The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  I keep careful watch for strange loiterers or suspicious movement. She notices my preoccupation, her gaze following mine a few times. I try to act like I’m just admiring the sights, but I can tell she’s wondering.

  Camera flashes strobe the marble as we climb the steps. Tourists stare in awe at the speeches etched on the walls, puzzling out meaning.

  “I just wanted to say”—and we wander closer to those two enormous white loafers, resting grandly yet casually behind the red velvet security rope—“that I think you’re right. That I’ve been pushing my anger onto other people. My suspicions. I’ve always had that tendency, and this only made it worse.”

  “It’s natural to feel that way. We need people to blame.”

  “That’s the thing. When I talked to this soldier, this kid who’s never going to walk again and who loved Marshall like they were brothers, I could see all I was doing was blaming him. Blaming anyone who had anything to do with the war. I wanted answers, and I figured everyone must be hiding one. And I ruined this poor guy’s day.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t work out that way.”

  She looks at me for a moment. “You are the calmest person I’ve ever met.”

  “I’ve just… seen things that most people don’t have to see.”

  Avoiding the questions in her eyes, I turn to read the inscriptions, the great man’s speech made in the middle of a war that must have seemed like the very end of civilization to people alive then.

  “I wanted to say thank you, for the things you said.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She asks me if my parents ever dragged me to Gettysburg or Harpers Ferry and I say no, quickly running searches on my databases so I can follow the conversation. She says I was lucky, and she tells me stories of awful family vacations, her father lecturing them on the importance of history, their heritage as African Americans. The long walks with weird tour guides across sacred battlefields where countless lives were lost in a war against slavery, when all she and her brother wanted to do was go home and watch television.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had so many serious conversations with a guy,” she says as she reads one of the speeches beside me.

  “Should we be talking about hip-hop and movies?”

  “That was a compliment. Usually guys try to act all funny and sly. You don’t do that.”

  Nearby a tour has ended and people are applauding.

  “Maybe I’m so sly you don’t even notice.”

  We take a cab back to her apartment after a long lunch at a Spanish restaurant, a meal involving small plates, plentiful garlic, and strong drinks with apple chunks floating in them. She calls her boss at one point and says she’s ill and won’t return for the day. And I’ve all but done the same thing; I’ve dropped all pretense of why I’m with her. This isn’t about upholding the order of history or the sanctity of a Perfect Society. I just want this one moment to be perfect.

  A few times I worry that I’ve given myself away—No, I don’t know that TV show; Sorry, I haven’t heard that album. I fear she thinks I’m a freak, some cultural outsider. But the way she looks at me is something I haven’t seen in so long.

  It’s still light out and she’s barely opened the door of her row house—I almost forget to check for solo men sitting in parked cars—when she turns to kiss me. We stand in her tiny vestibule like that for a while, my first kiss in I don’t know how long. I can’t remember the last one, though I know it happened. No file or image of it, but I can still feel it, and when her tongue glances off my teeth I remember more, and I hope Tasha wouldn’t hate knowing that I’m not thinking of her just now, or maybe I am, but of Cemby too, two people rolled into one. I hope she can forgive me that.

  Inside, while she’s pouring us glasses of wine, I stand in her living room and gaze at the book spines—so many books!—and the images on her shelves. In some of the images I see the young man who must be her brother (the eyes and the cheekbones are so similar); one is an official image of him standing in uniform before their flag.

  She walks into the room, hands me a glass. Smiling as if at a joke.

  “What?” I ask, afraid I’ve done something un-contemp again.

  “No, it’s just, I was thinking. How weird it is that we met. How unpredictable. I mean, of all places.”

  “I always pick up women at political rallies. It’s a good way to meet the committed type. Or the crazy ones.”

  “Seriously, though. Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds.”

  I feel a swelling in my chest, and I honestly don’t know if it’s pity for or jealousy of her belief that God or her dead brother can reach out and affect her life like that.

  I take her head in my hands and hold her closer, wondering which of us is lost and which is guiding the other someplace new.

  22.

  Leo found it surprisingly entertaining to concoct imaginary smoking guns for Tasha. He wrote up false memos about Consolidated Forces, typed fanciful e-mails sent from one fictional character to the next, and used his scanner and small copier to create documents that seemed aged. It felt weirdly like being in grad school again, crafting a paper for some obscure journal, the two key differences being that this time he didn’t have to feel bad about making parts of it up, and he was working on something that would actually have an impact on the world.

  Tasha had impressed him already by dangling the fake scandal story to T.J., who predictably asked her to bring more information the next time she met with him. Leo had expected more pushback from her, but apparently she was bright and pragmatic enough to see that she had no choice but to obey. The only potential problem was that she’d asked him at their last meeting if he’d found out anything about her brother. He’d forgotten all about his vague promise to look into it (because how the hell would he have any way of finding out how an overseas soldier died?). She seemed to think he had access to all levels of intelligence, a ridiculous assumption that at least allowed him to feel more important than he was. There was no harm in stringing her along, and he’d recovered in time to tell her that his nameless contacts in army intelligence were still looking into it and that such bureaucratic file-sharing took time.

