The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  He stood in the middle of the Asian foods aisle pondering this, and received a new shock. Standing farther down the aisle, frantically comparing the contents of her cart to a crinkled paper in her hands, was a gorgeous young Southeast Asian woman. Everything about her was jarring, and slightly off: She was awkwardly dressed in a yellow sweater, the color of which clashed with the warmer luster of her own skin and which was at least a few sizes too big for her, the sleeves rolled up. Her black sweatpants also were too large, and she seemed to be wearing men’s bedroom slippers. She would have looked like a homeless person if not for her perfect face and the fact that she was in the most expensive grocery store in D.C.

  But no, not perfect. An indigo crescent moon curved beneath her left eye. He thought it might be a birthmark, because the only alternative was too unfortunate to consider: that it was the fading trace of a shiner. They made eye contact and he looked away, caught leering—was she as beautiful as he thought, or was he just thrown by all the conflicting signals? Her near-black hair was pulled in a loose ponytail, the strands seeming to sigh as they drooped around the elastic. There was a wide space between her eyebrows, a place he imagined a lover kissing.

  Her fingers accidentally knocked a can off the shelf. She reached down and picked it up hurriedly. He saw red marks on the side of her neck as she did so. She placed the can back on the shelf and chose a replacement.

  She furtively glanced at him, as if expecting to be scolded.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t tell anyone.”

  She looked down again and attempted a three-point turn with her heavily laden cart. He saw that her small cloth purse had a patch of brown Javanese batik on it.

  “Are you from Indonesia?” he asked her in Bahasa. He hadn’t spoken the language in weeks and it felt clunky yet comfortable on his tongue, like putting on clothes that were three fashion cycles too baggy but favorites all the same.

  She looked up at him in shock.

  “Yes,” she said, amazed. She stared at him for a moment before asking, “You speak Bahasa?”

  “A little. I lived there for a few years.” He was not accustomed to divulging much of himself to strangers, but it spilled out. “Do you speak English?”

  “No.”

  He could tell now that it wasn’t a birthmark. The skin below the eyebrow was still the tiniest bit puffy. He ran the possibilities: A young immigrant with an abusive husband and very particular grocery needs? A badly dressed graduate student who’d been in a car accident? Her sleeves were too long for him to see any defensive wounds.

  “I haven’t heard anyone speak my language in weeks.”

  “There aren’t many Indonesians in D.C.”

  “You speak very well,” she said, and seemed to laugh without smiling.

  “Thank you. I haven’t spoken it in a while myself. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

  She looked down quickly, not to check the contents of her cart but again as if she’d been scolded. He wondered if he’d gotten his words wrong.

  He felt a charge coursing through him. The memories streaming back, the collision of worlds to be speaking Bahasa in D.C. And her odd appearance and demeanor, as if life were trying its damnedest to stamp out her beauty, but failing.

  “Actually,” he said, “could I ask you a cooking question? I didn’t bring any recipes with me, and I was trying to remember, do I need Kaffir lime leaves to make dendeng ragi?”

  Both of her hands were gripping the cart tightly, her knuckles white, the crinkled grocery list gasping out of her left palm as if attempting an escape. He wondered if he had made himself look like a fool in her eyes, a man doing woman’s work.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you know where to buy them around here? The only Asian grocery I know is out in Arlington.”

  “There’s a store around the corner, on 14th Street,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” said a shopper trying to get past Leo.

  He twitched his head. “Sorry,” he said, and slowly propelled his cart forward. The Indonesian woman turned and did the same.

  The aisle emptied into the dairy section, where customers inspected the dates on yogurt. Leo maneuvered his cart beside an island of gourmet cheeses and he watched as the woman continued. If he’d kept shopping, he would have remained right behind her, but everything in her body language told him she didn’t want him with her.

  Except her eyes. And the glassiness he’d seen there when she seemed to revel in the sound of her native tongue, even when spoken badly by this tall white man.

