The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  I drive with the traffic and as I crest the hill suddenly there in the distance is the Capitol dome, so large and unexpected it’s like a moon that’s veered out of orbit. I cut across a side street, and the moon is eclipsed by a corner row house with a chunk of bricks missing from it, as if a truck drove into it, or something exploded.

  My mind wants to revisit my wife, but I direct myself to pay closer attention to my surroundings. Live in the present, the Department tells us, not realizing the irony. I turn onto another of Washington’s wide avenues, the painted brick row houses gleefully flashing their different colors as I pass. The trees are losing their leaves, and I tell myself I’m lucky to have been sent back to autumn in a beat when foliage still changed colors like this (I’d read about the phenomenon but hadn’t entirely believed it). Try to concentrate on the beauty of things, I tell myself. Try to wrap your arms around what’s actually here.

  Between assignments, we Protectors are kept on the Department’s sprawling campus, as if we’re under quarantine. We are plagued by something that can’t be released into the public bloodstream.

  They say this is better for us, that it helps us stay in character. Our ability to blend in with our beats would be compromised if we were allowed to circulate in our own time between assignments. We’d start using slang terms from the wrong beat; we’d act according to the social mores of some other age; we’d let slip historical facts that our conversational partners weren’t supposed to know. Better for all involved, then, for us to stay tucked away.

  After we finish missions and are recalled to our own time, after the meetings and near-endless reports and the temporal decompressions, we’re shuffled to our dormitories and briefed on our new assignments. There’s always new assignments. Then, more files and videos, more facts to be absorbed as we prepare ourselves to reenter that fractured cosmos. Given the length of my last few gigs, I’ve barely been outside the Department campus for the last few months—or maybe even years?—of my own life. To the outside world, however, only a couple of weeks have passed. I wonder if I’m aging quickly in my superiors’ eyes, as the arc of my life span curves in an ever-taller parabola over their short linear paths. I mentioned this once, but they told me I was thinking too much.

  One day, after my previous mission but before this one, two other Protectors and I broke protocol. Between meetings, we hatched a simple escape plan, and later we met at a restaurant a couple of blocks away. The Department is at the edge of downtown, in nondescript buildings that most citizens tried to ignore. Derringer, Wills, and I had been in Training together but had met only a few times since. We were eager to swap stories. And to drink, quickly. It was like a race to purge the memories from our minds.

  When was this? A few weeks ago, I think. A few weeks ago or hundreds of years later, depending on one’s perspective.

  “How did yours go, Zed?” Derringer asked after the first round had loosened us. He was tall and athletic, as all the Protectors are, and completely bald. I was the one whose mission had ended most recently—I’d been back only a day, still felt bleary-eyed and nauseated from the Recall.

  “The integrity of history was preserved.”

  They laughed ruefully.

  Leaving campus had been less difficult than I’d expected. Most of the guards were low-level grunts who all but genuflected in our presence; few had the clearance to know what it was we did. Some of them hadn’t even looked us in the eye, just nodded when we told them we’d be back in a couple hours.

  “It was fine,” I continued. “The same. They’re not getting any better at it.”

  “The ones in my beat are,” Wills said. He had thin, intense eyes the color of gold. When he focused on you, you had the uncomfortable sense he was determining your character flaws, or plotting the quickest way to knock you unconscious. “They came close this time, very close. I neutralized the last of them just a few minutes before the plane took off.”

  Within the Department, we were the unlucky souls assigned to the Disasters Division. We were sent to ensure that awful events unfolded as originally dictated by history, that the hags did not rewrite the final acts of tragedies to make them comedies. Protectors in other divisions had the decidedly less troubling task of stopping the hags from wreaking unexpected havoc during otherwise calm events—they prevented benevolent, two-term presidents from being assassinated during their first months in office; or ensured that the hags didn’t detonate nuclear bombs on one of history’s originally meaningless days. At least each of those Protectors could look himself in the eye and know that he’d performed an inarguably good deed. Wills, Derringer, and I weren’t so fortunate. Derringer had recently eliminated a group of hags who were trying to prevent the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001. He strangled the final hag in a bathroom before the troublemaker could board one of those fated flights out of Boston, and then he sat at a bar in Logan airport and started drinking martinis minutes before TV journalists interrupted their telecasts to show images of the burning towers. He’d gotten so drunk he laughed at the news coverage, he told us, until an off-duty cop took a swing at him. And Wills had just neutralized a group of hags trying to infiltrate the U.S. military days before its planes were to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Wherever we went, countless people died in our wake.

  “I stayed a couple days more,” Wills said. “I just wanted to see it, you know? I boarded one of the planes, conned the pilots into thinking I was military intelligence and needed to be on the flight.”

  “Are you serious?” Derringer raised his eyebrows. It was dangerous for Wills to admit this. Any deviation from a mission could lead to severe reprimands, if not outright expulsion.

