The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “I’m not planning anything”—he seemed to search for the word—“wrong by you. I’m trying to help.”

  It was almost her turn at the register. “I’m not even supposed to use their phone. If they had overheard me calling you…”

  “You’ll have to make sure they don’t overhear you—call at night, when they’re asleep. And don’t use their phone. I put a cell phone in your shopping cart; it has my number programmed into it. It’s turned off now. Just turn it on when you need to make the call, then turn it off immediately. That’s important. Hide it someplace they won’t find it.”

  She glanced at the cart and saw it there, nestled among packages of noodles. Its charging cord was wrapped neatly beside it. When had he put them there?

  “I know this is difficult to understand,” he said. “But it’s the best way to get you out of this.”

  He stood there an extra moment, perhaps waiting for her to say the thank you that she was too shocked to say. Or perhaps he was equally unsure how they should part.“Okay,” he said. “Call me. Good night.” Then he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

  His lips were warm and dry. She was so startled she didn’t move, and she felt the color rushing to her face. As if ashamed of his own act, he didn’t look at her as he pulled back, just turned and walked past the other customers. The automatic doors pulled open and he was gone. Her eyes tried to follow him through the windows, but she could see only her own reflection and the dazzling colors of the store behind her.

  Z.

  Again night finds me a few blocks from the White House, surrounded by bland office buildings, their windows glowing yellow. Perhaps the local restaurants do big business on power lunches between lobbyists and their quarries, but the sidewalks are nearly empty as I take a preliminary recon walk.

  It’s only a few hours after my protection of the most recent Event. I’m still not sure what to make of the hag’s warning that they had learned from their mistakes. I try to stay alert for tails, something I’ve lost the habit of doing in my time with the Department since I’m always the one following them.

  Was that a hallucination I had, that man claiming to know who I was, even calling me Troy? Did something else go berserk when my GeneScan broke the other night? My head is pounding as I walk, a headache like the one I woke up with the day before yesterday.

  The last thing I should be doing is going out on a date. But despite the Department’s strict rules, I’m not the only Protector who’s done this. The temptation is too great, after being trapped in these gigs long enough. You crave a human touch, something other than the violence of subduing your prey. So you find someone, someone your files assure you is not of historical importance—preferably someone who is going to die soon anyway. It’s like setting up a perfect and untraceable crime, but really it’s the opposite—it’s a rare opportunity for a person in the Disasters Division to bring someone pleasure instead of pain.

  The next Event I need to protect isn’t until tomorrow afternoon, so I have time.

  The restaurant Tasha chose is Middle Eastern in theme; the smell of hummus in the air, faint zithers on the sound track. I wonder if Tasha chose the place because it serves a cuisine native to the area where her brother died in battle but figure I shouldn’t ask.

  Tasha sits with the menu and a faint squint that tells me she needs reading glasses but doesn’t want to use them tonight. She wears a bright red blouse, and her braids fall loose around her. If I’ve been doubting whether this is a good thing to be doing, those doubts vanish when she looks up and smiles. True, I already burned a similar image the other night, but the images we carry with us can do only so much. We need the real thing.

  We chat about the weather, and she asks me how my work in the city is going. I come up with something, trying to make it boring enough to keep her from asking follow-up questions but not too boring. Which isn’t easy.

  After the waiter brings us some wine, I ask Tasha what kind of law she practices.

  “Contracts law.” She sees my blank look and adds, “Corporate law.”

  “What does that mean, one corporation suing another?”

  “Basically. Or a corporation suing little people to crush them into even smaller pieces.”

  “I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.” Out of habit I look out the window to see if anyone is watching us. The street is clogged with traffic, the sidewalk a track meet of commuters running different routes. Yet the restaurant remains nearly empty—it’s as if people know nothing of importance is happening here, best for them to move along.

  “Usually it’s the little people trying to sue the corporation, and my job is to contest and stonewall for so long they can’t afford to keep going. Meanwhile lining the firm’s pockets with billable hours.”

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

  “I’m enthusiastic about paying off my debts. I’m gaining experience, you know, the whole corporate-slave thing. Just a few more years.”

  I’ve brought up a sore subject.

  “I do have misgivings,” she goes on after a pause. “Especially lately. I mean, my parents were very active politically. For a while, at least. I remember them taking me to the Mall for rallies against the contra war, or against slashing funding for city schools, or against the Gulf War, or in favor of AIDS funding, you name it. Me and the Mall go way back. But as I got older, I don’t know, I guess I felt like protesting was their thing and I needed my own. I focused more on my studies, you know? I read the paper, I stayed informed, but I didn’t want to be that… that stereotype, the angry leftist on the sidewalk. I told myself I was still being a good citizen, I was working hard, paying taxes, voting. But now…” Her voice trails off, the privileged early-21st-century American painfully unsure of the meaning of life.

  “It’s hard to know how engaged to be,” I say.

  “Yeah. And it’s hard to have an airtight political opinion when mainly you’re just worried about your brother’s safety.”

  I assure her that I know exactly what she means.