  Forget it, he told himself. She’s shy and isn’t used to being spoken to by strange men, and you misinterpreted that as interest. Or she’s an illegal hoping to avoid attention. And the definite and underlying truth: you’re attracted to her and acting out of character.

  The checkout lines were long and he glanced at the strange magazines the upscale grocers sold, as if Time and Newsweek would ruin their organic vibe. Headlines about new uses for soybeans and the benefits of transcendental meditation. Beside them, a few lefty journals warned that citizens’ civil liberties were disappearing in inverse proportion to their fears, that there was a government conspiracy behind the wars, and that the next round of violence would come from places you’d never expect, unless you bought this issue for $5.99. Leo was in more of a National Enquirer mood, would have liked to read about imminent alien invasions or the most recent subway attack by tentacled leviathans—an unreal threat for a change, terror you could laugh at.

  The conveyor belt whisked his baubles to the scanner, and the freckled Ethiopian clerk greeted him curtly before turning to her mindless task. Halfway through, she needed a moment to look up the UPC for jackfruit, and Leo saw the Indonesian woman, who’d made her way to the front of a new line. How old was she, early twenties, maybe younger? That had been one of the hardest things for him about living there, never being sure of people’s ages. The dozens of different ethnicities on that long archipelago, the effects of the sun and the poverty, the litany of life’s impacts so much harder to read.

  With some disappointment he watched as a multicolored array of baby food jars paraded down her conveyor belt. Her stack of wrapped meats confirmed that she was not in the same income bracket as a typical immigrant.

  Leo’s order was finished when her items were still being scanned at the other register. To stall, he entered the wrong password after sliding his bank card, twice. The people behind him were sighing, the aggrieved impatience of urbanites. Finally he entered the correct code. She was pushing her cart out the door now, and he did the same, slowly, allowing another shopper to walk between them.

  He told himself he wasn’t stalking her and was merely practicing surveillance technique. Outside, the beeping of scanners and the printing of receipts were replaced by a distant siren and the incoming sonic boom of a Metrobus racing to catch the yellow on 14th. His path was soon blocked by a series of knee-high metal bollards—rusty iron ones to prevent shopping-cart theft, lesser versions of the steel-and-stone behemoths that had sprouted around federal buildings all over town like some superprotective fungi. And there she was, just a few feet away, loading bags into the trunk of an illegally parked black Lincoln Navigator. Leo saw the reflected neon letters of liquor writ backward across the SUV’s glossy windows.

  The SUV bore diplomatic plates, and the mystery was partly solved. A diplomat’s wife, or an ambassadorial maid, the dissonance between her dress, manner, and language and her expensive purchases finally resolving itself. Still there was the matter of her blue crescent moon. He found himself memorizing her tags—which bore not the Indonesian diplomatic prefix but some other country’s—almost despite himself. Funny how the job seeps into your blood, an incurable virus you carry around without realizing it until the sores pop up at inopportune times. Jesus, did he just compare his career to a venereal disease? He needed sleep.

  Her clothes were too loose for him to get a sense of her body, but as she leaned into the SUV
her sweater pulled up and he could see a strip of skin the color of wet sand. He told himself to leave. He threaded his hands through the plastic hoops of his four bags and turned around, the bags swinging like pendulums as he made his way through the night.

  He walked toward his car, checking the storefronts. As she’d said, there it was: a small window cluttered with unfamiliarly labeled canned goods, a hand-lettered sign proclaiming ASIAN GROCER. He’d passed it a hundred times but overlooked it. Funny the things that hide in plain sight.

  It was nearly nine o’clock, and the wrought-iron trellis was menacingly poised above the door. He pushed the entrance open with his back and nodded at the old Chinese woman who stood inexpressively at the register. One look at the store told him he’d never find anything himself, so he dispensed with complete sentences and asked, “Kaffir lime leaves?”

