The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  (Later she realized she should have slipped on a pair of his loafers while she was taking the briefcase, but she hadn’t been thinking clearly then.)

  She ran outside, down the walkway, and onto the sidewalk. She remembered that a few blocks away were some markets. Surely there would be a phone somewhere. She kept running until she couldn’t hear the screaming anymore.

  She was limping by the time she made it out of the residential neighborhood and onto the main road. She’d stepped on acorns and branches and bottle caps and probably even worse things, and even her calloused feet could feel the cold of the November sidewalk. She hugged herself, the adrenaline and panic not quite enough to counteract the frigid air.

  She stood at the intersection a moment, her hair blown across her face by the wind. It was the coldest weather she’d felt yet. A group of black men in colorful sports jerseys were standing in front of a convenience store, their conversation no longer interesting them as they watched her silently. A crazy young barefoot woman with a briefcase. Her arm stung, and she looked at it quickly, saw and felt the blood. The sweatshirt she wore was dark blue so maybe they couldn’t see how hurt she was. Even she wasn’t sure how hurt she was.

  She turned right and headed toward a small grocery store. The people at the cash registers were neither as white as nor as dark as some of the Americans she’d seen; they must be some other race she wasn’t familiar with. She had no idea what the neon sign above her said.

  The girl at the register looked about Sari’s age, her eyes wide. Sari asked for help in Bahasa, then in Korean. The girl stared an extra moment, then turned and yelled something. A much older woman emerged from one of the aisles and stared at their bedraggled customer. Strange music played overhead.

  Sari mimed a telephone. Even asked for one, again in a language she knew they couldn’t understand, but she couldn’t stop herself, she needed help, please, could they help her?

  There was cold judgment in the old woman’s eyes, yet the hand on Sari’s shoulder felt warm and gentle as she guided her to the front corner of the room where a white telephone sat beside a pile of newspapers. The old woman picked up the receiver and dialed three digits. Sari shook her head, assuming the woman was calling some official police or hospital line. The woman looked at her another moment and seemed disappointed. Then she put her finger down again, killing the call. She looked at Sari, opening her palm as if to ask, Who do you want to call, then?

  He was there in ten minutes, pulling in front of the store and turning on his hazards as he’d explained he would. He did not honk the horn. He had told her not to talk to anyone, as if he were concerned that someone fluent in Korean or Bahasa might suddenly materialize in this grocery store filled with sweet-smelling baked goods and huge bags of multicolored beans. The old lady had sucked in her breath when she noticed Sari’s wounded arm and yelled something at the young cashier, who’d run off and then reappeared with a paper towel. Sari nodded her thanks, then pressed the towel to her arm, which burned.

  She nodded thanks to them again when Leo arrived, then she ran outside. He pushed open the passenger door, and they were driving away before she could say anything. He turned left at a light and told her to put on her seat belt.

  “What happened?” he asked. She hadn’t said much to him on the phone.

  “They attacked me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was just doing the dishes, and Sang Hee started yelling at me for something. I don’t even know what.” She was staring out the windshield, afraid to look at him. They were driving on a wide avenue, down a hill, the same way she’d driven to the grocery store. Buses and taxis sped by on either side. “Then she hit me, and took out a knife. She hit him too.”

  Apparently he was a very cautious driver, as he was looking in his rearview mirror a lot.

  “She stabbed you?”

  She nodded. They were at a red light now, and he really looked at her for the first time since she’d gotten in. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  She pulled the paper towel off her right forearm and glanced at the wound for only a moment before her eyes refused the assignment and went to the window instead. Her stomach turned, and she closed her mouth.

  He said what was probably a swear in English. She felt dizzy; the world vibrated at the edges of her vision. She wished she could lie down.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” he told her, “and try to slow your breaths. Just be calm.”

  He pulled off the main road and drove what seemed to her like a long circle through a neighborhood of multicolored row houses and young white men walking dogs. He looked in the rearview almost constantly. Then he pulled into a parking space. He turned off the lights but left the engine on as he reached past her and opened the glove box.

  “What is that, his briefcase?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he see you take it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  He unzipped a small red pouch and removed some gauze and medical tape. She closed her eyes, tried to follow his instructions about breathing. As if it were so easy. She could still hear Sang Hee yelling, could still see Hana forlorn on the steps. Would both parents have to go to the hospital? Who would take care of the children? She doubted either of the parents had the faintest idea how.

  She gasped as he rubbed something into her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to clean it. I’d rather take you to a doctor, but I’m not sure if we can do that. Tell me again what happened.”

  “What?” She squirmed as he rubbed at the wound, but he held her tight.

  “She just attacked you, and him? Where was he if you were doing the dishes?” He didn’t believe her. He was staring into her eyes. He was hurting her on purpose.

  “He was just sitting there! She’s crazy! She’s hit me before, and this time she decided to use a knife too! He got in the way, and then she started stabbing him! That’s when I ran off.”

