The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  She made it only three blocks before she felt her emotions loosening again. She needed to hide, couldn’t risk one of her colleagues on lunch break seeing her crying in public. She was near the almost ridiculously fortified White House, at the messily trapezoidal intersection of Penn and 14th and E Streets, when she noticed a set of stairs ascending a gentle slope of landscaped grass, a hilly miniature island in the convergence of all that asphalt. Where had that come from? It seemed a miracle that it existed, that she’d never noticed it before. She walked up the steps, grateful for the hiding place that God seemed to have rearranged earth and stone to create just for her.

  The stairs crested the hill and then descended to a long stone walkway. Before her was a wall upon which maps of Germany and France were etched. The lines and arrows represented military fronts, the movements of armies. She stepped back and saw the sign declaring this the World War I Memorial. It was protected from the view of pedestrians and traffic by the slope of the hill and the trees planted around it. A small copper-stained fountain burbled, and strewn on some benches were the homeless men whose collective knowledge of safe places to crash constituted the only human awareness that this spot existed. Tasha thought of all the fanfare and press and Hollywood stars surrounding the dedication of the World War II Memorial, and of its prime location beneath the Washington Monument, and she was struck and saddened by the contrast with this place. A memorial that hardly anyone knew existed, not even a lifelong Washingtonian who had spent countless hours writing legal briefs only three blocks from here. She sank onto a bench that was not currently occupied by a derelict and she cried. She had often wondered what kind of memorial would be built for soldiers like her brother—a trivial and petty concern, but what Washingtonian wouldn’t at least wonder this, surrounded by the damn things?—and the sight of this place, its utter forgottenness, the way it existed outside memory, outside anyone’s real life, outside any curious tourist’s itinerary, broke her heart.

  Eventually she wiped at her eyes and tried to read the etchings in the stone, the facts about this war, the staggering number of dead. No bouquets were laid here. These men had all died, and what descendants were left had gone on to fight other wars and forget about this one.

  She walked away and reentered the world, running from all that history. Yet she carried it with her, like the photo of Marshall she kept in her wallet. Her memories of the Marine Corps marching band strutting down Eighth Street on the Fourth of July, of the grainy images she’d seen so many nights on CNN, of the fog and wail of Marshall’s memorial service. She carried these with her as she walked not back toward the office but south, past clusters of tourists snapping shots framed by the White House’s manicured lawn and its rooftop snipers. Soon she could hear the commotion; something was happening on the Mall.

  Something was always happening on the Mall. On weekdays, the grass looked sickly and dead from having been trampled by this march or that rally over the previous weekend. Tasha had stumbled on NRA rallies, gun-control rallies, Impeach the President rallies, Support the President rallies, rallies for peace, rallies for war. So much conflict, so much disagreement, so many ways to disrupt traffic. She’d once seen a Recognize Taiwan rally, a group of happy Asian youths waving unfamiliar green-white-and-red flags at the curious onlookers, the passersby smiling at them, and something about the demonstration’s complete irrelevance to her own life had made it both comical and wonderful. Yeah, go, Taiwan! That had been a few years ago, before everything seemed relevant to her life and nothing seemed comical or wonderful.

  She knew what today’s rally on the Mall was. She’d seen the articles in the paper warning residents which streets to avoid. She told herself she had not gone on this walk so as to stumble upon it like this, but maybe she had. Her subconscious was doing crazy shit lately. She was confused, not really making decisions for herself. The events of the world were what they were, and she followed.

  Followed them here, past Constitution, in front of the Museum of American History, to stare at this, history in the making. Or maybe a refutation of history, an insistence that we stop history, redirect it. The marchers were chanting and singing, waving signs, carrying banners that sagged over their heads. END THE WARS. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. BRING THEM HOME.

  She was against the war and said so when talking with her like-minded friends, but she’d kept silent about her opposition when talking to Marshall and her parents. She knew he had been excited, though nervous. He didn’t need to hear her criticism of U.S. foreign policy. She loved her brother, even though they had lived such different lives. She hadn’t tried to change his mind about anything. And she would wonder for the rest of her life how things might have turned out if she had.

