Days later, Dan Eaton lay in the hospital, head wrapped tight, wondering about swallowing a bullet and how soon he’d be allowed near a weapon. So he tried to read with the one eye the doctors were letting him keep, and for whatever reason, instead of a book he opened this essay he’d downloaded to his Kindle months earlier. The author wrote it in France in 1940, just as the Vichy government was handing over Jews to the Gestapo. He finished writing just before he escaped the collaborationist government, only to commit suicide in Spain a month later. With his newly acquired monocular vision, Dan struggled, word by word, through the unsettling conclusion that one cannot look at the treasures of his society without feeling horror. Because when we look at history we only empathize with the victor, an empathy that benefits the current ruler. This ruler comes from a long line of those who’ve stepped over the stricken body of the one who came before, each an heir to a long line of violence and power. So the spoils of resources and culture get carried along in a direct procession, and it becomes difficult to contemplate any document of civilization as anything but a document of barbarism. The inevitability of progress being such a hopeless fantasy. Progress, the author warned, is ephemeral. The notion of progress lies in each successive generation’s “weak Messianic power.” How each one considers itself the conclusion of history: all who came before were fated to live and die so that it might triumph. Dan smiled through bandages and tears because he remembered a Calvin and Hobbes strip about that very idea. The author had a different vision: he owned a painting by an artist named Paul Klee called Angelus Novus, in which an angel seems to hurtle backward, wings spread, eyes fixed, mouth agape, and his description of the Klee painting was something Dan had never been able to get out of his head, his memorization hopelessly accidentaclass="underline" “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” the author wrote. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Hailey Kowalczyk took them the long way home. To get from the Brew back to Rainrock Road, you can either take Stillwater or 229. It was a night to drive with the windows down, and they were still a mile away when they began seeing red and blue hues, like extraterrestrial spacecraft reflecting off the night sky. They said nothing as they drew closer, and the lights pulsed with greater and greater urgency. Cresting a hill, Hailey slowed the car. A lunch-box ambulance and three patrol vehicles, sturdy SUVs with New Canaan Police Department spelled out in yellow italics along the sides, blocked the road. A cop was taking yellow police tape from the fence on one side of the road to a stake on the other.
“Wreck?” said Hailey.
It wasn’t, though. They pulled to within twenty feet, headlights illuminating the scene. There were two cars outside a gate: an old, battered Jeep and a small blue sedan with both its driver-side door and trunk open. Spray-painted on the gate were the words THE LORD HAS HIV. Beyond that there was a long field followed by miles of woods, and he could see more blue and red strobing from the depths of those woods, along with what looked like dozens of flashlights crawling over the black skin of the field.
A uniformed officer approached the driver’s side. Hailey, who’d not been wearing her seat belt, quickly pulled it across her lap and clicked it home. Bald and heavy, he leaned into the window. His name tag said OSTROWSKI, and Dan remembered him from long ago.