  He stopped cleaning the wound, if that’s what he’d really been doing, and taped the gauze onto her arm, which throbbed. “Is he hurt as bad as you?”

  “Worse, I think. She stabbed him a lot. In the arms and the chest.”

  He pressed her left hand against the dressing. “You need to apply pressure.” Then he held four pills in front of her. “Open; it’s for the pain.” He placed them on her tongue. He held a water bottle to her, and she took a drink, some of it spilling down her neck.

  “Do you have your cell phone with you?” he asked.

  “No. I left it there.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Between my mattress and the box spring.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, but the way he breathed told her he didn’t like that answer. “How about the flash drives, the other things I gave you?”

  She told him where she’d stashed them, in her bedroom closet, and when he asked if there was any new data on them she said no, they were blank. Then he put on a pair of leather gloves and pulled the briefcase onto his lap and opened it. There were some files inside, and a notebook, and he quickly flipped through them, not even skimming them but checking to see if anything else was inside. He leaned back and carefully placed the paperwork in the backseat. It seemed like he was moving too fast, like an old movie with the wrong-size reels, or maybe her perceptions were just slowing down. He checked the other pockets, removed some pens and clips and a flash drive. Then he pocketed the drive, rolled down his window, and dropped the other things outside.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking precautions.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, willing the world to resume its normal speed, and when she opened them he was holding a small retractable knife. She shuddered at the sight and turned away, telling herself surely he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. She stared at the front door of an attractive row house, the door painted red and the bricks white, a grand chandelier visible through the foyer window. She heard tearing, and
she turned back to see him eviscerating the briefcase. He checked between the layers of leather, looking for God knew what. It took him less than a minute to shred the case in every imaginable way. Then he turned on the lights, pulled out of the parking spot, and drove farther into the city.

  At the next red light, he punched the top of his steering wheel, three times. The entire car shook. She was surprised the wheel wasn’t dented. She closed her eyes and hoped he was finished.

  “I’m very cold,” she said after a while.

  He hit a button and the sound of the air through the vents grew louder. “You’re getting the chills. Your body’s just reacting to what happened.” Keeping one hand on the wheel, he reached behind him and handed her a blanket. “Here. Try not to get any blood on it or on the car.”

  “I’m sorry about the car.”

  “It’s not the car I’m worried about. I just don’t want to leave any evidence.”

  Evidence? Is that what was bleeding out of her? Is that what she had become?

  He pulled suddenly into an alley behind some storefronts, stopping next to a dumpster. He rolled down his window and underhanded the torn briefcase, whose pieces fluttered like the pages of an open book, into the garbage, then drove on.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I need to get you someplace safe until I know what’s going on. I would take you to the Indonesian embassy, but the Shims might go to the police and say you stole something from them and ran off, or worse. The embassy might not shield you if they think you attacked a diplomat.”

  “Why would the Shims say I did that?”

  “Do they strike you as the type of people who will be honest?” His voice sounded calm, cold, professional. He’d acted this way before, and she was glad he was helping her, but she found herself wishing he were more like the vision of him she’d had when they’d first met, in the grocery store. Friendly, trustworthy.

  She thought for a while. They were on a winding highway, cutting through a swath of forest that seemed misplaced in the city. She had no idea where she was.

  “You’re saying I should have just stayed. Let them do this to me again, so I could get whatever it is you want from them.”

  “No. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that I don’t have all the answers I wish I had, at least not yet.” They weren’t at a light, but he still managed to take his eyes off the road and look at her. “I’m going to get you out of this.”

  She believed him about as much as she believed that any of this was really happening to her, as much as she believed that she’d followed an evil couple to another country and had fallen into some incomprehensible trap. Nothing made any less sense than anything else.

  His eyes were back on the road. “Are you going to be able to walk?”

  “What?”

  “I know you’re tired and you’re hurt, but if we’re going to get you someplace safe, you’re going to need to walk a little ways. And be seen in public without seeming injured. Do you think you can do that?”

  She didn’t answer. They reached another light and he leaned closer to her. “Come here,” he said. She looked at him, confused, and he put his hands on her cheeks—cautiously and gently, but the last thing she wanted was someone touching her. She tried to pull back, but his hands were too strong. He was staring into her eyes like a doctor. Then he released her.

  “You’re going to be okay.”

  He was driving again when she mentioned she didn’t have any shoes.

  It seemed that enough events for several nights had already been crammed into one, but the night only got longer. He drove to a suburban strip mall, parked on the street, and told her to wait while he bought her some shoes. He told her to honk the horn three times if anyone approached the car. He was nothing if not prepared—in his glove box was a tape measure, and he used it to measure her foot. He was in the store less than five minutes before returning with a box of plastic-smelling blue-and-white Nikes, some socks, a black sweatshirt, a black baseball cap, synthetic track pants, and a matching zippered jacket. He pulled back onto the road immediately, dropped his wallet and some loose bills on the gearshift between them, and asked her to put the bills away for him so he could focus on driving. She did so, gingerly, with her injured hand, so the other one could keep applying pressure. As she folded the bills into his thick wallet—he had so much cash!—she thought of something. He was watching the road, and he didn’t notice that she took a twenty and put it into her own pocket. Just in case.

