The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “Three days later the functionary summons you again. The door is closed, and he sits closer to you than last time. He tells you he wants to know how you really feel. You’re frightened, but you remember to ask about his family. His parents have died but he says they lived well. His brothers were once important Party officials like him, he says, but they recently have all been put in charge of camps like this, far away from Pyongyang. He says this is because relatives of the Dear Leader consider his family to be rivals, and want them removed. He says he is lucky that he was sent into the mountains and not simply killed.

  “People do not talk like this anywhere in the country, and especially not in this camp. It makes you more nervous. He scoots his little chair closer to yours, and your knees are almost touching. You haven’t been looking at him this whole time, but you do now. He is not too handsome, but not ugly either—a perfectly average man. He has good hair and you haven’t seen teeth that clean in a long time. Your husband hasn’t touched you in weeks, and the last few times were not fun at all, no joy in it. Almost wrestling. You’ve been turned into an animal, do you understand? A filthy animal. Try to imagine that; but you can’t—it’s impossible to imagine being something that itself lacks imagination, has had imagination beaten and starved out of it. But my point is that to be this close to a not-unattractive man, it does things to you.”

  Sari swallowed. Her hand was still holding the glass; she was afraid to let it go. It was something to cling to.

  “What he does is this: He asks if you want to get out. He tells you that he too is a prisoner here, in a way; the Party will never call for him, never give him a better posting. He has been put here to rot. The difference, he says, is that he at least will die an old man, but you will die very soon. He says he can help. Things are happening quickly, and if he doesn’t act soon, his connections will disappear as these people too are banished to distant posts. He says he knows how he can get you out, but it will be difficult. He tells you he’s crazy to offer you this, but he wants to. You say no. This is all a test, you realize. A trap. You tell him no, you have all you need here. Then he says you can go. He tells you the overseers won’t punish you for being late this time, and you are surprised to find that he is right.

  “But one week later, it happens again, the same way. He tells you this is not a loyalty test and he really wants to help you. All week you have been thinking of his offer, assuming it was a test but wondering what if it was genuine. And now, here he is again, making you the same offer. You dare to ask him what he wants in return, and now you’re staring down, looking at his hands. They are so fine and soft—you forgot that adult fingers could look so white and pure. He sits up straighter and tells you that you have misunderstood. Your heart races and you think, It was a test, and I have failed. He says he doesn’t want anything. He only wants to make the most of this brief opportunity to do something good.”

  Then Sang Hee laughed. “Can you believe that? He actually uses the word good. Because here’s the thing: He can only let one person escape. His plan, which he can’t tell you until he puts it in motion, can only work for one. Two would be impossible, let alone four. You shake your head and say no again.

  “Imagine how hard it is to sleep, to even think about anything other than escape now that it has been offered to you. And you turned it down! You are a fool. Every time you smash your fingers in the mine, every time one of the guards harasses you, every time you shiver, you think to yourself, It doesn’t have to be. I could escape. But you missed your chance. Two nights later, when your husband returns from work, he hits you. He’s done that before, a few times. He tells you that he heard about the new functionary inviting you to his office. The guards told him, made obscene gestures. He hits you again until you tell him that if you show up to work with bruises, he’ll be punished. It’s true—only the guards are allowed to hit you. Abusive husbands are counterrevolutionary. After you tell him that, he stops. But he refuses to speak to you.

  “Your children watch this, of course. They watch everything. You still aren’t sure if the authorities will ship them off to some other town once their schooling finishes or if they too will have to work the mines as punishment for what your husband said. You are afraid to ask.

  “Two weeks go by, and your husband still will not talk to you. Finally you can’t take it anymore, and after your children are asleep, you tell him what really happened in the functionary’s office. Your husband, your once-beautiful, once-dark-skinned man, says he doesn’t believe you, that it doesn’t make sense. If someone made that offer to me, he says, I would take it in a heartbeat. But then they would kill me and the children as punishment, you remind him. He simply says, For freedom from this, I would do it in a heartbeat. He falls asleep.

  “The very next day, when you are raw and bleary from not sleeping that whole night, the very next day the functionary calls for you again. Can you resist yet again? He tells you, once more, that he could set you free, that he could get you into China, and from there you could find a way to South Korea, where perhaps you have extended family, people left behind from before the war. He tells you he brought you in this morning because one of the people he would need to call on for help will only be at his post for one week longer, so he’s running out of time. You ask him why he doesn’t escape, and he says he isn’t ready. He still has hope. He still believes he can return to the Party and make a difference. Besides, he says, he’ll still be alive in two or three years, but you won’t be. People only survive at the camp for so long, and you’re nearing the end.

  “You accept his offer. He says that after you have escaped and an investigation is made, he will do what he can to protect your family, and you pretend to believe him. Open your eyes.”

  Sang Hee had to repeat herself before Sari understood. She had become immersed in the tale, and her head was heavy with drink. The light was harsh, and everything before her looked wrong, too shiny, almost glistening. Nothing more so than Sang Hee’s eyes.

  “I know what you think of me,” Sang Hee said. “But let me tell you something. What you think of me is nothing compared to what I think of myself.”

