Hindsight 2020

We saw the corpse from maybe two hundred yards up the beach. It was bloated, black, and sodden but we all knew. By this point, you pretty much knew all the contours of a corpse, even in the medium-distance. Only Jason really flinched. The salt and seaweed cut most of the wet-rot stink.

“Oh man,” Shawn said, stopping. He twisted his calf up at the knee, started pulling off his Nikes. “This could be good.”

He ran diagonally up the beach, shoes on his hands. The corpse was at the line between the sand and the start of the embankment, where clumps of rock and grass began. When we caught up to Shawn, he was leaning over for closer inspection, hands on his knees.

“Look at that,” he said, not pointing.

“Ew,” Nicole said, pulling close to me.

He didn’t have to point. We could all see it, writhing away. An anthill had formed over the dead guy’s head, dirt piled in the divots where his eyes had been.

“Inspiring,” Shawn said, voice taking on a dreamy, wistful timbre. “Life always finds a way, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Shawn,” Samira said.

“I’m just trying to inject some positive thinking into the situation,” Shawn said, standing up straight and swiveling his gap-toothed grin over at me. “You should kick it, Dave. Kick it old school.”

“No,” I said.

Shawn nodded. “That would be impolite, huh? I should have expected as much from a Canadian. Oh well.”

He slipped his right Nike back on his foot. Then he drew back his leg and booted the corpse in its skull.

“Ugh!” we all said as the skull let out a poof of dust.

When the dust settled, the dead dude’s head had barely moved. It was as if the dirt-piled skeleton head had glanced insouciantly up the embankment and away from us, trying to diffuse the awkwardness. The ants scurried more frantically, their ineffable patterns rearranging.

“Jesus, Shawn,” Jason said. “Haven’t you got any fucking reverence left?”

Shawn shrugged. “My foot kind of hurts.”

“We should get out of here,” Samira said, taking Shawn’s hand. “Those ants look pissed.”

We started back down the embankment. Shawn walked backward and Samira kept his hand in hers, helping him keep his balance.

“You’re telling me,” Shawn said, “none of you ever kicked anthills in your lifetimes?”

“Why would we want to do that, Shawn?” Jason asked, petulantly.

“To watch something squirm and writhe, something bigger than you and bigger than itself.”

Shawn was looking to elaborate, but no one gave him a chance. We were back on the sand, the tide crawling up to meet us and then reconsidering. Nicole put her head on my shoulder as we walked.

Nicole and I had met on Maple Match, one of those dot.com dating sites that sprang up around the time of the 2016 election. If you were an American desperate to leave the States, the website had an algorithm that would find you your soulmate. Nicole was a New England Democrat, a refugee. I was just looking for a laugh and maybe a lay. She called my bluff and came up to Toronto. We ended up hitting it off.

A year and a half later and she got the idea it wasn’t so bad back home after all, and she wanted to go back. Now I was the one filling out immigration papers. By then President Bateman and Putin weren’t such good friends anymore. President Bateman. We never said his name. Instead we renamed him after the guy in American Psycho.

“Now look here,” Shawn said as we made our way around an outcropping. “Voila. See, I told you it was beautiful.”

“Wow,” Samira said, shading her face with her hand.

“It’s so pretty.”

The setting sun hovered like an orange, featureless face over the ocean, veiled with a murky haze from all the smoke that was still coming from what remained of Portland.

Shawn plunked down in the sand, stretching his legs out in front of him. Samira knelt just in front of the tide line. Shawn produced an old beat-up iPhone with a docking station, third party. He handed it to Samira. She turned it on — “Southern Man” by Neil Young.

Nicole wanted to dance, but nothing too dynamic. She put her arms around my shoulders and held her head to my chest. We swayed glacially like junior high-schoolers, only slightly outpacing the waves. As the tide moved in, Samira inched back in the sand, but Nicole and I let the waves course over our sandals.

The Rolling Stones sang “Honky Tonk Woman.”

“You should put the radio on,” Jason said.

“There’s hardly any signal anymore,” Shawn said, knocking his shoes together to the rhythm.

“You could try,” Jason said.

An old Bowie song came on, but Samira knew to skip past it. We couldn’t listen to that music anymore, not since Bateman started using “Suffragette City” as his campaign theme.

Slayer sang “Angel of Death.” Nicole brought her forehead against my chin and we slow-danced.

The radio signals, the ones you could still get, were saying that there was going to be another attack. You couldn’t sort conspiracy from truth now. All of it was Illuminati this, Book of Revelation that. Truth was a far, foggy shore — maybe even a mirage. Even something vaguely factual was luxury. Everything seemed to contradict the last thing you heard, especially when it came from the White House. You took all of it in breezily, like you knew you were precariously mortal before it was cool.

