The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “You want me to just lurk around outside the men’s toilets all day?” I said. “Right down the hall from the goddamn Situation Room?”

  “Oh God,” he said. “You’re hopeless. Go back to your desk, act normal, and see if you can get anything from Beth’s files about Dean’s conversation with Liddy. Maybe she took notes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The President doesn’t handle election-related business in the Oval Office,” he said. “It’s frowned upon. He usually saves campaign calls for the evening and does them from the Residence. I’m going to see if I can find anything out from the phone logs. We can meet tomorrow. Stairwell. 9:15 a.m.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m glad you finally decided to show up, by the way. I’ve been flying blind without you.”

  “You’ve been doing fine without me,” he said. “I’ve been getting the Deputy Director’s reports. That was good work with the girl in the jail. And with the burglars. You’re doing really well.” I was irrationally pleased to hear this.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said as he opened the door to let me out. “Oh, and by the way, you better get this file to the Head Chef. You owe me.”

  “I promise,” he said, smiling.

  “All those boxes on the shelves – it’s really all just silverware? This whole room?”

  “The whole room.”

  “Man, this is a weird place,” I said, shaking my head as I stepped out into the hallway.

  “You don’t even know the half of it,” said Carter, and he closed the door behind me.

  Eleven

  If I Could, I Surely Would

  I had barely been home that evening long enough to take my shoes off when there was a knock at the door. Perplexed, I opened it and saw Carter Hughes standing outside.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  “I couldn’t find Beth’s notes,” I said apologetically. “I’ll try again tomorrow. She has a steno pad for meetings and she locks it in her desk at the end of the day. There’s nothing filed under ‘Liddy’ in her file cabinet, that’s all I can tell you today.”

  “That’s all right,” he said cheerfully. “That’s not why I came by. Get your coat, we’re going for a walk.”

  “A walk? Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t get out enough.”

  “I get out the regular amount.”

  “You go to your office and then you come home,” he said. “And then you go back to the office, and then you come back home.”

  “That’s what people do,” I said. “That’s normal.”

  “You need to get some fresh air. Clear your head.”

  “I can’t. I have plans.”

  “Plans to drink beer in your underwear while staring at the screen of your handheld for five hours while your brain slowly melts?”

  “Are you a wizard?”

  “Just get your coat, Reggie.”

  “Fine,” I sighed dramatically. “I will come with you for a stupid walk in the stupid outdoors and look at stupid nature—”

  “For Christ’s sake, we’re not going to the woods—”

  “Just give me a minute to change my clothes,” I said. “This dress is for work. Mrs. Graham would kill me if she caught me wearing it near anything that grows in dirt.”

  “Okay, but hurry,” he said. “We don’t want to miss the sunset.”

  “Oh no. You’re one of those people.”

  “It’s gonna be fun,” he said breezily. “You’ll see.”

  “I think we have different definitions of fun,” I called over my shoulder as I closed the bedroom door behind me to change, and from the other room I could hear him laughing.

  * * *

  You may recall that I had been on my way towards the National Mall when Detective Barlow had picked me up. After that, for some reason I couldn’t quite name – superstition, maybe? – I hadn’t dared to go back there. I had walked to and from work very near those white marble landmarks but had never ventured inside the green park to look at them up close.

  But Carter made it a delight. He wasn’t a Realignment Agent like Grove or my mother, bouncing around through different Timestreams to fix errors when the General Timeline went wrong. He was a historian.

  I was a specialist in a particular era, but he was a specialist in this city. He had been here four years now and knew everything there was to know about Washington, D.C., so he was full of stories. He told me about every building we passed, swooning over architectural details and using words like “cornice” and “finial.”

  I was tempted to dismiss him as a hopeless nerd before I learned that his initial drop had been scheduled for June 1968, but he had filed a request for an earlier drop so he could be here in April, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated. The liability attorneys had refused his initial request, but he had appealed and won.

  “The risk assessment for a black male agent in April 1968 would have been well outside recommended mission parameters,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what they told me.”

  “It could have been dangerous.”

  “It was.”

  “Then why risk it?”

  “Because I had to know,” he said. “I didn’t want to read about it. I wanted to feel it. To feel it like a real person.”

  This puzzled me. In fact, nearly everything about Carter puzzled me. I could tell that he saw, just as I did, that everywhere we walked, suspicious eyes followed us, full of questions or judgment or patronizing concern, making it impossible to forget that interracial marriage had only been decriminalized here five years ago – but it didn’t seem to infuriate him the way it did me.

  I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand his whole life. The federal government paid him a depressingly tiny sum to move unobtrusively through the White House all day, invisible in plain sight, head subserviently lowered, being called “boy” (or worse) by cocky men in suits, while the Time Travel Bureau paid him a lavish one to report back on the things that he heard and saw while he did so. I wondered if his loyalties were ever conflicted.