  She was the big sister, for God’s sake. She was supposed to offer guidance. She was supposed to tell her little bro what she thought. But she’d been afraid to. She’d let him down, and he was gone.

  Who was she kidding? You couldn’t talk Marshall into or out of anything. All she would have done was piss him off. Maybe this was the toughest thing to admit: that she’d had no impact whatsoever on his fate. She was a tiny, insignificant footnote in another person’s story. Insignificance felt even worse than guilt.

  She didn’t trust the official and very abbreviated story the army had provided her family. Things didn’t add up, and she couldn’t get anyone from his unit to talk to her. Why had a regular e-mailer like Marshall (amazingly regular, considering the responsibilities he had) stopped sending his family messages a week before his KIA date? And why had his blog been taken down six days before his KIA date, as opposed to afterward? She’d heard that soldiers could get in trouble for posting certain things. After the army banned soldier blogs, he’d taken down his old blog, but then he’d launched a new, anonymous one—he’d mentioned the link to Tasha on one of their rare calls, but in an offhand manner, as if he knew people were listening. Had he gotten himself in trouble with the army or with someone else?

  Maybe she was just grasping for something to be angry at. Maybe she just needed an enemy. We all do, don’t we? she thought.

  She wished the firm didn’t demand all of her waking hours (and more). With what little free time she had—usually at two in the morning, when she couldn’t sleep—she had started the project of finding and compiling all of Marshall’s old e-mails and blog entries and journals, trying to shape them into some kind of memoir or book in his name. Which meant she needed more detail from the army about what had happened to him. She knew her parents didn’t fully believe the official story either, but they were hesitant to push. Well, she would push—that was a big sister’s job, even if she wasn’t really a big sister anymore. She vowed as she stood there watching the march that she’d find out what exactly had happened, even if she had to call every press office in the armed services, even if she had to track down every soldier in Marshall’s platoon.

  She needed to have an effect on something. She stood there as the ex-hippies and college kids marched past, some of them chanting as they tried to merge themselves into something greater. Over to her right a smaller group of Support the Troops boosters waved American flags, holding their own signs and mocking the “Commies,” telling them to go back to old Europe, decrying their misguided rage and weakness.

  She stepped forward and joined the flow of protest, let it carry her. She didn’t want to be alone for this anymore. She didn’t know if marching did anything at all, but she would try it.

  The day had started cloudy and was only getting grayer as it aged; the Capitol dome seemed to glow in contrast. Tasha marched with the crowd to the steps of the Capitol, read the pamphlets that were passed out, and ignored her cell phone as it buzzed and buzzed at her. She listened to the speakers, some of whom were inspiring and some of whom ranted about the environment and racial inequality and every other conceivable grievance of the Left, totally irrelevant to the war except within the tangent-happy interrelatedness of the orators’ minds. People were bringing whatever of themselves
they could into the cause. The cause was enormous, sprawling; it contained multitudes. It was as ugly and yearning and flawed as human nature, and at times she felt embarrassed to be a part of it. But at least she was a part of something. As her outraged cell phone continued to buzz as if it had its own violent opinion, she stood there, sublimating herself to this unnamed thing, this unified hope or harmonic rage, and tried to stop thinking about those GTK files.

  A few nights later she found herself at a meeting of antiwar activists. According to one of the pamphlets at the march, the activist group was hosting a meeting to “channel this weekend’s energy toward concrete and comprehensive goals.” Tasha was down with concrete goals. Part of her trouble since Marshall had died was the lack of goals, the lack of energy, the plain not knowing what to do with herself.

  The name of the group was Peace Now and Forever. That sounded rather utopian to Tasha, but maybe she was wrong to disparage those with lofty aspirations. So many people settled for the easy win these days, you had to tip your hat to those aiming higher, even if you knew they would miss.