  “I had to see it. We flew lower over the city than I had expected. And then, the flash.” He shook his head. “One hundred thousand dead, in a second. One hundred thousand. Try to imagine it. All that heat. All those lives. And then the thousands who went afterward, who took a few days or even weeks to go. Imagine that.”

  “They came up with worse,” I said, “less than a century later.”

  We drank in silence for a bit.

  “The looks on people’s faces in that airport, when they saw their towers fall,” Derringer said. “You should have seen them.”

  “I cheated too,” I confessed. The drink was getting to me, along with everything else. “After I’d finished off the hags in Poland, before I started the Recall, I made my way into one of the camps. Had a uniform and everything; they let me in.”

  “Glad you did it?” Wills asked.

  “No. I wish to hell I hadn’t.” I’d never realized a human being could get so thin and not die. They were dying, of course; plenty of them. But the ones still alive were the worst.

  More silence, more drinks.

  “What I console myself with,” Wills said, “is that they’re all dead anyway. Really. So long ago, and so long dead. Nothing we can do about it.”

  “I’d thought it would feel like that,” I said, “but it doesn’t. They’re in front of you. They’re real, they breathe. The pain doesn’t seem very historical when you’re steeping in it.”

  The screams I’d heard in that camp. The vacant expressions I’d seen. And my job was to ensure that it happened, that the hags didn’t save them.

  “It makes you hate all these people, doesn’t it?” Derringer asked later, after the third or fourth round.

  “Which people?” I asked.

  “All of these people.” Derringer glared at the diners in the restaurant. It was a glitzy place, only blocks from the Capitol—not the Washington I’m currently assigned to, of course, but the new Capitol. Most of them were upper-level officials with their supplicants and tempters. “The more I do the job, the more I hate how stupid people today are.”

  “They’re not stupid,” Wills said. “We’re very… privileged to know what we know.”

  “They’re gerbils. Rats. It’s our job to keep their cage nice and secure.”

  �
�Maybe you should request some time off before your next gig,” I said.

  “Time.” Derringer practically snarled that. “What a hilarious concept.”

  We all pondered that one for a while.

  “Imagine being able to kill a hundred thousand people in one instant,” Wills said. “Imagine that power, and that hatred.”

  “They all hated each other then,” I said.

  “I know. They made up some military excuse, but they really only dropped the bomb because they thought the people in Hiroshima were subhuman. They wouldn’t have done it to people like themselves. They didn’t think of it as murder, exactly. It was more like… wiping a slate clean.”

  In my time, the different races and ethnicities have been blended together for generations. The survivors of the Conflagration had better things to do than cling to biases against rival groups—they were just desperate to find mates and rebuild their lives. People eventually forgot what race even was, and the Government closely guards all records of past internecine conflict due to the dangers they could inspire. The Perfect Present lacks the blood feuds that are so rife in my current beat.

  “But isn’t it sad,” Derringer asked, “how no one else knows about this?”

  “Are you kidding?” Wills looked shocked. “I’m practically suicidal having all this history in me. You think other people should know about it too?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. So they won’t be ignorant and—”

  “It isn’t ignorance,” Wills said. “Why is knowing about some ancient grievance between one group of people and another important? Why should that matter to who people are today? The people in my beat”—he shook his head in pity—“are consumed by that nonsense. Hating another group because of something that group did years ago, which had only been in response to what their group had done decades earlier, et cetera, et cetera. Spiraling back in time, endlessly, and they’re trapped in the vortex. Today, we’re free of that.”

  Derringer stared at Wills. “You call that freedom?”

  “Freedom. Joy. Innocence.”

  Derringer looked at his glass. Wills and I exchanged glances. “Guess you’re right,” Derringer finally said. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  We all were. We finished our round and decided we’d sufficiently bleached our brains and should return to campus.

  We started to walk back. I was disturbed by what Derringer had said but more disturbed to realize that I agreed with him. The people of our modern world were strange. I had never thought of them that way before—I was part of them—but this was one of the first glimpses of the present I’d had in a while, not counting my time on campus. This was my city, what I’d been born into, where I’d fallen in love and worked and toiled and suffered, but it seemed so different. Colder than I remembered it. Fewer people on the street, the air fouler. I barely recognized certain blocks. It made me worry about what the job was doing to me.

  We’d been walking for a few minutes when Derringer turned around and faced a wide intersection, a few pods lined up patiently. “Lemmings!” he shouted at no one in particular. “You’re all lemmings!”

  Wills clamped a hand on Derringer’s forearm. Derringer shook him off, and both backs straightened as the space between them narrowed.

  Before a word could be spoken or fist thrown, a Security pod pulled to the sidewalk and out leaped four officers. The synthetic material of their black uniforms reflected the streetlights. Their visors were down but I could read their alarm from the tension in their jaws, the thinness of their lips. They encircled us, visors twitching back and forth between our drunken trio and the outside world, in search of some nonexistent enemy.

  “Are you all right?” one of them asked.

  “We’re fine,” Wills said, taking a step away from Derringer. “Lovely evening for a stroll.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be off campus.”

  “You telling us what to do, Officer?”

