The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  The names register in my Contemporary Persons, Locations, and Events file, linked to my brain via the implanted chip. It’s almost like memory, but not quite. Takes a second. Even if the names hadn’t been familiar, I’d still have understood—regardless of era or culture or language, all insults sound the same. The cops are having a hard time figuring out my race, their gut-level mistrust of intelligent-sounding darkies mixing with their fear of Arabic evil. My superiors told me that to the eyes of a white contemp, I might look like a “very light-skinned African American” or a “Pacific Islander” or someone “interestingly multiracial.”

  The second officer leans down and I can see his face for the first time. Like his partner, he’s as white as anything I’ve ever seen that isn’t dead. I glance at his thick cheeks and red, glassy eyes for an instant before he shines his flashlight at me and I look away.

  “Sir,” he says, “I’m asking you to pop your trunk. We won’t go through any papers. We barely even know how to read. We just want to see what else you might have there.”

  I nod and search for the button that opens the trunk. My inexperience with cars no doubt strikes them as a suspicious reluctance to comply with their orders. Finally I find the button and I hear the gentle pop behind me. The fat cop checks the trunk, and the cop on my left returns to his car to type my information into his computer.

  I carefully open the glove box and take out my gun while the trunk lid is blocking their view. I slide it under the jacket, which I nudge closer to myself, hoping they won’t notice.

  I’ve read through the papers in my trunk; they’re incomprehensible gibberish. If whatever the Logistics people printed out for me is indeed representative of contemp defense contractors’ reports, then no wonder everything fell apart so fast.

  The fat cop closes the trunk and returns to his previous position on my right. After another minute, the second officer rejoins us, handing me a pink slip of paper and explaining the citation. They’re not hags, just bored contemp cops wishing they’d stumbled onto a plot and settling now for their minor roles in this city’s busy narrative.

  “Be more careful when driving in the city, Mr. Jones. Now, what was that address you were looking for?”

  I repeat the address I’d given him before, passing his test, and he gives me directions. They bid me good night and return to their car.

  I follow the directions to the meaningless address, well aware that they’re following me. After a few turns, there it is, a glass-and-steel apartment tower. I find a spot to park in—parallel parking an automobile is not one of my greatest skills, but performing under pressure is—and the cops wait behind me as I muscle into the space. Then they drive on.

  I walk down 16th Street, which was where the GeneScan seemed to be leading me before it flickered off. This is a busier road, cars passing on either side, late-working lawyers and lobbyists and propagandists rushing home to their television and children and insulation.

  Before me is a large, redbrick church. This seems a fitting reconnaissance point for hags, many of whom are religious, driven by unyielding devotion to their dangerous creeds. One would think they’d be happy just to be in a time like this, to be surrounded by so many churches and synagogues and mosques, to walk into a bookstore and see their beloved tomes for sale.

  A sign in the tiny front lot tells me it’s a Catholic church. According to the schedule of services, nothing should be happening this late.

  I feel an illicit thrill as I approach the sacred building. A cross hangs over the entrance, and at my side are whitened sculptures already in disrepair—a digit missing here, a streak of dirt there—as if they know their era is on the wane. The heavy door is unlocked. I step inside and gaze at the rows of dark pews, the gray tile floor, the stained-glass windows looming above the bare altar. It’s so quiet my breath almost echoes. Toward the front I see the backs of two gray heads, hair pinned up in buns. I try to imagine what these women are thinking as they kneel here, as they make themselves small before some being of their imagination, something that has taken on such power through shared belief.

  “Can I help you?”

  I turn to see an old man, angel white. He smiles kindly. Above him are depictions of their Messiah being tortured, whipped, murdered.

  “I’m sorry, I was just looking…” I’m not sure what to say. It was a mistake to come in here.

  The priest is wearing a white dress shirt and black slacks, and the cross around his neck glimmers in the dim light. I burn his image, then thank him and step back. White and yellow pamphlets tacked to a corkboard beside me advertise bake sales, babysitting services, and political rallies in favor of “life.”

  He steps closer and asks if I’m sure there isn’t anything else.

  “The country where I’m stationed,” I try to explain, “doesn’t have any churches. It’s… interesting to be inside one again.”

  “Sounds like a terrible place. Which country?”

  I offer him a short smile. The people in this city are used to being told only the barest snippets of facts. “I should go. Good night.”

  “Peace be with you.”

  I don’t bother extending the same wish to him.

  Outside I run another check on my GPS and realize I’m only a block north of Lafayette Square, essentially the front yard of their president’s grand estate, the White House. Could the hags have designs on such a heavily fortified building? Probably not, as such a disruption would have historical echoes even they couldn’t predict, but I’d be remiss not to look into it.

  I notice a crowd ahead. Soon I hear someone on a loudspeaker reading a procession of names. Sergeant Wilfredo Dominguez. Private First Class Martin Dithers. Specialist Gloria Wilcox.

  Filling the southern end of the square are approximately two hundred people. Facing away from me, standing still as statues, light emanating from their chests. It’s like I’ve entered some contemp art installation, a maze of motionless human forms and the tiny white candles they hold before them.