  Ten minutes later, they parked in the second level of a tiered garage.

  He reached under his seat, and when his hand reappeared he was holding a gun. She’d never seen one in real life before, at least not this close. It was surprisingly shiny, like some giant precious object recently extracted from a riverbed. It looked heavy, yet he slipped it into his jacket quickly and smoothly. Then he nodded to her as if that hadn’t just happened, as if he’d done something as natural as combing his hair.

  “Change into those clothes,” he told her. “I’ll stand outside and block the window. Put your old clothes in the bag and give it to me when you get out.”

  She sat there after he closed his door. Change here, in public? She looked out her window and saw the seat of his jeans casually leaning into her door. He had wisely parked in the far corner. Still—maybe this was perfectly normal for Americans, but it wasn’t anything she was in a habit of doing.

  Sensing her lack of movement, he rapped at the window twice with his knuckles. “Come on. You have to do this, and hurry.”

  She finally obeyed, angrily. She remembered to move the twenty dollars from the old pants to the new ones. When she got out of the car she handed him the bag of old clothes; they started walking and he threw the bag into a garbage bin two blocks later.

  They took the subway, her first experience with American public transit, the station’s egg-carton ceiling high above them as they waited for the train. He kept his head down, almost staring at his feet, and told her to do the same. He also said to avoid eye contact with anyone. What faces she did allow herself to glimpse belonged to so many different races, she had to wonder about this city and this country, if it really was a place where all these different types of people could coexist peacefully. They rode the train for a while, a computerized voice telling them sweet nothings in English, and then Leo told her they were getting out.

  They walked two blocks, past new apartment buildings, six stories tall, some of them displaying banner-size ads with large numbers and dollar signs. The sky glowed gray above the rooftops, and airplanes blinked in the blacker dome above. Leo reached up and hailed a taxi, not even telling her his steps in advance anymore, and they got in.

  A short ride, maybe five minutes, and when they got out it seemed like they were on the same street of modern towers. Had he told the cabbie to drive in a circle, or was she just confused? He held her hand, asked if she was all right. He told her to walk faster.

  Ten minutes later, as they carefully avoided puddles beneath a highway on-ramp, she began to wonder for the first time if what he meant by “a safe place” was perhaps a safe place in which to imprison her, or worse. Why was she running around with this man? Just because he spoke Bahasa and was handsome? Just because he had pretended to be friends with her before asking her to spy on her employers?

  She saw a figure in a sleeping bag lying against the concrete supports of the highway, the wind pressing plastic shopping bags and other garbage against him. Graffiti was sprayed on the underside of the road—she wondered if it was his name, something claiming this territory. She remembered what she told Leo in his car a few days ago, that every place was as terrible as every place else. She’d spat those words out, half hoping that the insulted world would do something to prove her wrong. She was still waiting.

  They emerged from beneath the highway ramps and saw before them, cowering like a relic of an earlier time, a dingy motel. Two floors, all of the doors facing the outside. Soot from millions of aut
omobiles caked the gray windows and once-white doors. The sign was neon, and though she couldn’t read the English she recognized the blinking American flag beside it.

  “Where are we?”

  “Virginia. Just a few miles from where you worked.”

  It was wonderful to hear that in the past tense: She didn’t work there anymore. She would never see them again. She hoped he was right.

  “This place is safe?”

  “It’s not much to look at, but, yes, it is. No one will think to search for you here.”

  She waited by the entrance as he went in and paid for a room. Then he walked her upstairs, along the outer hallway that was serenaded by the sounds of cars rocketing by on the highways. She could still hear them after he’d closed the door.

  The room smelled of mold and Chinese food. It felt as though someone else had been in it only a few minutes ago. Surely Leo wouldn’t bring her to the sort of place that you paid for by the hour?

  Cigarette burns measled the tan walls, and water damage paisleyed the ceiling. She saw some pills on the floor, scattered into the corners by a halfhearted sweeping. There was no phone, and the small TV was mysteriously unplugged. At least the bed was made.

  Leo locked the door and turned the dead bolt. She faced him, more frightened than she’d been since she’d leaped into his car. He walked past her, businesslike still, to inspect the bathroom and closet. He even looked under the bed. Then he sat on it, letting his head fall into his hands, and exhaled deeply. Other than those three punches he’d thrown at his poor steering wheel, this was the only time she’d seen him act anything other than completely in control.

  She found herself sitting beside him.

  “Okay,” he said after a little while. Around them was the constant sound track of car horns and velocity. “No one followed us, so no one knows you’re here. I need to go to my office in the morning and find out what the Shims are saying, how badly he’s hurt. Do a little research. Until then, you cannot leave this room, for any reason.”