  “I have my orders, sir.”

  “We were heading there anyway,” Wills said. Derringer seemed too angry to speak. I was holding back to see what would happen next. I’d gotten so used to working my beats, to knowing all the plays in advance; I was thrown by this sudden spontaneity. “Care to walk with us,” Wills asked, “or were you going to try to stuff us all in your little pod?”

  The officers eyelessly looked at each other. “We can walk,” one of them said, as if doing us a favor. “I’ll radio the SAC and let him know what’s happened, but I’d appreciate your explaining what it is you’re—”

  “Give it a rest, buddy,” Derringer said, “or next time they send me back I’ll kill your great-grandfather before he hits puberty.”

  “Shut up, Derringer,” Wills scolded before I could.

  It was unclear if the officers understood the remark, but hopefully they didn’t. The three near androids pointed their mirrorlike visors at each other again, dark reflections of reflections of reflections.

  We walked back in silence. A siren occasionally rang out, but not nearly as often as they do in my current beat. A heart attack maybe, or a pod accident. We heard laughter and saw smiling faces through the ground-floor windows of new towers, more people in bars and restaurants, some of which I’d visited with my wife so many, many lifetimes ago. And at the same time, only yesterday. Grief is funny that way. Time stretches and stretches and you think you’ve eased into it, but then it snaps back at you and you feel you haven’t moved an inch from the moment you first heard the awful news.

  A few days later, as I was preparing for this assignment, one of my superiors mentioned that Derringer “had been removed from the Department.” No one ever said what exactly became of him, but we could guess. It was a warning to the rest of us.

  During Training, they crammed various theories into my uncomprehending brain, ideas on how time travel works, theoretical frameworks I supposedly needed to bear in mind as I muddled through my beat. The one I understood best was the Great Man theory. There are so many minor players scurrying about, and we all like to kid ourselves about how important we are, about our own impacts on the lives of others. We like to think we can change the world. But we can’t. A few can, the great men and women of history, and if a hag was to disrupt those life paths—if he was to prevent George Washington or Joseph Stalin or the first grand magistrate from being born—then history would tail off in an entirely new direction, not just an alternate path but a previously unimaginable one, foreign to what we see in our Perfect Present. This is precisely what the hags want. So they attempt to assassinate historic leaders, or they send themselves to major historic Events, turning points at which the very axis of humankind seemed to shift. Which is why a group of hags is running around in pre-destruction Washington, D.C., the very epicenter of the tectonic rifts that set off the Great Conflagration.

  I think about this as I sit here in a neighborhood park named after a great man, President Lincoln. I’ve learned that he set this nation’s slaves free during a vicious war that pitted brother against brother. In the center of the park is a statue of Lincoln pointing forward, standing above a depiction of a cowering unshackled slave. What strange images these people celebrate.

  I’m sitting on a wooden bench before a brightly colored playground of slides and ladders and swings and various other structures children could conceivably fall from. Toddlers and their older siblings climb up the steps and slip down the slides; they gleefully push toy trucks into miniature collisions and wreak other disasters, all while pointing excitedly at the life-size recycling trucks and backhoes that amble along the nearby road. Scattered on the benches are pale young mothers and darker-skinned women tending other people’s children. They talk to one another in various languages, or chat on their phones, pacing in distracted circles, or walk alongside their little ones, fingers extended to guide them.

  So many people outside, reveling in their ability to let the sun shine on their skin, as if they know that their descendants won’t be able to do this. It feels funny for me
to be outside for so long—I instinctively sit in the shade, afraid of the radiation that their atmosphere still manages to protect them from.

  I spent the morning monitoring two of the hags’ next targets, but all seems well. Today’s Event is still a few hours away, so I decide to wander the neighborhoods.

  “Which one is yours?” a young woman asks me. She’s pale as soap, wearing a shapeless green shirt over black jeans. Her unwashed blond hair is pulled back, her eyes are puffy with exhaustion, but she looks content. I remember that look.

  “None of them.”

  I’m still watching the kids, this quotidian scene of marvels tiny and huge, and it takes a second for me to realize the mistake I’ve made. She’s staring at me and her body is rigid.

  “I used to live here, with my wife and daughter,” I lie. But I mix in some truth: “They had an accident.”

  I’m too consumed by my own past to look back at her. I just stare at a little girl, maybe four years old, who reminds me of my lost jewel. Little pink and white baubles bounce at the ends of her braids as she darts across the playground, an autumn sprite spreading joy without even realizing it. I scan the adult faces, looking for one with a genetic similarity to the child’s, wonder whose she is.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman says.

  I shouldn’t be here, revealing myself to so many contemps. And I certainly shouldn’t be sharing memorable stories, horrors that will haunt this young mother as she puts her child down for a nap.

  So I try to hold the past inside me. I mix in more lies, cushioning my vulnerabilities in them. “I live in Philly now, but my company sends me here a lot. I can’t help dropping by the old playground sometimes, watching the memories dance around me for a few minutes.”