The Revisionists (6 page)

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 forsaken 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.

I drive with the traffic and as I crest the hill suddenly there in the distance is the Capitol dome, so large and unexpected it’s like a moon that’s veered out of orbit. I cut across a side street, and the moon is eclipsed by a corner row house with a chunk of bricks missing from it, as if a truck drove into it, or something exploded.

My mind wants to revisit my wife, but I direct myself to pay closer attention to my surroundings.
Live in the present,
the Department tells us, not realizing the irony. I turn onto another of Washington’s wide avenues, the painted brick row houses gleefully flashing their different colors as I pass. The trees are losing their leaves, and I tell myself I’m lucky to have been sent back to autumn in a beat when foliage still changed colors like this (I’d read about the phenomenon but hadn’t entirely believed it).
Try to concentrate on the beauty of things,
I tell myself.
Try to wrap your arms around what’s actually here.

Between assignments, we Protectors are kept on the Department’s sprawling campus, as if we’re under quarantine. We are plagued by something that can’t be released into the public bloodstream.

They say this is better for us, that it helps us stay in character. Our ability to blend in with our beats would be compromised if we were allowed to circulate in our own time between assignments. We’d start using slang terms from the wrong beat; we’d act according to the social mores of some other age; we’d let slip historical facts that our conversational partners weren’t supposed to know. Better for all involved, then, for us to stay tucked away.

After we finish missions and are recalled to our own time, after the meetings and near-endless reports and the temporal decompressions, we’re shuffled to our dormitories and briefed on our new assignments. There’s always new assignments. Then, more files and videos, more facts to be absorbed as we prepare ourselves to reenter that fractured cosmos. Given the length of my last few gigs, I’ve barely been outside the Department campus for the last few months—or maybe even years?—of my own life. To the outside world, however, only a couple of weeks have passed. I wonder if I’m aging quickly in my superiors’ eyes, as the arc of my life span curves in an ever-taller parabola over their short linear paths. I mentioned this once, but they told me I was thinking too much.

One day, after my previous mission but before this one, two other Protectors and I broke protocol. Between meetings, we hatched a simple escape plan, and later we met at a restaurant a couple of blocks away. The Department is at the edge of downtown, in nondescript buildings that most citizens tried to ignore. Derringer, Wills, and I had been in Training together but had met only a few times since. We were eager to swap stories. And to drink, quickly. It was like a race to purge the memories from our minds.

When was this? A few weeks ago, I think. A few weeks ago or hundreds of years later, depending on one’s perspective.

“How did yours go, Zed?” Derringer asked after the first round had loosened us. He was tall and athletic, as all the Protectors are, and completely bald. I was the one whose mission had ended most recently—I’d been back only a day, still felt bleary-eyed and nauseated from the Recall.

“The integrity of history was preserved.”

They laughed ruefully.

Leaving campus had been less difficult than I’d expected. Most of the guards were low-level grunts who all but genuflected in our presence; few had the clearance to know what it was we did. Some of them hadn’t even looked us in the eye, just nodded when we told them we’d be back in a couple hours.

“It was fine,” I continued. “The same. They’re not getting any better at it.”

“The ones in my beat are,” Wills said. He had thin, intense eyes the color of gold. When he focused on you, you had the uncomfortable sense he was determining your character flaws, or plotting the quickest way to knock you unconscious. “They came close this time, very close. I neutralized the last of them just a few minutes before the plane took off.”

Within the Department, we were the unlucky souls assigned to the Disasters Division. We were sent to ensure that awful events unfolded as originally dictated by history, that the hags did not rewrite the final acts of tragedies to make them comedies. Protectors in other divisions had the decidedly less troubling task of stopping the hags from wreaking unexpected havoc during otherwise calm events—they prevented benevolent, two-term presidents from being assassinated during their first months in office; or ensured that the hags didn’t detonate nuclear bombs on one of history’s originally meaningless days. At least each of those Protectors could look himself in the eye and know that he’d performed an inarguably good deed. Wills, Derringer, and I weren’t so fortunate. Derringer had recently eliminated a group of hags who were trying to prevent the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001. He strangled the final hag in a bathroom before the troublemaker could board one of those fated flights out of Boston, and then he sat at a bar in Logan airport and started drinking martinis minutes before TV journalists interrupted their telecasts to show images of the burning towers. He’d gotten so drunk he laughed at the news coverage, he told us, until an off-duty cop took a swing at him. And Wills had just neutralized a group of hags trying to infiltrate the U.S. military days before its planes were to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wherever we went, countless people died in our wake.

