The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  A few days ago she had finally reached Sergeant Velasquez, one of the only soldiers from Marshall’s company who’d been willing to speak to her. It was unclear whether the silence she’d otherwise encountered was due to some nefarious plot or to collective survivors’ guilt or to the practical difficulty of getting active-duty soldiers to reply to a stranger’s phone calls or e-mails during a war. Her hopes that Leo would be able to leverage his contacts for information were proving equally fruitless—she’d met with him a third time now, and he’d told her only that he had “some people” looking into it. She had the uncomfortable feeling that he was trying to wait her out, the same thing she was doing to him, all the while knowing a timer was getting closer and closer to zero, and she’d soon have to either deliver T.J. to Leo or tell Leo that she would never entrap her friend, regardless of the consequences.

  She waited in the hospital lobby for another ten minutes, then saw a man wheeling toward her. She’d been seeing a lot of wheelchairs lately, it seemed—an unusual number of young black men in her neighborhood and on the Metro sat in the contraptions, and she often wondered who had been shot in a street dispute, who was a returning veteran, who a slow victim of diabetes. The man before her looked to be in his early twenties, had the standard military haircut, and wore a ratty gray Oakland A’s T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. He was handsome and too young.

  “Miss Wilson?”

  “Tasha.” She smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Sergeant.”

  She shook his hand. His left foot wore a red Nike, and she could see a glimmer of white gauze just inside the right tails of his shiny black basketball shorts.

  “I could’ve picked you out of a crowd,” he said, smiling. “You two have the same eyes, same cheekbones—it’s eerie.”

  Velasquez recommended they talk at one of the tables on the patio outside. Other recovering soldiers and Marines were sitting alone or in groups; some of them were working through basic stretching exercises, their therapists instructing them as they retaught their arms and legs how to move. Tasha had an aunt who was a physical therapist, and the whole profession seemed to her a gathering of saints, patient do-gooders spending their lives working with broken people, endlessly toiling toward small victories: standing up, tying shoes, taking a shower.

  Clouds of cigarette smoke blew in the autumn wind. One of the soldiers wore a white T-shirt that read THE PRICE OF FREEDOM and had an arrow pointing to his left sleeve, which dangled empty. The skies were dim, and Tasha zipped up her coat. She saw how underdressed Velasquez was and asked if he wouldn’t be more comfortable inside.

  “Nah, this is nice. Oakland weather. I don’t get out much these days.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Coupla months. I was in Germany for a while before that, though I never really saw the place. Just the inside of a hospital, then the inside of an airplane.”

  “I’m sorry about your leg.”

  “Yeah. The weirdest thing? When I hear music, like especially when I’m sitting—what do I mean, when I’m sitting? That’s all I ever do now”—and he laughed at himself—“anyway, I used to play drums, and my right foot was the bass foot. So I sit here listening to my iPod and I’m tapping my foot and then I realize there is no foot. That’s the weirdest thing. I’m like grooving to a beat, and I’m subconsciously tapping a foot that ain’t there. But I can feel it tapping, y’know? If I was sitting at a real drum kit and hearing a song right now and tapped my little mental foot, I swear to God that bass drum would go boom. I know that sounds crazy.”

  “Not crazy at all.”

  “They had this neurologist talking to a bunch of us the other day. He said that kind of stuff, and the phantom pains you get, they literally are in the mind. Like, usually when you say something’s all in your mind, you mean that it isn’t real. But it is real—the brain actually has these like neurons or something, and they’re still convinced that the foot is there. So I have the memory of my foot, physically, inside my brain, and it won’t go away. A part of our therapy is to get the brain to forget the foot. Which is so weird. You’d think that after all the hours of me staring at my lack of foot, my brain would get it already, but no.”

  She nodded. She couldn’t tell if he’d always been a rambler or if this was the new him, if this was the way he was dealing with it, and she wanted him to feel comfortable. Marshall hadn’t been a big talker, but she wondered: If Marshall had survived, if he’d lost a leg instead of his life, would his personality have been transformed, would he too be going on and on about neuroscience and percussion? Can personalities change as quickly as lives can end?