  The meeting was held at a small, damp Sunday-school room at the Baptist Holiness Church in Shaw. Yellow Rorschach stains from water damage decorated the ceiling, and the windowless white walls were adorned with religious drawings from the local child artists: the sun rising on the empty cave Christ had fled, multiplied fishes and loaves heaped on picnic tables, Saint George decapitating a dragon with one mighty stroke.

  The different speakers told the audience about opportunities to volunteer for this letter-writing project or that PR campaign, to sit in on and possibly interfere with congressional hearings on the war, to screen documentaries at local apartments, to organize teach-ins and “spread the truth about the administration’s global goals.” Then a couple of “visiting economics professors” (likely unemployed) gave a long, meandering lecture about “world capitalism’s master plan for the subjugated people of the Middle East.” Tasha tried not to fall asleep as she sat there listening to old white men discuss how the free marketeers had deliberately seeded chaos in Baghdad, just like they did in New Orleans after Katrina and in South Asia after the tsunami; even supposedly random events like meteorological disasters were ascribed to a nefarious cabal’s master plan. If the making of legislation and sausage were two things you just did not want to witness, Tasha thought, the same seemed to be true of world peace. This was some seriously tedious shit.

  After the fortunately not endless (it only seemed that way) lecture, the two profs sat down. Then, to Tasha’s surprise, she found herself looking at one of her college boyfriends.

  The new speaker was T.J., a veritable supernova from her freshman winter and spring. They’d lasted nearly a semester, hooking up during a snowstorm in February and breaking up on a lily-speckled quad in May. He’d transferred that summer, and she’d never heard from him again. Now here he was, taking the stage like he owned it, telling the audience about his own related group. They were conducting an anti-recruitment project, in which activists would visit high schools and “hit kids with the truth about being a soldier,” the things that military recruiters would never tell them. For every recruiter who tempted teens with stories of honor and dignity and getting a good education, T.J. explained, an activist needed to tell America’s impressionable youth about the prevalence of PTSD among returning soldiers, about the squalid conditions at VA hospitals and the army’s lack of interest in its wounded veterans, about the human cost of militarized murder. And of course they had to tell kids about “the real reasons for the wars,” which, he said in such an offhand way as to defy even polite disagreement, were gravely immoral indeed. Tasha tried to imagine what Marshall would have thought about an appeal like this.

  T.J. made eye contact with her in the middle of his appeal, and a brief smile graced his lips. How long had it been, nine years? She had to admit: He looked good. Boy had great bones, a Hollywood face, plenty of planes for a cinematographer to light up from different angles. His hair was natty, the harbinger of dreadlocks, the tips slightly bleached, as if he’d changed his mind halfway through the process. He had dark skin and green eyes that shone with a certain playfulness, even when he was talking about “the atrocities committed by our military.”

  She hadn’t thought of him in years, but now that she saw him, she realized it wasn’t surprising to find him in a place like this. He’d been a constant irritant to their college during his one year there, leading protests at the administration building over the school’s paltry financial aid packages, its anti-union policies toward the janitorial staff, and its bloody-fingered investments in crooked multinational corporations.

  Her confusion and nervousness about what she was doing here built. Were these people good and well-meaning, sacrificing their time like this, willing to make themselves look like fools? Or were they fools, just plain crazy and angry, looking for any excuse to pick a fight with a world they didn’t understand? Seeing T.J. made it all the harder to sit there through the whole rigmarole, the reports and the minutes, the grudging way the organizers allowed anyone with a raised hand to speak his or her piece, even if it meant listening to some old lady go on and on and on with no discernible point.

  Finally, when the meeting ended and a few people coalesced into “planning groups” for the different events they were orchestrating, Tasha walked up to T.J. and said hi. She was hesitant, but he smiled at her as if the last decade had never been, wrapped her in a hug, and called out, “My girl! What’s up?” He immediately asked if she was free for a drink, like, now.