  Sari managed to look away from her and at her own glass, which, to her surprise, was empty again.

  “I want you to remember that, to keep that close in your mind at all times. This is a woman who killed her whole family. That is what she is capable of. Don’t you ever, ever forget that.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Now go to bed. Dream about your dark-skinned man and your little girls. Do that for me, please, because I don’t know how to anymore.”

  Z.

  Over the next two days Wills picks off a few more hags while I tail some others, but we don’t feel much closer to accomplishing our mission. The hags have indeed learned from their mistakes; instead of all of them coming back on the same date, a few of them come one day, a few the next, et cetera, making it impossible for us to wipe them all out. No one at the Department thought the hags were capable of sending so many, and so frequently—at least, no one told us to suspect this. It makes us wonder what else we haven’t been told.

  This afternoon I’m tailing another hag through the city. He left the Mayflower hotel—still their rendezvous spot—an hour ago and is walking downtown. It’s raining, and my umbrella provides me perfect cover, though his makes him harder to follow. I stay closer than usual. He’s short and thick, a human bollard. Dark hair is going gray along his temples, and his skin, though pale to my eyes, isn’t quite as pale as some of the other white people’s here. Like the previous hags I’ve followed the last few days, he wears a well-tailored suit.

  While I’d been waiting outside the hotel, my internal radio connection picked up a live story from a local station that mentioned one of the earlier Events. The news announcer noted the suspicious disappearance of a young Washington-based reporter who worked for an international wire agency. He explained that the young reporter, Karthik Chaudhry, covered the U.S. intelligence beat. Implica
tions were made that Chaudhry—who had dual American and Pakistani citizenship, was a graduate of George Washington University, and had lived in D.C. for the past decade—had stumbled onto something dangerous. Chaudhry’s employer was asking several governments for their assistance in locating him, and the D.C. police were appealing to the public for information.

  The announcer gave statistics from a global journalism organization showing that murders and kidnappings of reporters and photographers had skyrocketed in recent years, though for the most part those occurred in countries considered less stable than this one.

  Finally, a commentator noted that it was possible the young man had run off and committed suicide, or, more thrillingly, perhaps he was not a journalist but an undercover operative for another country meddling with U.S. affairs; the supposedly sacrosanct boundaries between intelligence and the media had long ago been violated. Had the “journalist” been removed by U.S. counterintelligence officers, or had his native country abruptly called him home? Then there was music and a segue into a story about a shooting at a D.C. elementary school, and I’d spotted the hag leaving the Mayflower.

  (The death of Mr. McAlester at the convention center received only a short paragraph in the following day’s Post—“Former Brit Spy Chief Collapses, Dies in D.C.”—and was blamed on a weak heart.)

  The radio report is a well-timed reminder that what I’m doing matters, that the integrity of history has thus far been preserved. Still, there are so many ways for me to blow this. I’m overtired and bored, and last night, when Wills and I were heading back to our terrible motel after keeping watch for a few hours, I stopped and bought a bottle of vodka from one of the many liquor stores. I lost track of how much I drank—Wills criticized me for drinking on the job, but then he asked for some—and my head is pounding today. I just want this job over with, want the hags to stop their ceaseless parade into the past.

  I tail the hag for twenty minutes, then he stops at a street corner. I stop at an earlier one, a block away from him. I lift my umbrella enough to get a look at the sidewalk, the pedestrians coming and going, and I see someone I recognize. Tasha, walking into a restaurant. She’s a block ahead but the entrance to the restaurant is well lit, and I see her shaking her braids out as she retracts her umbrella; she enters and sits at a table. The hag is still standing at his intersection.

  A few minutes later, a thin black man with strange hair bicycles his way down the street, managing to avert death three times in the one block that I see him. He looks up to check the street, as if he suspects he is being followed, and I recognize him from my intel: T.J. Trenton, a key player in the final Event I’m supposed to protect, though that’s not for a few more days.

  This is one of the discrepancies between my intel and Wills’s: The Department told him that Tasha plays a role in what will happen to T.J., but there was nothing about her in the narrative they provided me. Why not? Did I just happen to stumble onto a person who turns out to be important? Did something that I myself did alter her path and put her life at risk?

  T.J. locks his bike to a streetlight pole, shakes water from his poncho, and enters the building. I can barely see into the restaurant from here, but I see him greet Tasha and sit at her table.

  I stand there in the rain, my shoes and the bottom of my pants soaked as I try to determine the best ways to eliminate the hag before he makes a move. Wondering if whatever I do will only create more problems—for myself, and for Tasha, and for everyone else.

  I wasn’t the one who had to interrogate Cemby’s father, fortunately. But I listened to the playback afterward. It was bad.

  He gave up a little of the Revisions plot, but he held most of it back. He was very prepared, seemed to have known this moment would come.

  They’re always caught. So why do any of them pick a fight in the first place? That’s what I’ve never understood. We are so, so good at what we do. Even if someone feels he has a legitimate grievance against the Government, how can he be so deranged as to act on it, knowing what he is up against? That kind of fatalism is a mystery to me.

