To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  3. But blood does not cry out. As has been noted, when Charles de Gaulle wanted to withdraw from Algeria and concede independence to that land, one of his advisers protested: “But so much blood has been shed.” De Gaulle replied: “Nothing dries quicker than blood.” We do not have to be slaves to the past. The dead do not hold us to any pact or obligation. The dead forget.

  Maggie skipped ahead.

  16. Others have understood this truth before us.

  17. In 1598, Henri IV issued the Edict of Nantes, as he sought finally to end the wars of religion that had brought such pain to France. He understood the scale of the task: wars are easy to start but hard to stop. For sometimes events have a momentum of their own. So his edict sought to do something wonderful. It sought to make memory illegal. Henri forbade all his subjects, whether Catholic or Protestant, from remembering. “The memory of all things that took place on one side or the other from March 1585 [onward] . . .” the edict decreed, “and in all of the preceding troubles, will remain extinguished, and treated as something that did not take place.” Henri was eventually murdered, but he stands as proof that this urge to erase history itself has a history.

  18. A more recent example can also be provided. Spain recovered from the civil war that divided that country by means of the pacto del olvido, the “pact of forgetting.” Both sides, right and left, fascist and republican, initially agreed to bury the past along with their dead. They would dig up no bodies, they would bring no charges, they would hold no trials. That, they agreed, was the only way to guarantee the transition to a democratic system following the death of General Francisco Franco. Those who seek justice insist we must remember. But those who seek peace insist we forget.

  Maggie’s gaze drifted away from the pages in front of her and to the window, where evening was coming. Not twenty-four hours ago, she had heard this same argument made, in this very room, by the man she once loved. Uri had not used identical language. He hadn’t burned down any libraries. But these were his views. That peace mattered more than justice and that sometimes you just had to let go of the past.

  An unwanted thought returned to shiver through her. Why exactly had Uri turned up like that, after all those years? No matter how good his contacts in the governor’s office, which – now that she thought about it – was also a stretch, was it really plausible that he just happened to be in the same part of Charlottesville at exactly the moment she was? And then sending her into that burning building? She remembered again the quality of his fury at his archaeologist father. How had he put it? History so thick you could choke on it.

  Was it possible that Uri’s rage against the past had led him into some dark place, ready to join those who would literally burn it all down? Was he part of this group, sent to lead Maggie astray, to divert her, to weaken her resolve? He would not have been the first man deployed against Maggie that way. It had happened before. And it had worked.

  But surely not Uri. He had helped her, hadn’t he? Even sending her those texts when they were officially not speaking. He had to be on her side, surely.

  She went back to the text, skipping ahead a few more paragraphs. One section jumped out at her.

  128. We teach children the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and, depending on our views or education, we blame Eve or the Serpent. But we do not pay sufficient attention to the true source of the couple’s downfall. What is the tree from which the first man and first woman ate? What is the tree whose fruit was forbidden? It is the tree of knowledge. It is the acquisition of knowledge that sees Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden and humankind deprived of its Edenic gifts forever after.

  Maggie took out a pencil and circled that word. Edenic. She read on.

  129. Every child knows this and yet we continue to seek new knowledge and preserve at all costs the knowledge we have acquired. We guard it in libraries, which are as tightly protected as bank vaults, controlling the climate and the light, as if these shreds of paper are holy. But the truth is the opposite. It is knowledge that has kept us from our Edenic state. This is not a question of wrong and right, but of simple happiness. We were happiest and even holiest when we were innocent, literally lacking in knowledge.

  She moved to the concluding sections.

  229. Revolutionary movements have failed and failed again throughout history by making the same error. They stare with shining faces towards the future, promising to build the world anew and that another world is possible. “We have the power in our hands to remake the world,” they tell themselves. But they fail to see the obvious gap in their reasoning. They fail to follow their own logic through to its unavoidable conclusion. If you are to make a new world, you first must destroy the old one.

  230. In truth, some revolutionaries have understood this, but they have lacked the full courage of their convictions. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge saw the necessity of Year Zero and they removed some of those “intellectuals” whose historical knowledge threatened to be an obstacle. But they did not complete the task. In the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks shot the Tsar and his family, but they did not destroy their memory: the paintings, the palaces and, above all, the documents remained. They were not strong enough to go further.

  231. The next revolution will not suffer from that timidity. It understands that partial success is no success at all. To be free of the past, one has to be free of all of it. No trace can remain. If it does, all the old habits will persist: they will simply attach to whatever scrap or shard of memory survives. There needs to be nothing.

  232. We need to renew ourselves by starting afresh. The slate must be wiped clean. Even machines understand this about themselves: sometimes the drive must be erased of all data. So it is with humankind. We have to cut down the Tree of Knowledge which brought about our fall. Only then can we return to the Garden.

  Maggie sat back and briefly closed her eyes. Jesus Christ, what were they up against? The terrifying certainty, the absolute conviction – the declaration that the only vice of Stalin and Pol Pot was that they were too moderate.

