So many crumbling buildings!” he was overheard saying to an aide. The President took pills and herbs for the pain and, in his less lucid moments, he prayed. His wife consulted tarot cards. In statements to the press, the President’s spokesman ridiculed the crazies and their crude bombs, their patchwork ideology and their irrelevance. His injury was not mentioned.

  Figure 1: The President of the United States

  A specialist was sent for, a young European doctor who had written extensively on these matters. It was said that he was an expert. The subversives made public a communiqué in which they asked the nation to pray for the President’s speedy recovery. They lauded the decision to spend taxpayer dollars on a highpriced specialist. For the greater good of the Fatherland, read the document, every sacrifice is worthwhile. On his sickbed, the President was incensed. His wound was meant to be a state secret, but he had been betrayed. The rumors had swept across Washington and then throughout the country. He was being made fun of and everyone knew it. The specialist arrived from France and recommended the immediate amputation of the President’s right leg at the hip joint. The wound was yellow and gangrenous, the leg atrophic.

  “Have my reports been received?” the European asked.

  They had not.

  The specialist shook his head. “In any case,” he said, “there is no time for that now.”

  The President was proud of his indifference to matters of life and death. He had fought in Vietnam. He had seen many people die.

  How the amputated leg wound up in the possession of the subversives is not exactly clear. Perhaps someone had infiltrated the military hospital. Perhaps it wasn’t the President’s leg, but another, unfortunate man’s leg. The masked subversives held an armed press conference in the remote Pacific Northwest, beneath the high green canopy of the millenarian forests. The subversives presented the appendage. The gathered media was invited to touch it and photograph it from all angles. The subversives took off the leg’s shoe and sock, and played “This little piggy” with the formerly Presidential toes. Godspeed, our one-legged leader, they proclaimed. There were rumors. The amputation made the cover of the tabloids. The President ordered the offices of these papers shut down and firebombed. In response, the subversives organized massive protests, filling the streets of all the major cities. Thousands clamored in Times Square, along Lakeshore Drive. Traffic across the Bay Bridge ground to a halt. Cars were pelted with eggs. People carried placards bearing stylized portraits of the hobbled leader: the President on crutches, the President pulling his stump behind him. At Camp David, his devoted wife brought him each morning’s newspapers. His convalescence was torture. Enraged, he ordered the French specialist detained, certain that the arrogant doctor had betrayed him.

  His wife concurred. “I never liked his accent,” she said.

  A week later, still tormented, the President ordered the doctor executed. The specialist, he concluded, was a sympathizer, an educated and frivolous European of the kind who were entertained by the spectacle of America’s decline. When the doctor was informed of the President’s decision, he wept. His guards couldn’t wait to be done with him. In fact, he was so inconsolable that after a routine and uninspired beating (during which the specialist’s wailing grew almost unbearable), an impatient guard pulled out his weapon and shot the doctor dead, depriving the President the privilege of seeing the prisoner die. For this crime, the guard was also put to death.

  Mr. President, as your medical handlers mentioned to me in t
heir cable of last month, you are concerned about your wound. I assure you, I will come to your case without preconceived notions, my only intention, that of seeing you once again well and at the helm of your nation’s forces as regards the ongoing war. Of course you are fearful, and certainly you must be concerned. I will attempt, as best I am able, to put your mind at ease. Some background on therapeutic amputation is in order, and here I can say that France has taken a pioneering role worthy of our national character. Indeed, the first instance of amputation for a gunshot wound of the upper part of the femur occurred in the French Army of the Rhine in 1793. The doctor in question was the illustrious Jacques Perault, then and thenceforth a zealous advocate of hip joint amputation. The patient, whose name is recorded only as S., bore the operation well, and for several hours afterwards his condition was most satisfactory. Unfortunately, it was necessary that S. should immediately follow the army in a precipitate march of more than twenty-four hours duration. It was winter. He died from exposure and fatigue. Undeterred, Perault again took to the knife in 1812, in this case to succor a French subaltern of dragoons named Goix, whose thigh was badly injured by a cannon ball at the Battle of Bordino. After surgery, the patient was removed to the Abbey of Kolloskoi, and thence to Witepsk, under the care of Surgeon Major Bachelet, until he was nearly well. Bachelet treated Goix with brandy and tincture of iron administered orally, while caring for the stump with daily injections of terebinth oil. Within three months, the patient had completely recovered. Perault celebrated, reportedly telling his aide-de-camp that a medical miracle had been achieved. In his memoirs, he cited this case as the first successful primary amputation, but as the patient never reached France, and his death is not accounted for, the adversaries of this operation will not admit it a success.

  Years before he shot the President quite by accident, before the Second War of Rebellion, the Engineer, later Senator, from Arizona, said: “A fine spot for a lake, isn’t it?” He was sunburned and loud, his booming voice echoing across the valley. It was the golden earth of the reservation, a slab of red rock slashed by a thin stream of water. His assistants smiled. Yes yes, they said with their eyes. The river cut a serpentine path through the base of the rock. It boiled silver in the bright sunlight. “A fine spot indeed,” repeated the Engineer. He drew a sketch on a napkin and passed it to his assistants. “Well, get to it then,” he said, and lit a cigar as he strolled back to the Jeep.