  “Marshall played guitar,” she said.

  “Nah, he didn’t.” And Velasquez laughed.

  “What?”

  “Dude owned a guitar. But he couldn’t play a lick. Tried to teach himself—tortured us with it at Fort Benning. I’m sorry to say, miss, but your brother had no musical soul.”

  She laughed. “You’re right. He had the thing forever, but he never really spent the time on it.”

  “Oh, man, I don’t even like thinking of him working on his scales. And don’t even ask me about him trying to rap.”

  She laughed again, trying not to show how desperate she was to hear whatever else he knew of Marshall. The scenes, conversations, the way they’d passed afternoons and nights. It was memory porn—she craved it. She wanted to reach inside this stranger’s brain, tear out everything he had of Marshall, take it for herself. But she feared that if she revealed the extent of her needs, he’d turn silent.

  “How are your folks?” he asked.

  She thought for a moment. Why lie? “Bad. We all grieve in different ways, you know? How are yours? They must be pretty relieved to have you back.”

  “Yeah, they’re good. They were out here for a while, the army put ’em up nearby. But I told ’em I was good and, you know, they have jobs, grandkids. I didn’t want ’em here doting on me while bills were piling up.”

  She nodded, and they waited a moment. Then she asked, “Did you ever read Marshall’s blog?”

  “He had a blog?” He looked genuinely surprised.

  “Yeah. He didn’t use his name on it, because he… was afraid that if he said something the army didn’t like, he could be disciplined for it. He didn’t talk about it?”

  “No, ma’am. At least not to me. What, uh, what kinds of things did he say?”

  “It was like a journal. Here’s what I did today, here’s what I’ve been thinking. The irony is that when he had a lot of time to write, there wasn’t as much to write about. And then he’d be busy and couldn’t post for a while, and suddenly one day he’d get to the computer and he’d post these long stories…”

  “So… He said things he thought he might get disciplined for?”

  “I didn’t see anything objectionable. But I’m not an army censor. In the beginning, it was all rah-rah, go-army stuff, lots of details on what it was like to be there. But it sometimes sounded… critical of what we’re doing over there.”

  He was watching her carefully.

  “Anyway, by the time my family and I got word of what had happened, the blog was down. Meaning, the site was gone and everything had been deleted. I’m wondering why that happened, and so quickly.”

  “Like I said, he never mentioned it.”

  “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind… I was wondering what you might be able to tell me about how Marshall died.”

  He looked away for a moment.

  “Or maybe that’s the last thing you want to talk about.”

  He shrugged. “The last thing and the first thing, you know? Same as you, probably.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t remember much about it. It was the same day as this.” He motioned to his phantom limb. “They tell your family anything about it?”

  “They did, but from the ten-thousand-feet perspective. I was hoping to get the view from the ground.”

  “Where things blow up,
right?” He smiled. He seemed to swing between amiable and brooding, and she couldn’t tell if she was pushing certain buttons or if the randomness was self-programmed. So she waited, unsure what to say next, hoping he would continue.

  “We’d gained control of the city after a real nasty week. We’d lost a lot of guys, but we’d pushed the hajjis out by the sixth day. So we were doing different patrols, making sure everything was locked down, that there weren’t any neighborhoods where they were hiding out to hit us later.” None of this contradicted what she’d been told. “Anyway, things had calmed down when three soldiers on a supply run vanished. I mean, they came under fire, but before they finished radioing, we lost their signal, and when more joes got there, they were gone. No bodies, just a shot-up truck. Couple hours later, we got word that some American soldiers were being held in this old warehouse. Lieutenant Wilson led a small group, and we stormed it. I was one of the guards outside it, and when the guys went in, there were shots, something was going down, and then me and the other guard saw activity across the street. That’s pretty much all I remember.

