The Gift Economy

Stephen Tuttle

We offered a generous supply of goods that were, we weren’t afraid to mention, greater than the gross domestic product of many small nations. That’s nice, they said, as they placed before us a glistening stone. It was just something they found in one of their mines. It happened to be the largest ever discovered. In response, we offered them enough cattle to feed their people for years. Oh, they said, but our slaughterhouses are full. So, don’t slaughter, we said. Build some fences and keep these for a rainy day. They said they wanted us to have some airplanes, a whole fleet of them, but we already had airplanes. Right, they said, how are you for fighter jets? When we said we had a couple, they said, Not like these, you don’t. We admitted that they really were quite impressive fighter jets. In return, we insisted that they accept stockpiles of munitions and weaponized chemicals. That’s sweet of you, they said, but we have more than we can keep. Well, we said, we happen to know you have room for a little more. We beg your pardon, they said. They wanted to know how we could know what we claimed to know. We said we were throwing in some satellite technology we were sure they would enjoy. They said it was too much. They offered us a rocket ship, a space station, a thousand scientists. We said we would only take them if they accepted ten thousand of our soldiers. They asked where we supposed those soldiers would sleep and what they were supposed to do. Put them to work, we said. Hand them shovels and tell them where to dig. Inject them with diseases and learn from them. Use their bones to build bridges. At this, we think they finally understood how wealthy we were and how much we could afford to lose.

Hospitality

When our neighbors asked us to mow our lawn a little more frequently, we were happy to oblige. No one wanted grass going to seed, they said, and who were we to argue? Later, they asked if our son could avoid playing the saxophone before he went to school in the morning. It wasn’t a sound, they said, to start one’s day. Later, they asked if we would please avoid parking on the street, because our driveway was big enough, wasn’t it, for two cars. Plus, parking on the street created a hassle for mail delivery, garbage trucks, and the occasional guest. When they asked us to please stop ordering packages they said it was because boxes left on our doorstep were likely to attract thieves. When they asked us to re-home our dog, they said it was because he barked too often and had once growled at a child. Then they asked us to remove the catalpa tree growing in our backyard. While its blooms were lovely, they said, its large leaves and bean-like pods kept sneaking onto their property and raking was such a chore. Soon, we found them reading our gas meter, tsking as they did so. They also commented on the frequency with which we watered our lawn, drove to work, bought groceries, had friends over. When they decided to move, we said we were sad to see them go, but of course we didn’t mean it.

Post

The other day, I received a postcard from my future self. Addressed in my own hand, it was a strange thing to hold. The front of the postcard featured a beach and a palm tree. In the distance, far from the waves, sat a large, low hotel. There were birds in the sky that a child might have drawn: lower case ems in a vee formation. The oversaturated image called to mind those efforts to colorize old black and white movies. On the back, the postmark was smudged, the date a blur. And by the writing, I could see that in the future I would continue to press too hard with a ballpoint pen. Though my handwriting was steady and unhurried, the tone of what I had written or would write on the postcard was nothing short of urgent. Time was short, the future me said, and he/I had this one opportunity to encourage me toward certain decisions. The future, he said, depended on what he was about to tell me. Though this was highly irregular and though my future self was taking a great risk to employ this strategy, I shouldn’t worry about continuums or distortions or any of that Hollywood nonsense. The only thing that mattered, the postcard told me, was that I did what it said. What followed was a concise list of actions I was meant to take. The postcard told me the name of the woman I should marry. It told me the job I should get. It told me where I should invest my savings. The problem here was that I was already married and had a good a job and had my money tucked safely away. More specifically, I was married to the woman the postcard told me to marry and had been for five years. The job it told me to get was the job I had. My money was already in the very fund my future self wanted me to know about, and it was doing quite well there. This is to say that I might have appreciated this advice a decade or so earlier, but I didn’t need it now. And shouldn’t my future self have known that he or I or we were going to make these choices without intervention? The only thing this postcard could teach me was that in the future I would still get things wrong. For that reason, I hesitated to read on, but there was just one line below the list of things I had already done, and I couldn’t help myself. In that line, the future me said that the future was unwritten, and while I had weighty choices to make, I trusted myself to make the right ones. So, it seemed that in addition to his bad sense of timing, my future self was one to peddle in empty platitudes. What a disappointment, this man I would become. I wondered what decisions I might make, what things I might do today and in the weeks to come, to show him just how fully he had let me down.

Stephen Tuttle’s fiction and prose poetry have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.