  Was this the work of an individual or a committee? A man or a woman? Was it an American or perhaps someone from somewhere else entirely, their work rendered in translation? And who was Lethe?

  She googled and was not wholly surprised by the answer. Lethe: one of the five rivers of the underworld: those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe: the name for the Greek spirit of oblivion.

  So whoever wrote this manifesto had attributed it to the goddess of amnesia.

  Maggie was about to reread those last few paragraphs, to catch something that had jogged a thought, when an image on the TV caught her eye. Was it fate or a premonition, but there, holding forth on the screen, his face bright with glee and the Richmond courthouse as a backdrop, was William Keane.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Washington DC, 1.22pm

  Maggie reached for the clicker and jacked up the volume. While his mouth moved silently, all William Keane was conveying was smugness. But now she began to hear his voice.

  ‘. . . in the final stages of this remarkable case. But I am here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen of the press, that as soon as I am done here, I will be going into that building to deliver this letter to the presiding judge, urging her to see what is surely now obvious, not only to the twelve good men and true who are sitting as jurors – and yes,’ he was rolling his eyes and sighing simultaneously, ‘before the snowflakes start writing to their congressmen, I know there are women on that jury too – obvious not only to them, obvious not only to the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia and these United States of America, but to the entire watching world. Namely that her solemn duty under the law of the Commonwealth and, indeed, under the basic principles of natural justice, is to direct the jury to rule in my favour!’

  Maggie watched Keane work himself up, his face getting more flushed, the blood vessels under his skin almost visibly cracking under the strain, and found she could not tear herself awa
y. What they said about William Keane was true. His charisma, especially on television, was powerful. You could not stop looking.

  ‘What possible evidence of so-called “slavery” can my opponents point to now? All their supposed evidence is disappearing by the hour! It’s on the ash-heap of history. In fact, history is an ash-heap! That’s all that’s left!’

  His glee was disgusting. But the sheer, shocking nerve of it, the sight of a man welcoming a series of events everyone else had lamented, refusing to mouth the politician’s pieties about ‘loss’ or ‘tragedy’, but instead standing there and celebrating a fire which had destroyed the archive in Charlottesville, and all those other blazes around the world, it was . . . mesmerizing.

  ‘The records of so many so-called events are up in smoke now. I mean, that centre in Jerusalem’ – Jerr-oooz-ah-lem – ‘that’s gone now. So we won’t be hearing too much more about the “Holocaust”.’ His fingers made air quotes around the word. ‘I mean, these are revolutionary occurrences, ladies and gentlemen.’

  There was a muffled question, off camera.

  ‘What’s that?’ Keane cupped his ear, prompting the unseen reporter to speak up. Now Maggie could hear the question.

  ‘Are you saying those documents that were destroyed in Charlottesville would have proved the existence of slavery, but now they’re gone we can’t be sure? Because in that case—’

  ‘No, no, Matthew. You know that’s not right. You’ve been following this trial. I could have proved that any one of those documents in that library was either a forgery or exaggerated under duress or for profit or otherwise unreliable. Don’t you worry about that, I’d have proved that. My point is, now I don’t have to! They don’t have any fake documents to wave at me any more.

  ‘I mean, this is a game-changer, folks. All these “crimes” they keep saying we’ve done? Well, how they gonna prove any of them now? Let me give you just one example. I mean, how sick and tired are you of hearing that our great founding father, Thomas Jefferson, was a “slave” owner?’ More air quotes. ‘About his supposed siring of children with a Miss Sally Hemings? Well, I have to tell you, all the documents that were relied on to make that spurious case are now gone. They were there in that institution in Charlottesville. And now they are but dust in the air. So we’ll hear no more of that.’

  He was still talking as the screen split and a ‘breaking news’ alert flashed along the bottom. The other half of the picture showed a night sky, filled with patches of raging orange. Now the words appeared. Massive blaze at National Diet Library buildings in Tokyo and Kyoto.

  Good God, thought Maggie. A masochistic urge propelled her to the website of the Japanese library. Sure enough, it displayed an image of seven green bottles.

  They were moving so fast. She pictured the volumes housed in the building she could now barely make out in the TV footage: the texts and treasures of an entire civilization, some of them no doubt dating back to the very birth of Japan. And she, like millions of others, was just sitting there, watching them turn to smoke.

  A new sentence appeared on the TV screen, crawling along the bottom: Curator feared dead, killed in bid to save collection, Tokyo officials say.

  She could bear to look at Keane’s gloating face no longer. She went back to the document whose pages were spread out on the kitchen table: the manifesto. Again it came to her, that thought she had had so fleetingly before Keane’s face had appeared on the television. But it broke the surface only briefly and then was gone, like the shimmer of a fish in a river. She was trying to grab at it, like snatching a fragment of a dream in the seconds after waking. Come on, she thought. What was it?