  I wondered how he felt about the people he worked with. I wondered if he looked around at these 20th-century people and felt like I did – as if he were a traveler from far more civilized shores shipwrecked on a barbarian island.

  I wondered if he had made friends here, if there was anyone he went home to at night, or if it was simply too dark and sad to let himself grow close to anyone who might be killed in ten years when the first bombs would strike.

  We walked and talked for a long time. The sun set over the water, and night fell, sweeping away the crowds and noise and most of the scampering children, leaving warm breezes and a mellow green hush.

  He showed me the path along the Tidal Basin where the cherry trees would bloom in the spring. He let me take as long as I wanted to stand in front of the Washington Monument, trying to forget about the dark crater that sat in its place back in the time we had come from. And then we followed the long, glossy bulk of the Reflecting Pool, gleaming at night like a dark mirror, towards the place I had wanted to visit since I was five years old.

  “The best way to see the Lincoln Memorial is at night,” he said as I stepped up onto the low concrete ledge so I could be a head taller as I walked alongside him. “Always at night. And you have to come at it from this side, walking along the water. You have to ease into it. You have to take it in a little bit at a time. He was a force of nature, Abraham Lincoln. You have to enter his temple with respect.”

  It was a beautiful night, and I was having a lovely time. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed myself so effortlessly. And Carter’s feelings about Lincoln were so exactly my own feelings about the man that I felt myself loosening up, growing dangerously close to comfortable in his presence.

  It was the only explanation I can think of, when I look back, for doing what I did next. />
  I decided to pick a fight.

  “You do know that his attitudes on racial equality were very problematic,” I said, carefully placing one foot in front of the other on the ledge, arms outstretched like I was walking a tightrope. “Many of the leaders of the Abolitionist movement viewed his positions as too moderate.”

  “He was moderate. Moderate is what gets you elected. Fire and brimstone is how you survive the primary; playing to undecided voters is how you win.”

  “I’m just saying, the children’s history book Lincoln – the moral crusader, the American saint – isn’t necessarily supported by the whole picture of his life,” I shrugged.

  “You take the fun out of everything,” said Carter.

  “’I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.’ That’s a direct quote.”

  “Yeah, thanks, White Girl, I’ve heard that one before.”

  “You might not know this, but—”

  He stopped walking. “Why do you have to win every conversation?” he said. His voice wasn’t harsh or accusatory – he sounded more curious than anything else – but his question was so excruciatingly true that I deflated entirely. “We were having a nice time,” he said. “We were just talking. And then suddenly we were in a contest, playing ‘Who-Knows-The-Most-About-Lincoln.’”

  “I just don’t understand it,” I said. “A cab driver calls me ‘sweetheart’ and I want to break his kneecaps. Beth Rutherford could be a CEO – hell, Beth Rutherford could be President – and she’s stuck as a lawyer’s secretary. It isn’t like this where we’re from, Carter, I’m off by a hundred and fifty years and I’m aware of it every second of every day. We keep passing people on the street who look at me like they’re trying to get me to signal them if I’m in some kind of danger, just because I’m out after dark with a black man.”

  “Yeah,” said Carter. “It’s 1972.”

  “That’s my point,” I said, frustrated. “You’re from the same place I am. We both grew up in the 22nd century. We both have degrees from the Academy. Back there, we’re the same. But this place . . . How do you stand it? How can you like it here?”

  “What did you get on your Academy final exams, Reggie?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “95%.”

  “And what level did you get placed at?”

  “Level 2.”

  “I got the exact same score as you,” he said. “And I’m a Level 6. You know what the difference is?”

  “Your professors weren’t all colleagues of your mother?”

  “Besides that,” he said.

  “It’s because you’re black,” I said. “Because there are higher security restrictions on where agents of color can go.”

  “You picked Nixon,” he said. “You chose your field. This is your area. This was the posting you wanted. I didn’t. So don’t tell me that back home, you and I are the same.”

  I looked away. “Look,” he went on, “everything you know about what it’s like to be a black man in America is theoretical. Nothing you learned in an Academy textbook is going to teach you what it’s like to walk through a nice neighborhood and see white women clutch their purses and cross to the other side of the street. Nothing you learned sitting in a classroom, studying the words of Malcolm X and Dr. King and parsing them for layers of meaning, as though they’re dead works of rhetoric and literature, will ever convey to you what those words really meant. The way they changed people. The way they changed America.”

  He looked at me. “So don’t come to me with your out-of-context quotes from the Lincoln/Douglas debates and your superior attitude, like I’m not allowed to respect a man whose racial attitudes were problematic. You know who else’s racial attitudes are problematic? America. And everybody in it.”