  “Well, not really, but it’s the only stuff that makes any sense. I remember an explosion, not from inside the building but outside, someone firing RPGs, and one of them hit close to me. Then I was just on the ground and things get, you know, disjointed and stuff. Eventually we controlled the area and they got me out of there. From what I been told, he didn’t make it out of the building.”

  She nodded, watching him. She tried to replay what he’d said, tried to let the images unfold, see if she’d missed anything. Her family had been told that Marshall died leading his men to safety, that he died trying to rescue other soldiers, but they hadn’t been told anything about people being held hostage or any search-and-rescue mission. Was it standard procedure for the military to fail to mention that, or was it suspicious?

  “Don’t they usually send in special teams of Rangers for rescue missions?”

  “For something planned in advance, yeah. But word had barely gotten out that the soldiers had been taken before the lieutenant got a tip on their location, and we moved immediately.”

  “Did you save the hostages?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The tough thing for me was, you get injured, you get medevaced out, and then you’re detached from your unit. You’re in another world. I was finally able to get some messages out, and yeah, they say we saved the hostages. The hajjis were planning to execute them on camera, had a little TV studio hooked up and everything.”

  “Do you know their names?” She hadn’t brought a notebook, hadn’t wanted to put him off or alarm the guards by looking like a journalist. She was memorizing as much as she could.

  “No,” he said, and he seemed to be looking back at himself for a moment. “I never thought to ask. They weren’t from our platoon, so I probably wouldn’t have known ’em anyway.”

  A therapist wheeled another patient toward the building, a young white man missing his right leg and right arm. Velasquez broke from his reverie to call encouragement to the kid, who smiled and nodded, his eyes wandering quickly to Tasha. Once they were gone, she looked at Velasquez again, trying to be patient, to see what else he might offer her. His eyes were filling up.

  “I was guarding the perimeter. If I had seen things, if I’d picked up on a detail better, we could have gotten them out quicker. Or told the team to wait.” He nodded, his voice growing tight. “It’s my fault things got out of hand. Said they’re gonna give me a Purple Heart for this, but I’m the one that fucked it up, and guys died.” He wasn’t looking at her. “I wanted to tell you… that I was sorry.”

  “No.” She shook her head, only now realizing what she’d done. “Please don’t feel that way. I’m sure that what happened—”

  “Thank you, but you weren’t there.”

  She hated herself; why hadn’t she realized that all she was doing was adding to someone else’s pain?

  “Whatever they told you,” he said, “whatever the official story is, they’re lying, sure. That’s why you’re here, right? You don’t trust the official line and you want to know what really happened. The official line should be: Sergeant Velasquez’s failure to secure the perimeter and failure to notify his forward soldiers of imminent danger resulted in loss of life. I mean, Marshall was the lieutenant, yeah, but I was the sergeant; those were my boys in there. My boys that died. Army isn’t saying all that, to protect me, because they don’t want to hang me out like that. They see I lost a leg and figure I suffered enough. But it’s the truth.”

  She’d come in search of a grand conspiracy, something that would implicate sinister and powerful forces. The last thing she’d wanted was to point a finger at a young man in a wheelchair, lost in the cold.

  She took his hand and tried to tell him that he wasn’t the reason Marshall died. She said she wouldn’t have come if she’d realized he would say or even think that, and here they were, two mourners trading apologies, each unburdening him- or herself of things the other didn’t want either. So she tried to sound stern, telling him that the last thing Marshall Wilson would want was for any of his comrades to castigate himself like this.

  Velasquez nodded like a petulant teenager who knows that faking an agreement is the only way to get his parent to shut up. Hell, he practically was a teenager. He rolled his shoulder to wipe at his cheek with his sleeve.

  “Yeah,” he said. His eyes were glassy, staring straight ahead. “You know, I am getting kinda cold. I should head in.”