“I stayed a couple days more,” Wills said. “I just wanted to see it, you know? I boarded one of the planes, conned the pilots into thinking I was military intelligence and needed to be on the flight.”

“Are you serious?” Derringer raised his eyebrows. It was dangerous for Wills to admit this. Any deviation from a mission could lead to severe reprimands, if not outright expulsion.

“I
had
to see it. We flew lower over the city than I had expected. And then, the flash.” He shook his head. “One hundred thousand dead, in a second.
One hundred thousand
. Try to imagine it. All that heat. All those lives. And then the thousands who went afterward, who took a few days or even weeks to go.
Imagine
that.”

“They came up with worse,” I said, “less than a century later.”

We drank in silence for a bit.

“The looks on people’s faces in that airport, when they saw their towers fall,” Derringer said. “You should have seen them.”

“I cheated too,” I confessed. The drink was getting to me, along with everything else. “After I’d finished off the hags in Poland, before I started the Recall, I made my way into one of the camps. Had a uniform and everything; they let me in.”

“Glad you did it?” Wills asked.

“No. I wish to hell I hadn’t.” I’d never realized a human being could get so thin and not die. They were dying, of course; plenty of them. But the ones still alive were the worst.

More silence, more drinks.

“What I console myself with,” Wills said, “is that they’re all dead anyway. Really. So long ago, and so long dead. Nothing we can do about it.”

“I’d thought it would feel like that,” I said, “but it doesn’t. They’re in front of you. They’re real, they breathe. The pain doesn’t seem very
historical
when you’re steeping in it.”

The screams I’d heard in that camp. The vacant expressions I’d seen. And my job was to ensure that it happened, that the hags didn’t save them.

“It makes you hate all these people, doesn’t it?” Derringer asked later, after the third or fourth round.

“Which people?” I asked.

“
All
of these people.” Derringer glared at the diners in the restaurant. It was a glitzy place, only blocks from the Capitol—not the Washington I’m currently assigned to, of course, but the new Capitol. Most of them were upper-level officials with their supplicants and tempters. “The more I do the job, the more I hate how
stupid
people today are.”

“They’re not stupid,” Wills said. “We’re very… privileged to know what we know.”

“They’re gerbils.
Rats
. It’s our job to keep their cage nice and secure.”

“Maybe you should request some time off before your next gig,” I said.

“Time.”
Derringer practically snarled that. “What a hilarious concept.”

We all pondered that one for a while.

“Imagine being able to kill a hundred thousand people in one instant,” Wills said. “Imagine that power, and that hatred.”

“They all hated each other then,” I said.

“I know. They made up some military excuse, but they really only dropped the bomb because they thought the people in Hiroshima were subhuman. They wouldn’t have done it to people like themselves. They didn’t think of it as murder, exactly. It was more like… wiping a slate clean.”

In my time, the different races and ethnicities have been blended together for generations. The survivors of the Conflagration had better things to do than cling to biases against rival groups—they were just desperate to find mates and rebuild their lives. People eventually forgot what
race
even was, and the Government closely guards all records of past internecine conflict due to the dangers they could inspire. The Perfect Present lacks the blood feuds that are so rife in my current beat.

“But isn’t it sad,” Derringer asked, “how no one else knows about this?”

“Are you kidding?” Wills looked shocked. “I’m practically suicidal having all this history in me. You think other people should know about it too?”

“
Yes
. Absolutely. So they won’t be ignorant and—”

“It isn’t ignorance,” Wills said. “Why is knowing about some ancient grievance between one group of people and another important? Why should that matter to who people are today? The people in my beat”—he shook his head in pity—“are
consumed
by that nonsense. Hating another group because of something that group did years ago, which had only been in response to what
their
group had done decades earlier, et cetera, et cetera. Spiraling back in time, endlessly, and they’re trapped in the vortex. Today, we’re
free
of that.”

Derringer stared at Wills. “You call that
freedom?
”