  Her expression did not change as she turned to walk down the aisle. He left his bags on the floor and followed her, and after she handed him the small plastic package he hit her up for some galanga as well, which she retrieved from a freezer that reeked of fish guts. He was following her to the register when the door opened and in walked the Indonesian woman.

  He smiled. “Thank you for telling me about this place.”

  She nodded slightly, not quite a smile, shoulders hunched. Leo was six two, and during his time in Indonesia he’d grown used to looming above most people, particularly women.

  She passed him, the sharp scent of bath soap cutting through the store’s aquatic miasma. He followed her into the aisle.

  “Have you been working in America for very long?” he asked as he pretended to look for something.

  “A few weeks.”

  “Have you done any sightseeing?”

  “I have no time for it.” She put a couple of cans in her plastic basket, then looked at him. “Where, ah, where did you live in Indonesia?”

  “Jakarta.”

  Finally, a smile. “I’m from Jakarta.”

  “Really?” He’d guessed that already—her accent was Javanese, and Jakarta was the biggest city on Java. “I loved it there.”

  “What brought you there?”

  “I was working for a bank,” he said, the lies so natural now. “It was an American company that has branches throughout Asia.”

  She nodded, as if there were so many things to say about her homeland that she didn’t know where to begin. But then she said, “I’m sorry, I must go now.”

  That was quick. She walked deeper into the store, and he figured he’d pushed this as far as he could.

  At the register, the proprietress forcefully punched the register’s keys as if punishing it for some offense. She looked up at Leo and let the numbers on the display speak for her. This woman would be a beast at diplomatic negotiations, he thought as he paid. She made the change and deigned to give it to him.

  He picked up his Whole Foods bags and was about to back his way out when the Indonesian woman, walking to the register, asked him in Bahasa, “Excuse me, could you tell me your name, please?”

  Again he wondered if his mental translator was in error. “What?”

  “Your name? Please?”

  She was facing him, ignoring the stone-faced matron, who had already punched in her order and was waiting silently for her $9.82.

  “Leo,” he said, putting down his bags.

  She took the blue Bic that was anchored to the counter by a thick thread and a tourniquet of black tape and jotted his name down on the back of one of those obnoxiously long coupons that Whole Foods’ machines printed out. “And your phone number,” she said.

  This was without doubt the strangest pickup he’d ever experienced, if that’s what this was. His heart was double-timing and he wondered if he was blushing—he was not a blusher—as he felt both the store owner’s harsh gaze and his inquisitor’s soft breath. He looked at the Indonesian woman, who, finally, was not cowering or moving quickly from one thing to the next but standing at her full height—perhaps a foot shorter than Leo—and looking at him calmly, fully. He had scrutinized her clothing and car and purchases and license plate and ass and visible scars and noted her lack of girlie oils and perfumes, yet he felt that she was focused entirely on his eyes, as if she were gathering all the necessary intelligence from them.

  Then she was the hurried foreigner again, stuffing the piece of paper into her pocket and pulling out a change purse.

  “Nie o’clock!” the store owner called out suddenly, and Leo jumped. It was like being attacked by a statue. “Nie o’clock!”

  Leo picked up his bags and walked to the door. He was leaning against it, the moisture on his back steaming his shirt flat, when he asked, “What’s your name?”

  A piercing ringtone emanated from her sweatpants, some processed Asian pop song. She seemed afraid of it, dropping her change purse while trying to retrieve the phone, more of her hair coming loose from its band.

  “Nie o’clock!” the store owner reminded her distracted customer.

  In the midst of this manic activity the young woman stopped to look at Leo, a photograph in a maelstrom. “Sari,” she said.

  Then the cyclone picked up again and she answered the phone, pocketed her change purse, lifted her bag, and then paid the store manager. She spoke quietly into the phone in what sounded like Korean, nodding furiously as if the phone’s camera lens were watching her.