  He turned away from me then, and started walking. I hopped down from the ledge and followed, but a few paces behind, cheeks flushed hot with shame. We walked in silence for a while, watching the looming white bulk of the temple columns rise up before us. When we reached the base of the steps, he stopped to let me catch up.

  “The funny thing is, I bet Lincoln is your favorite president too,” he said to me. “I bet this was the thing you most wanted to see from the minute you set foot in Washington.”

  “He is,” I said, embarrassed again. “It was. I was just—”

  “Showing off,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Carter sighed. “You’re in the field now, Reggie,” he said. “You’re not looking at the General Timeline from a screen, you’re inside it. And sometimes in here, good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Nobody is a monster and nobody is a saint.”

  I looked down at the ground as he went on. “You’re used to sitting at a computer watching human lives like they’re lines on a screen,” he said, “while all the rest of us live down here in the muck and the mess. Here, a man says during a presidential campaign that he believes white people are the master race and then signs the Emancipation Proclamation after he’s elected. Because Lincoln was a real person, and real people are complicated. They’re motivated by incomprehensible things, they’re shaped by forces they’re not even aware of, they’re products of their times, they grow and change their minds, they achieve greatness and then make terrible mistakes that undo all the good they’ve done, and then they start from scratch and build it all back up again. There are no rules. There are no straight lines.”

  He looked at me then, really looked at me, his gaze so steady and so serious that I found myself shifting uncomfortably and staring down at the ground to avoid looking back. “You don’t have to try so hard,” he said. “You don’t have to be the smartest kid in the class. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it more than I had ever meant anything in my life. He grinned at me, and the tension was broken.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Are we okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’re okay. Just maybe, you know, next time how about not trying to teach a black person about racism like you’re the first person who’s discovered it.”

  “That’s fair,” I said, and he followed me up the white marble steps.

  The evening crowds at the monument were dissipating as we arrived, with more people going than coming, so that we found ourselves pushing through a crush of bodies at the bottom (as my HIO meter ticked reprovingly in my pocket, reminding me not to shove so much) and nearly alone at the top.

  A shape in the corner of my eye caught my attention, but I only had a split second to wonder why a man would sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to read a newspaper when there were plenty of benches nearby, before I looked up and found myself in the presence of Abraham Lincoln with a startling suddenness, as though he had somehow snuck up on me.

  It took my breath away a little, and I entered the hushed white sanctum with shy reverence, like I was in church. There were a smattering of other visitors who clearly felt it too; everyone seemed to have agreed through collective osmosis to speak only in low voices, if they spoke at all.

  I had seen pictures of the memorial, of course. I knew it was a wide rectangular space separated into three chambers by row of Ionic columns. I knew that Lincoln’s two most famous speeches were engraved on the walls, one on each side, that the statue in the middle was carved of Tennessee marble and that if he stood up from that white chair he would be twenty-eight feet tall.

  I knew which step Dr. Martin Luther King had stood on when he made his famous “I have a dream” speech, and that there was an urban legend that Lincoln’s hands were carved to form the initials “A.L.” in American Sign Language. I could have told all these facts and dozens more to Carter, to show him how much I knew.

  But I didn’t want to. I just wanted to stand there in silence and look up at Abraham Lincoln’s face.

  Carter sensed that I wanted to
be alone, and drifted tactfully away, leaving me in front of the statue. I don’t know how long I stood there, looking into those white marble eyes for answers I would never find, before I looked over and found Carter reading the Second Inaugural Address. The crowds were beginning to dissipate, and we had the space mostly to ourselves.

  “’Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained,’” I read in a soft voice, as Carter turned to see me coming up behind him. ‘”Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.’”

  “’The prayers of both could not be answered,’” was his response. “’That of neither has been answered fully.’”

  “This,” I said, suddenly comprehending. “This was the field posting you wanted. But you were a Level 6 so they wouldn’t send you.”

  “Civil War era is basically off-limits for black agents, without assassin-level self-defense and firearms training.” he said, “And that’s not me. That’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to work for Lincoln.”

  I watched him quietly for a long moment as he read the words on the wall. “’The prayers of both could not be answered,’” he said again. “I think that’s the truest thing anyone’s ever said about war.”

  “All these people are going to be dead in ten years, Carter,” I said, unable to tear my eyes from the clusters of tourists making their way up and down the steps.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that. Everyone knows that.”

  “Why do we do what we do, then,” he asked me, “if not for the belief that the future can be changed?”

  “You’re looking at this sideways,” I said. “I’m not here to stop the war because it was terrible. I’m here to stop it because it’s historically inaccurate. I don’t approve of the Vietnam War either, but I have to leave it alone. Vietnam stays. The Civil War stays. The Trail of Tears, the Ku Klux Klan and the World War II internment camps all stay. Every other atrocity in our history stays. We’re not him,” I said, gesturing angrily at Lincoln. “We’re not heroes, we’re editors. It’s not a moral victory.”