A gust of wind blew and the pages fluttered in her hand as if pleading for release. Tasha stuffed them back in the envelope. She thanked Velasquez and hung up.
Marshall had died for love. At least she could say that. No matter how she felt about the wars or the politics of her age or the feuds in Washington and the wider world, her brother had found something good to hold on to, and had sacrificed himself for her.
Maybe if Marshall had never met her, he’d still be alive. Or maybe not. Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?
Tasha stared at her tiny front plot. The tall oak was no doubt decades older than the 1912 row house, which had been a blue-collar family’s home for years, then a crack house during the eighties when this block was among the nation’s most neglected, and then an abandoned building for a full decade before the previous owner had started fixing it up. Tasha was doing the rest: she’d put in a new bathroom, removing the matching all-black toilet and sink and bathtub (all the better for finding your spilled cocaine, apparently), and she’d patiently re-topsoiled the front plot, removing pieces of broken bottles and the occasional razor blade, and planted new bushes and perennials. She’d spent an entire weekend the previous spring gardening and, the very next Monday morning, had been stunned to find that two of her new bushes—each a fifty-dollar sarcococca—were gone, in their place nothing but two gaping holes. What the hell? Had she bought migrating bushes? She’d stood there, confused and enraged, as her neighbor, the friendly gay man and proud survivor of worse times on that block, informed her that such crimes occurred now and again. Botanical thieves would dig up expensive-looking shrubs and hock them at yard sales. Tasha was floored. Shrubbery theft?
So the next weekend, early on a Saturday morning in March, she’d driven around the Hill in search of yard sales. She hadn’t found many, but there was an enormous market set up in the vast parking lot of RFK Stadium. Stalls of pirated CDs, incense, secondhand clothing, baked goods, and folk art were perched there on the banks of the Anacostia, as if people were selling all the belongings they couldn’t carry with them as gentrification pushed them farther southeast. It had taken Tasha only ten minutes to find the lady with the bushes.
Two of the sarcococca had looked familiar, though she couldn’t be certain. She knew of no way to DNA-test bushes. But her rage, and her righteousness, had burned hot enough.
“Where do you get your bushes?” she asked the heavyset woman who sat on a wheeled office chair that was as out of place here as everything else was.
“Oh, my grandsons grow ’em.” She wore a thick blue sweater and had a blanket across her knees even on that glorious spring morning. Her voice was pure country by way of two or three generations in D.C., from the state of North Carolina to North Carolina Avenue Southeast. “Which ones you innerested in?”
Tasha looked around but didn’t see anyone grandsonish in the vicinity.
“I’m looking for the kinds of bushes that don’t up and walk away.”
The lady laughed, genuinely mirthful. “Girl, I ain’t never seen that happen!” She slapped a knee and managed to recover. “Though, in this town? Wouldn’t be the craziest thing I ever seen.”
The satisfaction wouldn’t be there, Tasha realized. So she reached into her pocket and allowed her two fifty-dollar shrubs to be price-cut down to twenty-dollar shrubs.
She’d just started wondering how exactly she was going to get the two bushes into her car when the old lady whistled.
“Ay, Darnell! Delivery, boy!”
The kid wandered over from one of the CD stalls. Wearing a black Heat jersey over a black tee whose sleeves reached past his gawky elbows. High school, if he still went. He loaded the two shrubs onto a flat hand truck and asked Tasha which way her car was, never making eye contact. She didn’t recognize him from the neighborhood but wondered if she’d start noticing him around now. If he recognized her, he didn’t show it.
She walked alongside him, his crooked red Phillies cap facing her even though he did not. He had long, skinny fingers, and she imagined them tearing into the earth. He slowly weaved his hand truck through the stalls, and the sun off the asphalt was warmer than it had been in months.
She popped open the back of her hatchback. He didn’t bother to protect the young boughs as he muscled the plants inside.
“You know, my little brother used to steal stuff too.”
He looked at her. “Huh?”
“My little brother. Though I doubt he ever boosted a bush.”
He adopted the blank look with which she’d once been annoyingly familiar. “I ain’t know what you talking about, lady.”
“I’ve never had to plant something a second time before. But I guess there’s nothing wrong with needing a second chance, so long as you use it right.”
His blank stare vacuumed her own gaze for a moment, then he turned without a word, the now-empty hand truck squeaking on its wheels. Tasha shook her head. She would have to tell Marshall about this, she thought. He’d get a kick out of it. He was out in the desert again, doing God knows what and hopefully being safe, and she’d just bumped into his past on the ever-changing streets of D.C.