  At that moment, there was a chime from her phone and then, a moment later, another one. As she fumbled it, there was a third. No names, only numbers: because all her contacts had been deleted, the phone didn’t recognize them.

  The first read simply: Am looking for a reaction quote to the latest drop. Gaby.

  Fuck. More bloody emails.

  The next one was obviously from Liz. Mags, call as soon as you get this. L xx.

  The third struck hardest. I’m getting calls about this. Pressure on me to ask you to step down. Donna

  Maggie shook her head and prepared to call the governor. Even if there were new emails, she’d have hoped her blanket denial to DC Wire would have covered it. Surely people would have understood that if the first lot of ridiculous emails were fake, this next batch were too? Why didn’t Donna see that?

  Now the phone was ringing. From the number, there was no sure way of telling if it was Liz or that reporter, Gaby. She thought of screening it and then, after four rings, pressed the green button.

  ‘Jesus, Maggie, what the fuck?’

  ‘Liz. I promise you, whatever you think I said, I didn’t say it. Those emails are fake. Someone’s forged—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Whatever it looks like I said, I didn’t. This whole thing—’

  ‘It’s not something you said, Maggie.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘You know damn well what I mean.’

  ‘I seriously don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Liz. What?’

  ‘You haven’t seen it?’

  ‘Haven’t seen what?’

  ‘There’s a video of you, Maggie. On the internet.’

  ‘What kind of video?’

  ‘Maggie, please. Don’t make me say it.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Washington DC, 1.40pm

  Instantly Maggie pictured herself caught on camera during some unguarded moment, probably slagging off the president or some of the wankers in his party. She could imagine it: herself slouched on some bar in Washington, dodgy sound picked up by a hidden camera. Nightmare. She braced herself, glad that she was going to hear it from her sister rather than Gaby bloody DC bloody Wire. She closed her eyes. ‘Go on. What is it? What am I saying in it?’

  Liz replied quietly. ‘Like I said, Maggie. You don’t say anything in it. Words are not exactly the issue here.’

  ‘So what is it then? Come on, Liz, for fuck’s sake. Spit it out.’

  ‘It’s, you know, a tape.’

  ‘What kind of tape?’

  ‘A tape. You know, a tape tape.’ Hearing the silence at the other end of the line, Liz said a babble of words that came out as, ‘I can’t believe you’re making me say this fuck fuck fuck it’s a sex tape. That’s what it is. A sex tape.’

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Oh God.’ Liz sounded as if she was curled into a ball.

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘I wish I were.’

  ‘And you’ve seen it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s on the internet. Don’t look! I mean, you can look. But maybe don’t. Oh, Christ.’

  ‘But I’ve never . . . I don’t understand. Is it . . . is it a hidden camera or something?’

  ‘No. In the tape, you’re totally, you know, looking at the camera.’

  ‘Looking at it?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of . . . performing for it.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I never did that.’ Maggie was remembering the sex with Richard. It did get intense, compulsive even. But he’d never produced a camera. He’d wanted to, but she’d refused. Point blank. Unless. Had he filmed her anyway? Had he hidden a camera behind a mirror?

  ‘Is it Richard in the tape? Is that who I’m having sex with?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. It doesn’t – listen, I think you’d better look at it yourself.’

  ‘How do I find it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding it.’

  ‘Liz.’

  ‘If you go on Twitter and search “former White House official sex tape”, it comes up pretty fast. Call me back.’

  Maggie’s hands were trembling as she typed in the words. It came out as former whote hoiuse official seex tape and therefore brought the
response: No results for former whote hoiuse official seex tape. The term you entered did not bring up any results.

  She did it again, one button at a time. She felt herself paling.

  Now the screen filled with tweets. The top one was from

  Drudge:

  Breaking: Sex tape featuring former White House official.

  It linked to a celebrity gossip site, which had a few words of text – including Maggie Costello’s name and the name of the president who first hired her and whose campaign she served on – above a video player. There was a warning. This video features explicit language, nudity and explicit content of a sexual nature.

  She pressed the play button.

  It began with a glimpse of a naked torso, male and taut, and the waistband of a pair of boxers. The image was shaking as a pair of hands, the man’s hands, fidgeted with the camera, settling it into position. Then he withdrew, turning his back to the viewer.

  Now you could see the room. Or rather the bed, wide and stacked with cushions, all in various shades of brown. Above it, a bland, abstract canvas. At a guess, she’d have said it was an expensive hotel room, lit for the late evening.

  And now, at the left of the screen, there appeared the figure of a woman, standing side-on, in profile. You couldn’t see her face, because she was looking down, her long red hair a curtain. She was wearing only underwear, black and lacy.

  She mounted the bed and crawled across it, on all fours, slow and panther-like, until she was at the centre of the frame. The head was bowed, still looking downward, the hair still a curtain. The image suggested submission, surrender. She stayed like that for a half second, offering her body to the gaze of the camera.