  His hands started spinning the wheels and he turned toward the door. She had to hurry to keep pace with him. She thanked him for meeting with her, asked him if there was anything he needed, anything she could pick up for him.

  “Nah, I’m good, thanks.”

  She wasn’t sure how to say good-bye, whether a handshake would be too formal or if bending over for a hug would make him feel pitied, and while she was wondering this he leaned on his back wheel to turn and face her. As if he had one last important thing to tell her. But all he told her was to take care and she’d barely replied when he spun around again, his wheels taking him past another guard station and down the long hallway.

  Z.

  Timelines have grown confusing to me, cause and effect reversed and turned inside out, stories mixed with the wrong endings. Without my GeneScan I can’t track any hags, and I can’t help but wonder which other parts of my perception have been blurred or simply wiped clean.

  I wonder if Wills was right, that this a purgatory for me. And I’ve dispatched the one person who might have understood what I’m living through.

  The day after shooting Wills—and using a Flasher to eliminate his body, then leaving and checking into a new motel before the manager of the first found an enormous hole in the bathroom—I’m staking out the Korean diplomat’s place. Nothing happening, no obvious hags about. I linger outside his office at the embassy, but here too all seems normal.

  Then I get a call from Tasha coming in through the line I’d tapped for my personal use. She asks me if I’d like to meet for lunch downtown. I was about to check on her, actually, so this is the perfect excuse.

  Wills never really answered my question about Tasha. My intel didn’t say she was important; his did. Was his intel faked, to throw me off? Or is she in fact slated to be killed with T.J.? If so, is it because of something I’ve done? Is there a way I can undo it, erase my own accidental imprint on history? Or would that too be a violation, and she’s already damned, and there’s nothing I can do to save her?

  I opt for a cab ride instead of the Metro. Better one contemp silently driving me around than countless others glancing at me.

  She’d said to meet in the sculpture garden at the National Mall. There she is, standing in front of an optical illusion: a fifteen-foot-tall painting of an almost two-dimensional house that seems to bend and open as I approach it. She stands at the center of it, the fulcrum where the two panes impossibly move, the house seeming to grow and shrink with each of my steps. />
  “I love this Lichtenstein,” she says. She’s actually standing a good ten feet away from it, but from a distance she seemed to be inside of it. “When I was a kid, me and Marshall would try to play in it. We didn’t understand why our parents wouldn’t let us until the time a security guard saw us and started yelling.”

  “A metaphor for the flatness of domestic life?” I wonder, reassessing it now that I’m closer. “Or how the people you love are never what they appear to be?”

  “You’ve never seen it before?” She’s shocked. “And you used to live here?”

  “I’m… not much for art.”

  “I’ll have to work on that.”

  A gust of wind blows her braids across her face. She asks if I wouldn’t mind a bit of a walk before lunch or if I need to rush back to the office.

  “No, I have time,” I say. “I’ve been wanting to skip work for a while now.”

  “Things bad at the office?”

  I look around at the other sculptures, giant spiders and vulvic metal installations lurking among the trees. What am I doing here? Is anyone actually interested in interfering with Tasha’s life, or is it just me?

  “I think things have been bad at the office for some time and I’m only beginning to notice.”

  She smiles like she knows exactly what I mean. Then we walk toward the Lincoln Memorial. The skies are gray, the grass ocher. Far fewer tourists around than the last time I came here, when I saw that doomed little black girl with the pink sweater.

  It’s a long walk, and Tasha asks me about my job, forcing me to make up more lies. I try to change the subject. Finally she explains why she wanted to see me so suddenly.

  “I talked to one of the soldiers who served with my brother. I figured you might be the only person who’d understand what I’m thinking.”

  The wind seems to calm as we approach the Lincoln, the tall fortress providing sanctuary.

  “I was thinking about what you said to me the other day,” she continues. “About how you weren’t trying to learn more about what happened to your own brother. I couldn’t understand how you wouldn’t want to find out everything you could. I figured maybe we were just in two different stages of grief.”