* * *
She read through a few of the e-mails again, then looked up at her reclaimed bushes—which weren’t doing so well due to the dry fall and her complete failure to water them since August—when she saw Troy Jones, a bandage covering his right eye and two more on his left cheek, same damn clothes as before, walking her way.
Z.
She’s sitting on her front stoop surrounded by text. I wondered if she might back away at the sight of me, but she watches calmly as I walk down the sidewalk and up the short path. I stop at the base of her steps. Bits of the padded envelope stuffing are sprinkled on the steps like gray snow.
“Surprised to see you,” she says, voice decidedly neutral. Which is an improvement over how she sounded the last time. “I assumed you’d just vanish into wherever it is you people hide before popping up again to follow someone else.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to do, actually. But I’m not doing it anymore.”
She watches me for a moment, judging. The wind blows; leaves scrape their fingers against the brick sidewalks.
“Thanks for sending this to me,” she says.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get it to you sooner. I wasn’t sure how to show you without…”
“Without letting on the type of work you do?”
“Used to do.”
“You’re very past tense today.”
“I’m feeling the opposite. That night, at the restaurant. When I told you some of us can imagine a better future? I’m putting that theory to the test.”
She doesn’t dare smile or lighten her voice, yet her eyes are round, more vulnerable than she wants them to be.
“Your brother. I’m sorry I read his messages, but I needed to, to find what you were looking for.”
“Wow, an apology. Aren’t you used to reading other people’s things?”
“I’m apologizing anyway.”
“It’s okay.”
She watches me for another moment, then pats the stoop beside her. “Pull up a brick.”
I sit there, our knees almost touching, the angle of the autumn light so sharp I have to squint.
“There’s a lot that I need to explain,” I say. “Once I figure out how.”
“You’re in the obfuscation business. Truth doesn’t come so easily, huh?”
I don’t answer that one.
“What happened
to your face?”
“I spent the last thirty-six hours with the FBI, and—”
“The FBI did that to you?” Eyes wider now, ready again for the world to confirm her worst opinions of it.
“No, no. They patched me up. And I needed their help with something else.”
I was at the Washington field office of the FBI for more than a full day. I explained my story to at least three underlings and sat for hours in a windowless holding room before they finally sent someone with any kind of authority over or familiarity with what I was talking about. Special Agent Westerberg, he introduced himself, and we spoke for hours. He asked me to tell my story, then asked for it again, then asked every conceivable question that might trip up a liar. But I had the facts down, my internal databases there to guide me, my own experience and memory as well, though those are decidedly less reliable.
“You’re technically a missing person, as I understand it,” Westerberg said at one point.
“I’ve been found.”
I showed him some of the files in my briefcase, explained their relevance to what was happening, what had already happened, and what might still happen if he and the Bureau didn’t step forward and impose some order on this chaos.
I told him about the gunfight, and Leo. While we sat there he dispatched other agents to the scene, which, one hopes, was already being investigated by local police by then. At some point a medic came in to clean my wounds and look at my eye. He told me I should see a specialist immediately because I risked permanent damage to my vision. But I’d already lost so many things, this latest loss seemed fitting. First the GeneScan, then the ability to foresee what would happen next, and now basic three-dimensionality. All these extra layers were being peeled away from my world, or from my perception of it. And is there any difference? Everything before me now seemed flat, stark, a blank canvas.
By the time I left, they’d dispatched teams to keep watch around Mr. Sentrick and Enhanced Awareness’s other senior staff and were also monitoring Hyun Ki Shim, who was due to meet with Sentrick to close a deal that afternoon. Westerberg shook my hand before I went, telling me to stay in touch and assuring me that they’d be calling for me shortly.
“Are you in trouble?” Tasha asks.
“Not anymore. And neither are you. I wasn’t following you before, I was… trying to protect you. The people I was protecting you from, you won’t need to worry about them anymore.”
I’m staring ahead, at the tree that dominates her tiny plot, this massive motionless thing that will be so rare one day soon. Or maybe not. Maybe everything that I take for granted about my Perfect Present has been uprooted; maybe I would never recognize the new world to come. The world I’ve helped remake.
Her head seems the slightest bit closer, her voice quieter. “Do you want to tell me about your family? Your job? What you used to do?”