  I run a check on the names I’ve heard thus far, searching every database. They belong to servicemen and -women who died in the contemp wars.

  It’s haunting to stand among the mourners. We don’t have protests in my time, or demonstrations (such an odd word choice, because what exactly are they demonstrating, their helplessness?). This is a peaceful one, eerily so. The tears on some of the people’s faces are the only things moving.

  I look for a sign bearing the group’s name but don’t see anything. I check the date and time against various databases but find nothing. Whatever this is, it isn’t considered important by the Department. So why did the GeneScan lead me here?

  During my gigs it’s tempting to think of myself as the only living person in a land of ghosts, and the effect is heightened now. The city feels peaceful from inside the park, as if the silent prayers of all these people can blot out the world’s noise.

  Then the names stop, and, one by one, the people blow out their candles. Little flecks of hope are extinguished all around me. The world grows darker; orange glows scar the inside of my retinas and dance like a busted GeneScan. Some of the people drop their candles, ends still smoking, into a pile. Others hold on to theirs. They stay where they are, alone or huddled in sobbing groups, or they leave the square, slowly. There was no announcement calling this activity to its end; it was as if some telepathic message were sent, or some genetic instinct requiring no conscious thought.

  It’s amazing how sadness can be so beautiful.

  Ghosts are floating past me in every direction, and I slowly walk around, looking for I don’t know what. Something. Something of obvious import. As if the job is ever that easy. Again I’m revealing myself to countless contemps, egregiously violating Department norms, but I don’t know what else to do.

  “You look about as skeptical as I feel,” a woman’s voice says.

  Her skin is very dark to my eyes, her hair tied in thin braids that fall behind her shoulders. She wears glasses wi
th thick purple frames. We’d been standing next to each other, just looking at the square. Some people have relit their candles and are walking around with them, as if needing the light to guide them, or afraid to let go.

  What does she mean? Maybe I’m not doing a good enough job blending in—she noticed I’m one of the only people here who haven’t been crying, whose eyes aren’t red. But neither are hers.

  I motion to the extinguished candle resting in her joined hands. “Who are you here for?”

  “Lieutenant Marshall Wilson, my brother. He was in the army. Killed last June.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” We don’t say that in my time, but I learned it in my Customs training.

  She looks at my empty hands. “How about you?”

  “My brother too.” The lie just comes out because I don’t want her to realize that I don’t belong here. A harmless mistake, perhaps. And I want to keep her talking to me. Her eyes are so wide and somber, and the air feels charged with its candles and prayers and memories of the lost.

  I burn her image into my drive, but not for any report I plan on filing. Just a little something to carry inside me after she’s gone.

  She repeats what I said to her, expressing her sorrow for my “loss,” completing the ritual, our little tragic circle.

  “So I suppose if it really mattered what people think,” she says, “if all this combined yearning could do anything, then they’d all come back somehow. What happened to them would be undone. But that’s crazy. So it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what the point is.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  She continues. “Some socially acceptable way to make us feel better, I guess. And maybe I did feel better, for about two minutes.” She shakes her head. “But now I’m only angrier.”

  I’m not sure if people here always speak so freely with strangers or if she’s given herself up to the mood of the event. Or perhaps she assumes from my mere presence that I agree with her on all things, or at least the important ones.

  I met my wife at a public gathering—very different from this one, of course, but I can’t help thinking of it. It was so very long ago, and so far in the future. I miss her. I wonder if that’s why I’m still standing here talking to a woman who desperately needs someone to hear her.

  I notice that she wrote words on the circular piece of cardboard that rings her candle. “What did you write?”

  She instinctively angles the candle so that I can’t see the words. “Oh, just an old saying me and my brother used to have. Inside joke.”

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t pry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m the one who started a conversation with a strange man.”

  I allow myself the faintest grin. “I’m not that strange.”

  She smiles. “No, I meant—”

  “I know. A strange man in a park at night. You should know better.”

  “I guess I figured this was a safe enough environment.”

  Lady, I just killed two people. And, in a way, millions.

  “True,” I say. “And there are all those heavily armed police officers in case I was to try anything inappropriate.”

  She follows my eyes to all the cops and security guards who stand at the gates of the White House and atop nearby buildings, their hands gripping rifles, their chests thick with bulletproof vests. They stand there and pretend not to watch the ghosts floating away from their territory.

  “I’d heard about these sorts of things but never wanted to go before,” she says. “I was supposed to come with my parents, but my mom caught a cold and they decided to stay in.” She shakes her head, as if she’s been searching for a way to express her feelings but is finally giving up, accepting that they’re inexpressible.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” I say.

  “Yeah, they don’t usually get much press. I don’t think anyone really cares.”

  “No, I mean…” What do I mean? “I’m not from here. I live in Philadelphia, but I’m stationed here for work, for a little while. It’s an interesting time—I mean, an interesting place.”