  Joseph sounded like a different person in the Dark Room. Everyone is a different person when going through that. Or maybe he finally had the false layers of himself stripped away and was showing who he truly was for the first time. Maybe everything else was falseness, the father-in-law I thought I had. He’d seemed a kind man, loyal, loving to his daughter and granddaughter. Quiet, a bit of a recluse—the consummate Archivist type, I’d always assumed. But maybe he’d been that way only around me. Because he didn’t trust me, because he was already walking his fated path when I first met him. He had counseled Cemby against marrying me so quickly. He’d been smart about it, dropping subtle hints, offering only minor pressure, knowing that an outright objection would have had the opposite of his intended effect. Back then, when she told me about his concern, I wrote it off as typical of a protective father, or maybe he was uncomfortable about my job. Now it seemed more the latter, in a worse way than I’d imagined.

  Still, it hurt to listen to the interrogation. I couldn’t stop thinking of Cemby, of the things she’d told me about her father. He’d walked her to school when she was a kid, taught her to play the guitar, had helped her through the death of her mother years ago. All that dreamy and placid and difficult family nonsense I’d never had. He was a great granddad too—always sprawled on the floor playing with Laurynn when she was a baby, and as she grew older he called her once a week to chat. How was I going to explain this to my daughter?

  In the Dark Room, he used my name a few times. First in anger, as if blaming me for this. Later in desperation, as if I were on the other side of the door and could have intervened. At one point I was worried he would point a finger at me to distract the investigation, a final fuck you to the son-in-law he’d never trusted. But he didn’t. He protected his daughter and her family until the end.

  After his interrogation, I was brought into a room for the first in a series of long conversations with counterintelligence and teams of analysts I’d never met. We understand you’ve given many years to Security, they all said. We just need to be sure of a few things. You’d do the same in our place. I told them I understood, no hard feelings. Ask whatever you need to ask. Look through whatever files you care to.

  I was in the building for three days and didn’t sleep except during a few brief breaks. I knew this was how they wanted it. When it was over, when I had passed their tests and was allowed to return to my desk, I was surprised to see there were no messages for me.

  “We deleted them,” Myers told me. Wearing a different suit than the last time I’d seen him, days ago.

  “How many times did she call?”

  “Enough. She even tried to come into the building and look for you.” He sighed. “You should probably sleep here before you go home. Clear your head a little.”

  That wasn’t an official order, so I didn’t obey. I wish that I had.

  Tasha and T.J. either are very quick eaters or are meeting only to talk, because after fifteen minutes, they leave. He unlocks his bike and heads off in one direction while Tasha walks in another. To my surprise, the hag follows Tasha instead of T.J. I follow the hag.

  Her bright red umbrella is like a beacon we’re homing in on, the hag about half a block behind her, me maintaining a similar space from him. After three blocks, Tasha walks into an alcove of a building, shakes out her umbrella, and takes an escalator down to the Metro.

  My Customs lessons fortunately covered public transportation; the Department doesn’t want me riding crowded Metro trains, but they know emergencies may require it. I buy a ticket downstairs, hurrying to keep pace—Tasha already had one, and so, to my surprise, did the hag. I realize with shame that he’s more prepared than I am. Wills is right that I’m slipping.

  After sliding my card into the machine, I spot the hag and ride another escalator down a level. I don’t see Tasha and have to be careful I don’t look around too obviously. There she is—a good t
hirty feet beyond the hag. He’s going to board a different car than hers, one back, and view her through the window. It’s as if he’s done this before.

  The platform is crowded, meaning that countless people see me. I tell myself this isn’t a problem—in such a vast crowd, I might as well be invisible.

  Lights at my feet blink, and the train approaches with a long sigh. People push forward as the doors open. The hag is one of the first in; I’m one of the last.

  The train is astonishingly humid, rain from all the passengers’ shoulders and feet and umbrellas evaporating into a heavy torpor. Elbows and forearms intertwine as people reach for the slick metal bars above. Beside me a young black man in a black 76ers cap (even their sports teams celebrate history) holds a sleeping infant with his free hand. By the doors a white-clad colonel checks out the reflection of his epaulets in the window. Someone is laughing; someone else’s child whines faintly. A voice advises us not to leave any items unattended on the train and to alert the station chief if we see anything suspicious. The hag is standing sideways at the very back of the car so he can check the small rear window—I see him do it at least twice—and keep track of Tasha.

  With each stop, the crowd thins; after three stops, the hag and I have both found empty seats. We’re leaving downtown’s offices and cultural sites and entering Capitol Hill.

  Most of the advertisements on the train aren’t for products or services the way they are in my time; they’re political in nature. Apparently everyone in this city is deeply invested in the bureaucracy of the state. One ad exhorts them to oppose the repeal of the Wildlife Protection Act, one encourages them to support their teachers’ unions, and another celebrates Toyota’s long track record of providing jobs at its U.S. factories.

  Another ad warns me to BE PREPARED, recommends that I heighten my vigilance around people wearing “unusually baggy jackets.” It occurs to me that most of the young black people on the train are wearing exactly such jackets. Everyone here is afraid of something.