“I do. But later.” I try not to wonder about the Department and whether they have the ability to send more Protectors back, whether they’ll try to undo what I’ve done. Maybe I’ll have to spend the rest of my life fending off their attempts to resteer history in their favored direction. And maybe that’s exactly what it’s like to simply live through the present like everyone else does, something I’ve nearly forgotten how to do.
I realize that she’s been looking at me with sympathy. It took a while to recognize because I’m not used to it.
Her voice is a whisper. “What did they do to you, Troy?”
“Nothing. I did it to myself.”
She puts her hand on my face, trying to trace the outline of something she can’t fathom. I hold it there and we watch each other.
And I know this is bad timing, but my sense of timing is perhaps permanently off, so I say, “I need a favor. I made a promise that I don’t think I can keep on my own.”
“Which is?”
I ask her again what kind of law she practices.
Leo told me there was a coded knock, but I can’t remember what it is. Too much has happened since then.
“Open, please,” I tell whoever’s behind the door after I knock. If she’s really there. “We’re with Leo.” I say his name again, in case it’s the only word of English she knows.
Tasha says the same thing, hoping a feminine voice might make us less threatening.
The door opens, slowly, and by only a few inches. Sari is young, and scared. I try to look kind and accommodating—not one of my skills. She waits a moment, then backs up and lets us in.
Her room has been invaded by crumpled food wrappers and empty juice bottles. Her expression and stance are tense, like she’s trying to choose the best time to bolt past us, out the door. Her sleeves are rolled up and she has a large bandage on one of her forearms. Behind her, the made-up faces on the morning talk show are mute in horror.
“What the hell did he do to her?” Tasha says, quietly.
I close the door behind us. I’ve already tried to make sense of what Leo told me that night, and what he’d told me a few nights earlier when I surprised him in his car. Still, this woman doesn’t look like someone who belongs on a cross-country train, with or without a fake ID and lots of cash.
Tasha asks her if she speaks English; Sari’s eyes betray nothing but fear. Then Tasha takes her phone out of her purse—just the act of opening that purse makes Sari flinch, as if she’s expecting a gun—and opens the Internet. I see a tiny map of the world.
Tasha uses her fingers to show her how it works.
“Where?” Tasha asks, as if keeping it to one word makes it comprehensible.
Sari hesitantly touches two fingers to the tiny screen, opening and closing them, dragging her fingertips until she’s found her country of origin. I see mostly blue water and some islands.
“Indonesia,” Tasha says to me, then switches to another Web site. “These translator sites aren’t very good, but they’re better than nothing.”
She types a question, the site renders it into another language, and Sari can’t resist the tiniest smile of recognition. This black American woman’s phone “talking” to her in Indonesian. Then Sari demonstrates that she is no stranger to cell phones or texting. Her fingers madly dance over the keypad.
She and Tasha trade questions and answers, writing her story in slow motion. During this exchange, Tasha looks up at me. “It’s not my specialty, but I know some international affairs people, and they owe me a favor. Could take a while, though.”
Sari offers her the phone again, another secret conveyed. Tasha reads it, thinks for a moment, starts typing. I hear cars on the highways that surround us, anxiously careening headlong toward their next appointments and trysts, betrayals and rescues.
I assure her that we have plenty of time.
About the Author
Thomas Mullen is the author of The Last Town on Earth, which was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, and The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. His books have been named Best of the Year by such publications as the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Onion, and Amazon.com. He lives with his wife and sons in Atlanta.
Acknowledgments
The song that the nameless activist listens in chapter 32 is “Weapon of Choice” by The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
Thanks to Col. George Reynolds (Ret.), USA, for military guidance; Laurel Hatt for cultural pointers; and Dave Ricksecker Esq. for legal advice not followed.
My unofficial D.C. and Atlanta writers groups allowed for needed venting and idea vetting: Louis Bayard, Keith Donohue, Susan Coll, Charles McNair, Marc Fitten, and Jon Fasman.
My agent, Susan Golomb, remains indispensible. My editor, John Schoenfelder, poured fuel on the dying spark of a crazy idea.
All past, present, and future accomplishments are due to my wife, Jenny, and my family.
ALSO BY THOMAS MULLEN
The Last Town on Earth
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Present Shock
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2.
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4.
5.
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7.
8.
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Part Two: Revisionism
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11.
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13.
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15.
16.
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18.
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Part Three: Green-Tags
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22.
23.
24.
25.
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27.
Part Four: Human-Asset Protection
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29.
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31.
32.
The Revisionists Page 44