  The first year of the dam was known as the year of drownings. They came from all over—from Maine and California, from Florida and Illinois—to step into the turquoise water and breathe it in, to fill their lungs with it and die. Native Americans mostly, and their sympathizers, earthy people who had protested the dam’s construction at each step. They came and drowned in their indigenous costumes, plumed and painted as if for war. Their streaked, dead bodies floated to the surface, bloated and blue. The Park Service asked Congress for a pontoon boat to pull the corpses from the gentle waters. But there was no money. The war had begun in earnest. There were rumors that the President had been shot. It was the year of the Battle of Denver, the subversives’ first military victory of any import, and the government was struggling to make ends meet. So the bodies stayed, bobbing helplessly on the surface of the lake, and that summer a few intrepid tourists braved the war zone to visit the picturesque lake, to watch the sun set over the water dotted with dozens of floating, colorful corpses. Seagulls too had found their way there, and flew over it in lazy, swooping circles. At dusk they could be seen pecking at the bodies, tearing at the water-logged flesh with their thin beaks.

  Figure 2: The Engineer

  The Engineer, for whom the lake had been named, found no humor in its macabre attraction. He looked upon the lake as one might a child suddenly grown into adulthood. He recalled that morning when he drew the first crude sketch of the place: the livid colors blooming from the rock, the bright sun, the altogether pleasing submissiveness of his assistants. It was a dream of his to see a lake there, and now the dam was in danger of becoming clogged with bodies. The whole Western power grid was in danger. He called the Speaker of the House. “I won’t stand for it,” he said. He called the Senate Majority Leader and spoke with the same harsh tone: gruff, pained, gravelly. He very nearly called the President, though they had not spoken since he’d shot him. In interviews with the press, he didn’t hesitate to call the body of water “my lake.” After all, hadn’t he conceived of flooding the desert? And hadn’t the President named it after him?

  Of course, there are dangers, Mr. President. It is true that the combined mortality rate for amputations by the British in the Crimean War and the French in the Franco-Prussian War was a startling 76%. These were indeed the dark early days of battlefield medicine. But you are right to judge that 10,000 dead out of 13,173 is not acceptable. And yes, you may have heard that amputations at the hip joint are particularly dangerous, with 100% mortality rate during those two military engagements. Yet I am optimistic for two reasons. First of all, the progress in these fields of medicine cannot be ignored. The survival rates have improved with each successive campaign, so that by the time of the First War of Rebellion in your country, only 83.3% of hip joint amputees perished within a month! Secondly, I believe Americans are quite simply stronger and have within their grand and heroic souls a greater will to live. On this second point, I turn to Mrs. Phoebe Y. Pember, who wrote of her experiences as a matron at the Chimborazoo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia during the First War of Rebellion:

  Poor food and great exposure had thinned the blood and broken down the systems so entirely that amputations performed in the hospital almost invariably resulted in death after the second year of the war. The only cases under my observation that survived were two Irishmen, and it was really so difficult to kill an Irishman that there was little cause for boasting on the part of the officiating surgeon.

  I have been told, Mr. President, that you are of Irish stock. Is this true? Take heart, Mr. President: The Irish are lions!

  The President’s doctor’s name was Céphas. Before he was killed, he dreamed of Paris. He was in Washington, of course, in the dim bowels of the White House, but he dreamed of the city where he was born: the graceful indolence of the Seine, the gentle winds, the bustling plazas and crowded, smoky cafés. His parents were Senegalese. His older brother sold phone cards at a subway stop in the 17th arrondissement. His younger sister was a housekeeper for a wealthy couple in Montmartre. He’d never been to Senegal, and left the French capital on only a few occasions. He studied, excelled, and reached heights that he could scarcely explain to his mother and father. They wanted him to marry, to stop fooling with so much education. “A man in your position could have two wives or even three,” they told him.

  He laughed when they told him things like this. “Ah, my simple parents,” he said in Wolof, and kissed his mother on the forehead. He was young, not yet forty, when he was called to serve the American President. This they understood, and were proud. Céphas studied the President’s condition in preparation for his trip. His family saw him off at the port. Crowded in a waiting room, his brother embraced him, pressed a stack of phone cards into his pocket, and said to call “every day, if you can.” The voyage by sea would take only two weeks, so improved were the newer fleets. There were tears in his mother’s eyes. Inshallah, his father said somberly, God willing, we’ll see you again soon. The news from America was grim. They were afraid to send their son to a war zone, but it was an honor to serve a great nation and ally like the United States.

  Now Céphas dreamed of a Paris empty of people. Even in his ghastly cell, it was a startling image. No dramatic Parisian beauties dressed in black, smoke coiling from their ruby lips; no jaded young men with scarves wrapped tight around their necks; no Algerian cab drivers pretending to know their way, boasting as they drove in circles around the sullen, industrial neighborhoods at the southern edges of the city. Nothing human, not a soul: only the buildings, but even they were somehow changed. In his
reverie, he squinted: What was it? Windowless, he could see it now, a city of tomblike structures, shuttered constructions. Everything bricked-over, monuments too encased in concrete, as if each building were the site of a tiny nuclear explosion, as if the city had, for its protection, buried itself block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. Denuded trees stood like skeletons along the Seine. A city of miniature Chernobyls. My parents, Céphas dreamed, have fled, back to Dakar with my brother and sister, but the rest of the city has perished, perhaps even the rest of France. The images played out before him in high-definition: first the dead city of his birth, then his family, at the pier in Dakar, scanning the horizon for a boat from America that would bring their youngest son home again. He wept at the thought of it. The ocean is turbulent, and ships do not carry Africans east across the Atlantic.

  Will you be disfigured, Mr. President?

  You will.

  But allow me to interpret: Aren’t we all mere vessels, carrying on our persons the sundry wounds and scars of living? Is not the very character of a man molded in his darkest moments? And yet, you can count yourself fortunate: Times have changed since Private Thomas A. Perrine of the Michigan Regiment (Union) penned these melancholy verses:

  I offered her my other hand

  Uninjured in the fight;

  ’Twas all I had left.

  “Without two hands,” she made reply,

  “You cannot handsome be.”

  War has left me with empty sleeve,

  but she, alas, with empty heart.