  Leo stepped outside and hurried to his car as the bags’ plastic handles sank their fangs into his fingers. He unloaded the bags and sat in the driver’s seat, keys in his hand. He watched the store—the owner flipped a sign on the door, informing passersby in four languages that it was CLOSED—and the young woman emerged. She was still on the phone. She walked quickly, her eyes drenched in worry.

  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror, curious what she could have been staring at so intently. What had she seen in these eyes that gave away so very little?

  He pulled out and joined the mania of 14th. Only forty-five minutes before the next meeting of the peaceniks and conspiracy theorists he was keeping tabs on for his mystery client; he’d have to hurry home if he wanted to make it in time.

  Driving north, he checked his rearview, hoping for a glimpse of her SUV, but he didn’t see it. A crescent moon dangled in the sky before him, just above the scaffolding for a new high-rise condo on U, and he found himself thinking of the crescent on her face. And of how much he hated his new job. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was immersing himself in something trivial and meaningless, and that he’d just let something important slip from his grasp.

  At the next red, he popped open his glove box and found a pen and an old oil-change receipt. He jotted down her license-plate number before he could forget it. Hoping.

  Z.

  I wake up thinking about my wife. Traffic rumbles outside my motel room, the window’s thin shade only beginning to lighten from the sunrise. I roll over and reach out with both arms, feeling coarse sheets and loneliness, and wait for the dream to pass.

  When I dream of her, sometimes it’s a memory and sometimes it’s just a fragment. There are times when I’m not sure if it’s an actual memory or something my subconscious is stitching out of itself, out of my desires and fears and the myriad colliding impulses of my self. I dreamed we were walking along the coast, wearing heavy jackets, her scarf blowing in the wind and tickling my nose. Did we ever walk on a beach in winter, or did I see that in a video? I try to remember. It seems hugely important to remember this. Was our daughter with us in the dream, or did I forget her? There is a sourness in my gut, made worse by that thought: Did I forget my daughter? I wake with this sourness every day. They say it fades, but it’s the only thing that hasn’t. Everything else—my memories, my sense of my family, my sense of myself and my role in the world—these things are on the verge of erasure.

  I get up and wash my face and wait out the daily, awful period in which the dreams or memories are replaced by the latest reality I’ve surrounded myself with. A for
saken motel room in a forsaken city. Okay, yeah, that’s familiar. I open my Personal Info Link and fill out an entry. I note every detail of my successful protection of the Event ending Mr. Chaudhry’s life. I leave out my afternoon spent sightseeing and the little black girl with the pink sweater, as well as my drinks at the bar and the vigil with Tasha.

  I have a headache, which isn’t like me. There’s a tender lump behind my ear where the hag got me with the rock, and my GeneScan isn’t even pretending to work anymore. I’ve never had any malfunction like this, and it worries me. It makes me wonder what else inside myself could be broken.

  It’s not yet nine o’clock when I walk out of the motel on a cool day, light rain falling like tiny miracles. They don’t realize how rare this will become, this moisture from the skies. A few umbrellas bob along the sidewalk, and a parade of cars waits at a traffic light, most of them heading into the city but a few trying to escape it, as if they know.

  My motel is crouched beside chaotic, shambling New York Avenue, in one of the city’s forgotten corners. Across the street, a swarm of yellow school buses are caged in a lot lined with barbed wire. Unlit neon signs stretch into the distance, advertising liquor, check-cashing services, and ethnically acrobatic restaurants specializing in both pizza and Chinese food. Few pedestrians venture here, as if they’ve been chased away by the desolation of the city’s northern pole; those who do walk the streets are clad in overlarge, brightly colored jackets. They stand at intersections, some of them on phones and others slapping hands and laughing.

  I wonder if anyone died in this motel during the night. If anyone overdosed; if anyone threatened to kill his or her lover or whore or dealer. It seems that kind of place. There are stories here, buried in grit, walled off from the rest of society. I hate the Department for making me stay in places like this, even if I see the logic.