  We stand there talking for a few minutes. About politics, the wars. I ask about her brother and she doesn’t know what to say at first, then she says so much. She didn’t support the wars before, and certainly doesn’t now, after losing him. She wishes she’d done more when he was alive, when it would have mattered. But now it would matter to all those still fighting, wouldn’t it? she asks me, and I nod. I want to tell her that I have no right speaking to someone like her, that she should run screaming from me, from what I’ve done, for what I’m here to do. But I want to stay here, with the calm park wrapped around me, the night wrapped around me, her words.

  She says she’s sorry for prattling on, that she doesn’t mean to sound so selfish. She asks me about my brother. Perhaps a similarly long and rambling explanation is expected. Instead I shrug and say, “It’s still hard to accept that it actually happened.”

  I leave it at that and she nods. “I know what you mean.”

  The square is emptying around us. She doesn’t seem ready to leave. Perhaps it would mean leaving her brother behind. I wonder about all the old superstitions and beliefs, wonder what mystical power she feels in thrall to. But I’d felt something too when I stood among the candlelit statues, hadn’t I? What had it been?

  I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t keep talking to her like this.

  “Anyway, thanks for the conversation,” she says. Then she dares to remove one of her hands from the candle, extends it to me. “I’m Tasha.”

  “Troy.”

  I love how real her hand feels. Cold from the night, clammy from clasping the wax.

  “You said you don’t live here?”

  “Well, I do temporarily. I’m a consultant.” I make the quick calculation that defense work would not meet with her approval. “Health-care policy.”

  “While you’re in town, would you like to get dinner some time?”

  “Sure.” No harm in making false promises. And I allow myself to fantasize for a brief moment, to imagine having that freedom. “That would be great.”

  Tasha says we should exchange phone numbers so we can coordinate, and I confess that I don’t have one.

  She raises an eyebrow. “No one doesn’t have a phone.”

  “Well, I had a cell, but it died on me just before the company sent me here, and I haven’t memorized my hotel phone yet. Why don’t you just give me your number?”

  She gives me a look. I’ve trampled on some social code. But she recites her digits, and I record them. Then we say good night and she walks away.

  I feel my heart beating faster than usual, as if I’ve just protected some vital Event. The GeneScan led me astray, and I let pure carnal desire, or maybe heartache, do the rest.

  As I walk toward my car I notice a man lying on one of the park benches. He’s wrapped in a filthy gray blanket; beside him is a large pile of miscellaneous possessions. I decide that I’ve already violated so many rules tonight, what’s one more?

  “Spare change, brother?” he asks. He has a thick beard and skin that doesn’t look real. There are layers there. If I could peel them all off, I wonder who I would find beneath them.

  “You sleep here? And we’re, what, across the street from your president’s house?”

  “Hell, he don’t sleep there, brother. That’s just his spectral projection. He’s floating above us in his ship, you know, pulling the strings.”

  I remove a one-hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and hand it to him.

  “Bullshit!” he shouts, and I step back. “This ain’t real!”

  I wasn’t expecting this anger, like I’ve pulled a trick on him.

  “Maybe none of this is real,” I tell him. “But that’s legal tender, friend.”

  I wait another moment as he holds it up to the light of a streetlamp. He doesn’t thank me, and hopefully he won’t throw away the money, which I withdrew from Troy Jones’s account earlier in t
he week.

  I drive off to my terrible motel. Still thinking of Tasha, I check every database they’ve loaded into me. As I expect, all records of her cease at the start of the Conflagration.

  2.

  People in D.C. liked to drive in the middle of the road, Leo had noticed. The narrow side streets lacked lane markers, so each car tended to glide down the center, staying clear of the parallel-parked cars on either side, seemingly confident no other traffic would dare come its way. Opposing drivers waited until the last possible moment to pull to their own sides.

  It was a warm night and Leo drove with his windows down, the city drolly exhaling in his face. He wound his way through D.C.’s bingo board of alphabetized and numbered streets until he reached the Whole Foods, whose opening here in Logan Circle, when Leo was stationed in Jakarta, had officially jump-started the gentrification process a few years back. He barely recognized the neighborhood.

  He entered the store and joined the young women in post-gym outfits—recently showered, hair pulled back, no sweat to be seen—talking on their cell phones; the mothers balancing babies on their hips and gripping their carts with their free hands; and the young men like him, some looking comfortable in their suits and some whose concert tees and tight jeans were wielded in a desperate attempt to define themselves as D.C.’s Other. Leo had been back for a while now, so culture shock was no longer an issue. But still he felt something, a sense that he did not belong here, and it never went away. What do you call that, culture trauma? Present shock?

  The grocery carts were half size to allow for some semblance of maneuverability through the cramped urban aisles. Leo tossed in vegetables whose colors and textures shone forth like they were works of art, still lifes waiting to happen. He had become something of a cook during his time in Indonesia. So far, he hadn’t been able to find any Indonesian restaurants in D.C.—the outer suburbs were spawning more ethnic restaurants than the city as real estate prices pushed the immigrants out—and since he had few plans for the upcoming weekend, he figured he could spend some quality time in his kitchen. He grabbed some natural peanut butter and extra-firm tofu for gado-gado, sifted through shallots and garlic for nasi goreng, grabbed a coconut. He realized too late he was planning a veritable feast and found himself wondering, sadly, if there was anyone at all he’d want to share it with.