  Prior to coming here tonight, I searched the databases for a soldier named Jones who’d died recently so I could at least use a real name as my fake dead brother, just in case Tasha checked up on me. Fortunately (for me, not for him) there was indeed a soldier named Randy Jones who died in combat a few months ago. I won’t tell Tasha that this particular Jones was white and grew up in South Dakota.

  Letting her opinions guide me, I add, “On the one hand, I hate war. At the same time, I’m not naive enough to doubt that there are enemies out there who’d like nothing more than to wipe us out. Destroy our way of life, erase all of modernity and bring us back to some ancient past, or at least the particular view of an ancient past that they see when reading one old book. We need someone to stop them. My brother wanted to be one of those people.”

  “So did mine.”

  “So sometimes I think I shouldn’t feel bad for him. He got what he wanted. He died a hero. But nothing’s that simple.”

  “How are your parents?” she asks.

  “They passed away before this all started.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “How are yours?”

  She sighs. “They wouldn’t talk about it much when Marshall was alive, but I think they were against the wars. They’d just say they wanted their boy safe. They don’t want to get into second-guessing the army, doubting the president—which is weird to me. They were members of SCLC in the sixties, and even though my dad owned a store here on U, they still managed to travel down to Montgomery for the protests there. Then their store burned down during the riots.”

  I nod, unsure whether I’m supposed to offer condolences.

  “Everyone was having so much fun burning places down that eventually people stopped looking for those Black Owned signs and burned whatever they could, you know?” Tasha says. “The irony of my dad’s place getting torched by the people he was spending all his time fighting for…” She shakes her head. “
He’s still bitter about it. I wasn’t even born yet, but I can tell.” She stares off for a moment. “Sorry, I’m going on and on. Are you from Philly originally?”

  “We moved around a lot—I was an army brat.” The Department provided me with some facts about Troy Jones’s life, but not many; I have to make the rest up. “My father was raised in a bad part of Philly, but then he was drafted for Vietnam, I guess before the riots. Maybe in ’65? He liked to say it was safer over there than back home. He did two tours, lived to tell about it. Also met a lovely young Vietnamese woman with pro-American sympathies, brought her home, and made some babies.”

  “I was wondering if you had some army in you.”

  “Some. My brother followed in his footsteps, but I was the family nerd.”

  She seems skeptical. “You don’t look like much of a nerd.”

  “You should have seen my brother. Anyway, my dad stayed in the service after the war, so we lived in lots of towns in lots of states, mostly in the South.”

  “How’d your mom like living in the South?”

  I try to imagine that, try to imagine a time and a place even more rife with racial animosities than this one. “I’m sure there were hard things about it, but she wasn’t a complainer. We were a tight family. We stuck together.” I wonder if something like this could be true. The cover was just something I read and memorized; I’ve never given it much critical thought. But what must it have been like for such children in a time that so derided half-breeds? Would the parents have been strong enough to endure it all? No, probably not. My story is too rosy. Maybe the father would have begun to feel ostracized by his fellow blacks for marrying a bride from a former enemy nation; maybe he would have started to drink; maybe he and his wife would have fought, and eventually divorced. Maybe Troy Jones had a rough time of it indeed. No sense burdening my date with this sad history, though, so I tell her, “My dad retired from the service and bought into a car dealership outside Philly when I was in junior high.”

  “How did he feel about the wars?”

  “He passed away before they started.” Cirrhosis of the liver, or a car accident? Possibly suicide. “But I’m willing to bet he would have been against them. He had mixed feelings about Vietnam. The army was good for him; it gave him a role to play that he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. But he discouraged me the few times I mentioned enlisting. It was more important to him that I be the first in the family to go to college. Once I did that, it sort of freed up Randy to enlist. My mother didn’t like that, though. She’d lost a lot of her family during the war; some of them to U.S. forces, some to the Vietcong. At a certain point, the reasons a war started aren’t important anymore, who did what to whom however many years ago. The faces behind the guns don’t really matter. It’s just a bunch of guns. All you want to do is get away.”

  “You ever go there?”

  I’m confused; I let myself roam too many places. “Where?”

  “Vietnam.”

  Funny how a dinner date can lead to a more detailed grilling than some professional encounters. I wait a moment, think. “Once, when we were kids. I don’t remember much of it. I spoke very little of the language, and it was so long ago. And they weren’t real thrilled about the mixed-breed kids over there either. My mom never went back after that one time. I think people might have said things about us—the kids—that she didn’t like. I didn’t hear anything myself, but I put two and two together. Also, she didn’t have much family there anymore. So many people died then. I think that the whole country—the landscape, the language, the heat—only reminded her of what she’d lost.”

  Too much of the conversation has been focused on my constructed past. I don’t know how much longer I can sit here inventing myself before such a perceptive audience.

  Then a new voice asks, “Troy?”

  I look up and there’s a white woman standing at our table. She wears a sleek gray business suit and holds a briefcase in her finely manicured hand. Her long blond hair is pulled into a ponytail and she’s smiling at me.

  “Troy! How are you? It’s been forever!”