  Meanwhile he worked on more nefarious file-sharing. He’d researched Consolidated Forces and was employing enough real names to provide his fake docs with an aura of truth, just in case T.J. or his fellows in guerrilla journalism tried to verify any of this. Which he knew they wouldn’t. They would eagerly take the information, which confirmed all their worst assumptions about the U.S. government, and post it on Knoweverything immediately.

  Once that happened, Leo’s client would have proof that T.J. was involved, and Leo could start identifying the rest of the network. The false story would discredit the site in the eyes of the mainstream media and most of the country. Their most extreme adherents would no doubt sense a plot against them, a new, grander conspiracy, but that would be their little shared delusion while the rest of the world moved on.

  The previous night, he’d retrieved another flash drive from Sari and had sent it on to Bale. He had been more cautious than before, approaching the house from a different direction and much later, at two in the morning. Again, there had been no sign that anyone in the neighboring houses was even awake. The mysterious stranger did not make a repeat appearance.

  Leo couldn’t wait for the Knoweverything operation to be complete. He was tired of following people who only knew how to complain and tear down. The truth was, you could find fault in anything if you tried hard enough. That was the modern condition, especially in his generation. What is irony other than pointing out the flaws in something while wearing a superior smirk on your face? The unstated always being I’m better than this thing I’m making fun of, whatever the thing was. A new movie, a pop singer, the president, patriotism, the American Dream, faith in God or country or things larger than oneself. Larger than one’s ability to make snide comments. Why were people willing to sett
le for the easy laugh? He’d had people tell him he had no sense of humor—usually this came from disappointed, soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends. But the truth was that he saw past humor, at least the modern, ice-pick-thin version of it. Everyone else wanted to show off how smart they were.

  Because here was what none of them wanted to admit, Leo thought, the thing they were simply too blind or angry or spoiled to realize: this life was the best it could possibly be. There were flaws, yes, and the world might not work for everyone all of the time, and innocent people occasionally suffered due to the callousness of fate or their fellow citizens, but what were the alternatives? What utopia were people like T.J. dreaming of when they railed against the minor problems of capitalism and democracy? Had they taken a look at the world around them? Didn’t they realize how much better this was than any other country, any other system, any other way of life? Had they failed to notice that every time some mad dreamer took the reins of a country by revolution and promised his people a paradise on earth, he delivered the opposite? T.J. and his pals reminded Leo of the academics he’d grown so tired of; they’d been too busy lining up for Abuses of the American Empire 101 to bother learning about Stalin’s gulags. They’d been too busy mocking Oliver North and Reagan to read about the Sandinista death camps. They’d been too taken with the romance of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen’s heroic post office bombings to take heed of the warnings in Pol Pot’s exterminations or Mao’s purges. They had so much fun pointing out all that was wrong with the closest thing to perfection that any of them would ever see in their angst-ridden lives.

  Didn’t people like them realize that if they lived in almost any other country, they would have already been arrested, tortured, and discarded? No, they would doubtless take Leo’s very involvement in their lives as evidence that the system was corrupt.

  Leo read through his false documents one more time, then turned off his computer. He needed to sweat this insanity out of his system, so he threw on his running clothes and sprinted from his apartment.

  He was jogging along Rock Creek Park, nestled in late-afternoon shadows, when an SUV pulled over beside him. The hazards were on, and two men stepped out of the backseat and into the bike path, their palms held out. One was white and bald, the other Asian with graying hair at his temples. They wore dark suits and sunglasses and were straight out of central casting.

  He slowed to a trot and pulled the buds out of his ears. Garage rock dangled from his fingers.

  “Leo!” one of them shouted over the traffic. Cars honked, outraged that the SUV was blocking a lane, and during rush hour no less. “We need to talk. C’mon.”

  “What about?” He’d been running for twenty minutes and it was all he could do not to lean over and put his sweaty hands on the knees of his running pants. He didn’t want to look weak in front of whoever this was.

  “Those fingerprints you lifted.”

  He nodded. He figured his asking Who are you? would only lead to evasive answers, so he didn’t bother with questions as he followed them into the back of the SUV. They had him sit in the middle. Ah, the memories. Backseat briefings in Indonesia or Thailand or Hong Kong, sometimes by people he knew and sometimes by total strangers he never saw again but who knew the code words. You learned to pay attention to what was being said as well as where you were going, since you never knew where you’d be dropped off and you weren’t always left in a city you’d been to before. It made him nostalgic, again, for what he’d lost.

  The two at his sides looked to be in their early forties, tall and athletic. Even though they kept their shades on, Leo was confident he’d never seen them before.

  “We’d like to know how you came upon those fingerprints,” said a man riding shotgun, who faced forward. He had silvery-gray hair, and Leo could only occasionally catch bits of the man’s face in the mirror, a pale cheek here and a bushy gray eyebrow there.

  “You work with Bale?” Leo asked.

  “We move in similar circles.”