We were fucking more now, Nicole and I. She was asking me for weird things, telling me to tell her things, demanding me to come on her — her stomach, breasts, her back, her mouth — kneeling and begging for it. It had never been like this before we came back.

The sun was almost all the way down when the song ended.

“Was this not worth it?” Shawn asked.

Nicole murmured.

“We’ll see,” Jason said. “It’s a nice view, yes, but we’re pretty far from the car and its getting dark.”

We turned back, walking beside our footprints in the sand, which were gradually smoothing over.

Deplorables were everywhere. This afternoon we’d passed a bunch of them on the way up to the beach. They were crowded in the back of a pickup parked in the breakdown lane. They were all in orange-face, drinking sour mash. They had their shotguns slung over their shoulders, laughing. The truck had MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN on the grill, dead bugs spattered over the letters like buckshot. Some of the deplorables glanced over at us, but didn’t seem to care. Their faces all looked gnomish and smeary on account of the layers of carroty greasepaint. They were too drunk, I guess, to notice Samira in the backseat. She had her hijab off. She hardly ever wore it anymore.

When we passed by the corpse again, no one looked.

“Methinks,” Shawn said, “I’m pretty sure that brother was black before he went in the water.”

We climbed back into my car, Shawn and Samira and Jason in the back, Nicole and I in the front. Nicole used my thigh as a pillow. We pulled out of the rest area and back onto the highway, a strip of headlamped hardtop emerging from black in front of us.

It was too late and we knew it and we were silent almost all the way. When someone finally spoke, it was Shawn.

“You know,” Shawn said. “I voted for him.”

“What?” Samira scoffed. “Really? You’re kidding me.”

“Nah,” Shawn said. “I wish I was.”

“That’s awful, Shawn,” Jason declared. “He’s a fucking warmongering amoral monster. Look at all that he’s fomented — a nuclear event, for Christ’s sake! Portland’s been reduced to rubble! And there’s a goddamn civil war on the way, you wait and see!”

“I’m not going to be blamed,” Shawn said. “I’m not racist and you all know that. If you want to know why I did it, it was just like when I used to kick those anthills when I was little. I just wanted to see it squirm and writhe, too, I guess. America was an anthill kicking itself.”

“I didn’t vote,” I said. “I’m kicking myself.”

“You’re a Canadian,” Jason said, missing my attempt at levity.

“It already was squirming and writhing,” Samira said. “America.”

“Maybe I just wanted it to squirm and writhe in a pattern I could understand,” Shawn said. He sat up. “Well, fuck it, right?”

“That,” Jason declared, “is what half the country said. Half the people said ‘fuck it’ and didn’t vote. And that’s most of the problem.”

Nicole picked her head up off my lap, turned in profile to the backseat, but not all the way. When she spoke it was soft, like the slow grind of a breeze through birch in late autumn.

“I voted for him, too.”

Another silence threatened, but Jason cancelled it quickly.

“Almost half of women voted for him,” Jason explained. “The figure I heard was 47%. Almost half. Personally, I can’t understand why half of the women who voted in this country would cast their ballot for an accused sexual predator…”

His voice trailed off in my ear, as I’m sure it had for the others. We knew the monologue well. We’d heard the reasoned response — the trained response — so many times not only from Jason but from every pundit who still had access to a radio. Its echo seemed to vibrate in us inexorably now. Still, no one told Jason to shut up. It gave us comfort, like some old story of creation or redemption might have comforted our ancestors around primordial campfires or even before that. Nicole’s head reassumed its position on my thigh.

We would be fucking again tonight. She would tell me to say his name, she would scream his name, the name we never say. She would ask me to whisper the name in her ear. “FUCK ME, DONALD J. TRUMP!” she would shriek. She would beg me for it, in her mouth, on her face, and, unless we ran into trouble on the road, in about an hour or two, I would be kneading my half-hard, loofah-like erection, hoping maybe for a deus ex machina or a nuclear event to intervene. But still it would happen, maybe even twice, because it is an inevitability, because even halfway can still make for a lot of explosions.

The unimaginatively titled “Hindsight 2020” was slated to appear in Republican Party Massacre, a collection of Trump-related stories that was planned for release in early 2017. However, Charles Norwood and I got too scared of Trump’s legal team to self-publish the collection, so we released it as a privately-circulated samizdat. Other stories of mine from that samizdat went on to receive publication in real-life, non-self-published collections. These include “The Hills Have Votes” in HellBound Books’ Schlock! Horror! and “Commando-in-Chief” (with Norwood) in Econoclash Review’s Trump Fiction.