  “Hi,” I say, pausing for a second and then trying to return her smile. Another one? Who are these people who seem to know me? I burn her image, start scanning it against my databases. “Um, yeah, it has. How’s it going?”

  “Oh, good, busy, the usual. How’s life up in the suburbs?”

  “It’s good,” I say, trying not to speak too slowly, trying not to show how confused I am. The blonde is still smiling, but her eyes are steel. I feel taunted.

  “Your daughter must love having all that space,” the woman says. I don’t turn up any matches of her face.

  “She does, she does. We’ll, um, we’ll have to get her into the city soon so she can see all the old sights.”

  “That’d be great.” The blonde pauses for a moment. “Speaking of which, I’m late for picking up Clara—I should run. So nice to see you!” She walks away, and I look at Tasha and try to put on a neutral expression. But over Tasha’s head I can see the blonde moving toward the door and continuing to stare at me all the while. Her smile is gone, but the steel in her eyes is still there.

  “You okay?” Tasha asks.

  “Yeah, it’s just…” I make myself smile. “I really have no idea who that was.” And suddenly I’m laughing. I need another drink.

  “Sounds like it was the mom of some kid that played with your daughter?”

  “Yeah, I guess it was.”

  I look outside again, hoping for obvious signs of surveillance. The man at Capitol Hill, who also called me Troy, seemed to be warning me that I was being watched, that I was only leading the hags to their targets. But how? Are they following me in hopes of finding a safe moment to eliminate me? How are they following me? Maybe one of them has a GeneScan. Then why don’t they just show up at my motel in the middle of the night and kill me?

  Tasha looks at my hands, then at me. Her expression has changed.

  “I guess I missed the part about you having a wife and daughter.” She sounds like she’s barely holding in a sudden anger.

  “I don’t have a wife and daughter,” I say.

  “Just a daughter, then?”

  “I did have a daughter. She was five.”

  I exhale those words and she breathes them in, where they thicken; they’re like smoke in her lungs. She seems to have trouble breathing for a moment; she’s unsure how to respond, trying to control her reaction. It’s a relief that I’m not the one feeling that for a change.

  I make myself continue. “And I did have a wife. They were in a… a car accident.”

  The Department, either out of some unexpected spite or because they thought it would be easier for me, found me a cover who had a tragedy similar to mine. The real Troy Jones also lost his family. Like a page torn out of a memoir and stuffed into a novel.

  “Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  She shifts in her seat, folds and unfolds her hands, her body moving every which way in search of the appropriate response. She starts to reach for one of my hands, but stops halfway.

  “I’m so sorry, Troy. I hope I didn’t sound… I was just confused.”

  “It’s all right. I wanted to tell you.” I finish my glass of wine, willing this to be a normal conversation again. But I don’t know what normal is, in this time or any other.

  “You, um, you lived around here with them?”

  “Not far.” I feel like I’m looking at pieces inside myself, trying to decide which ones to lift up and show her, which are worth the effort and which are still too heavy. “There’s a lot you want to forget, you know? A lot you never, ever want to forget, but plenty you’d like to just let go of. And then it happens and you realize you have forgotten, you really have. And you hate yourself for it.”

  She nods as if she can understand.

  Things get hazy here; I’m too distracted by the strange blond woman and my memories of Cemby and our daughte
r. Tasha and I talk, but it’s like I’m not really here. A waiter has brought food and refilled my glass and I’m drinking deeply. I try to tune back in, remind myself of the Department’s ridiculous credo to live in the present. Tasha’s talking about her brother.

  “My parents flipped when he enlisted. I mean, my folks worked hard so we could go to college. But Marshall, I don’t know, he had to be the rebel. The more they told him that the army was just a place for poor folks to get sent because the system didn’t give them any other options, the more appealing it was for him. He bought into all that honor and valor stuff, you know? He was seduced by that image of the hero, the good soldier. He did two tours and made it through unscathed, physically and mentally. But not the third.”

  “How did it happen?” I could look it up in my files, but I’d rather hear it from her.

  “I’m still trying to figure that out. They told us he was ambushed by insurgents, whatever that word actually means, and that he and two of his soldiers were shot and killed. But I’ve been getting conflicting information, which only makes me more suspicious. I have a bad feeling that the deeper I dig, the uglier the truth will be, you know? It’ll turn out there were no insurgents in the area, and it was friendly fire or some colossal fuck-up.”

  Then she asks, “What happened to your brother?”

  “IED, under his Humvee. A supply run on a very bad road.”

  “Did you… investigate at all, ask around?”

  “No.”

  She looks like she doesn’t believe me. Maybe I’ve made a crucial mistake. I’m too good at concealing pain.

  But her face changes, slowly, as if she’s beginning to understand how two people can respond to the same tragedy in different ways.

  “Maybe I’m too skeptical for my own good,” she says. “I just have a hard time trusting that the government is telling the truth when it’s already told so many lies. I mean, some PR guy in the U.S. Army press office told me how Marshall died, but I can’t just believe him. I have to find the real story.”