  “So,” he asked as they sat at the bar of Busboys and Poets, off U, “is that you who writes the Ask Tasha part of the Word on the Street? I’ve read those wondering if it could be the same Tasha I knew back in the day.”

  A few years ago she’d started writing a very intermittent column for one of D.C.’s arts weeklies. It was political comedy of sorts, modeled on advice columns, and Tasha crafted both the Qs and the As. “Dear Tasha, I just discovered that my husband voted the opposite ticket as I did. Would it be wrong of me to withhold sex for the next four years?” “Dear Tasha, I’m convinced that the cable guy at my house today was actually a CIA spy planting bugs. Should I cancel my anarchist book club this week?” “Dear Tasha, I’m a Dem but the Republican across the street from me is smokin’ hot. Can you recommend any GOP pickup lines, or would it be more politically pure for me to masturbate while watching her out the window?” It had started during the slow months of her final year at GW Law, an occasional thing she’d done for an old friend who edited the paper, and it had grown into a needed escape from her humor-impaired job. She hadn’t written a column in a few months, though.

  “Maybe not the exact same Tasha,” she said, “but pretty much. The same DNA, at least.”

  “I’m happy to see it,” he said, and she noticed him giving her a quick once-over, really a twice-over because she’d caught him doing it once already. “I loved the one about the staffer with the unnatural crush on the sidewalk Politico dispenser.”

  “Thanks.” She’d wanted to be a writer but had gone to law school instead. Her parents, a high-school history teacher and a manager at the water company, had worked too hard for their daughter to waste their money, or her own fat loans, on an English degree. All through law school she had consoled herself that once she was finished, she could write stories in her free time. But then she’d started at the firm and realized that there was no free time; it all had to be billed.

  She and T.J. caught up on the last nine years. He’d taken some time off from college after leaving Oberlin, then enrolled at Reed for a year, or maybe it was two, he couldn’t remember anymore—he’d been a bit too into drugs at that point. After detoxing, he’d built houses in various ghettos for Habitat. Next came Peace Corps in Moldova, for only a few months, as local Mafia strongmen extorted protection money from the office and made uncomfortable propositions to the female workers, prompting the organization at home to evacuate the volunteers e
arly. His adventures since then he rendered in careful snapshots: helping a buddy film a documentary on Chiapas (had she seen it?) while crossing the line between video journalist and guerrilla activist; a year in LA spent working in vain against one of those California propositions that basically made it illegal to be Latino; a few months with a traveling impromptu-art group that projected poetry onto skyscrapers and government buildings; rock-throwing protests at WTO meetings in Seattle, D.C., and New York. Currently, he explained with mock humbleness, he was a mild-​mannered bike messenger zipping at supersonic speed between foreign embassies, Hill offices, and the evil headquarters of the World Bank and IMF by day and a superhero activist saving the world one good deed at a time by night.

  His black T-shirt proclaimed, in alternating red, white, and blue letters, NOT A SHAREHOLDER, and his shoulder bag was armored with political buttons (STOP TORTURE; LOGO-FREE ZONE; END THE CORPORATIST STATE; I’M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR). On the right side of T.J.’s neck was the tattoo of what was perhaps an Asian character, or maybe an Egyptian glyph. It hadn’t been there in the days when she’d traced her tongue on that skin.

  She put the tab on her credit card, violating chivalry partly out of goodwill and partly because his income bracket seemed several rungs below hers. She wasn’t sure if this should make her feel beneficent or guilty for being condescending.

  “Few years ago,” he said, gesturing to the plastic that the bartender had taken from her hand, possibly needing this story as a distraction from any male shame at letting her pay, “I remember reading that the CEO of some credit card company said their goal was to eliminate cash. Completely eliminate it—everyone would use plastic, for even the tiniest purchases. All the while paying those invisible fees and the interest. When I told people about it, they all laughed, Yeah, right, it’ll never happen. And now, maybe five years later, tell me, how much cash you got in that stylish purse?”