  Leo had passed the mystery man’s prints on to Bale, telling his boss that they belonged to a man who’d been at a couple of the peacenik meetings lately, a possible agent provocateur sent by another entity. Later that day, Bale reported that the prints hadn’t turned up any matches. Had he been lying? Had he passed the prints on to these men, or had his search unknowingly tripped some silent alarm?

  “Listen, Leo,” the man in shotgun continued. “Sometimes people who have been on the inside but no longer are, they tend to feel they’re still protected. They think they’re comfortably nestled under the government’s blanket. But it’s a cold world, and you’re alone, and there are werewolves everywhere.”

  “I was always more afraid of vampires.” He was still catching his breath, panting loudly and drenched in sweat while the others sat motionless and silent in their suits. But he would not act intimidated. He’d had plenty of time to steep in the shame of his speedy disclosure to the mystery man, and he was determined to handle himself more professionally.

  “Where did you meet the man you lifted those prints from? Your little story about him attending some antiwar powwow doesn’t add up.”

  So, these men said they weren’t with Bale, but clearly they’d spoken to him—or spoken to someone who’d spoken to him or had listened in somehow. Too many possibilities.

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “Allow me to explain things to you more clearly. You’re a civilian who erroneously believes that he has the power and might of the U.S. government at his back. You have nothing at your back. That little breeze you feel there? That’s the wind from the cliff you’re standing at the edge of. Any trouble comes your way, you think someone like Bale will vouch for you? And you think anything in that little head of yours will be considered valuable enough for you to barter your way out of trouble? No and no. I hate conversations like this, because I’m talking to a destitute man who thinks he’s independently wealthy. You green-tags are all the same.”

  “What trouble would come my way?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  Rock Creek Parkway curved and bent vertiginously, and Leo’s shoulders rocked against the two other men’s.

  “I met this individual while I was performing research as part of an operation for my employer.”

  That won him laughter.

  “Leo,” the man to his left said. “We’re not asking you anything difficult. And your man Bale won’t care what you tell us, since he’ll never know anyway. So stop worrying about the integrity of your precious operation and tell us about your conversation with the guy. What he told you, what if anything he asked you, how he acted.”

  “I already told my boss.”

  They crossed the river and headed north on the GW Parkway. This was the way to Langley, but he still wasn’t sure if that’s where they were going.

  “Tell us what you left out,” the back of the gray head in shotgun said. “Such as where it really was.”

  “We know you hate the work you’re doing,” said the man on his left, who was actively campaigning for the role of Good Cop, if only these guys had been cops. “I would too. It’s beneath you. So you’re trying to make a little rain, prove your resourcefulness. Hoping to impress someone important, someone with connections.”

  “And the good news”—the guy riding shotgun took the baton—“is that you are now in a car with precisely such individuals. The meter is running, Leo. If you want to impress us, start impressing us. Maybe you’ll never have to tail a hippie again.”

  Leo thought for a moment.

  “I was told those prints produced no matches.”

  “Which is mostly true,” Shotgun said. “They did not match up with any identified person, any name, date of birth, et cetera. But they do match the prints of an as-yet-unidentified individual who’s been causing us some trouble.”

  Maybe sharing a little would yield a little. “I’ve been surveilling the residence of a South Korean diplomat. It’s in its early stages. There isn’
t much to tell.”

  The SUV climbed the hill, and Leo caught glimpses of the Potomac below.

  “And you approached this gentleman, or he approached you?”

  “He’d seen me observing the man’s house. He approached my car and implied that I was disrupting another operation.” He left out the gun, the threats, the weird existential questioning. And he didn’t mention Sari. No one seemed to be taking notes, so there must have been a recorder somewhere.

  “So he was watching you while you were watching the diplomat,” Shotgun recapped. He’d said it like he already knew which diplomat Leo was talking about.

  “Maybe. He was acting pretty randomly. I know people on long stakeouts can get a little unhinged, but it seemed more than that. And I don’t necessarily think that what I was doing had anything to do with—”

  “You’re probably right,” Shotgun said, too quickly.

  “So who was the guy?” Leo asked.

  “Someone we’re trying very hard to find,” Shotgun said.

  “He works for…?”

  “That’s not yours to know, I’m afraid.”

  “Look, I’ve given you—”

  “Stop thinking like a case officer, because you aren’t one. Remember? This is not a meeting of equal minds. You, a green-tag, do not have clearance to know anything. You’re fortunate you aren’t having this conversation with a black bag over your head.”

  Leo seethed. But they were right.

  The car exited at one of the scenic overlooks. A station wagon with Minnesota plates had been idling there, but it pulled away when the SUV entered, as if sensing danger. Leo and his interrogators were alone with the view and the circling hawks and the falls far below.

  “So,” Shotgun continued, “you, Mr. Hastings, are a former government operative playing amateur spy games with a South Korean diplomat. Last I checked, that country was a staunch ally of the United States. I’m sure any number of people would be happy to lock up a loose cannon who’s trying to jeopardize our sound diplomatic relations with the people of South Korea.”