The Revisionists (11 page)

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 early. 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?”

“I think seven bucks.”

“See? It worked, faster ’n they thought.”

“So next you’re gonna tell me you hoard gold? You got three months of canned goods stored in your basement for when the revolution comes?”

He smiled. “Gold’s for gangsta rappers. And no on the canned goods, but only because I refuse to follow the Homeland Security advice, the duct tape and all that. Although, honestly, it’s probably a good idea, but not for the reasons they’re thinking.”

It was amazing how it all flooded back. Not just the memories of their brief time together, but the whole collegiate energy, the anger at the rotten world, the desire to remake it. Even the smallest decision—going vegetarian (for one year) to save a few hundred animals or boycotting clothing chains that used sweatshops—seemed to carry enormous moral weight. Years later, she still considered herself a politically engaged citizen, but full-grown adults who even mentioned sweatshops tended to sound like teenagers chanting slogans at a rock concert, and people who didn’t eat meat were a bitch to plan around at dinner parties. Bringing up the plight of the oppressed sounded ridiculous when buying five-hundred-thousand-dollar row houses in what had recently been dilapidated neighborhoods.

And here T.J. was, someone who’d made all the opposite choices she had: living off the grid, still dressing like a grungy college student, and crashing at a group house in Columbia Heights (only a few blocks from the very neighborhood she and her family had fled for the safety of the suburbs), while she in her Prada slingbacks and boutique jeans sipped her fifteen-dollar Belgian beer. Modern living made you choose between your morality and your desire to fit in, to not be a freak. But what if the freaks were right?

She just wanted something to believe, or believe in. It seemed such a modest goal, yet was anything but.
What do I really believe? That the government unjustly started these wars for the oil that enables my lifestyle, that they sent my brother to die and covered up various profit-minded plots? Or that our country is a benign force for good, and Marshall died a hero trying to bring peace to an area whose years of wars had sent out long trails of destruction that led to deaths here on September 11 and that will inevitably lead to even more unless we take the fight to them?
Which was the naive view, and which the pragmatic one? She felt like some displaced fairy-tale heroine in search of the one shoe that would fit perfectly and solve all her troubles, or at least make it easier to walk on this constantly shifting terrain.

“So other than those columns, are you doing any writing?” he asked. “I seem to remember you were going to be a famous novelist.”

“Nah, that’s just
my
superhero thing. My Clark Kent is being a lawyer.”

“Knowing a lawyer is always good when you’re arrested as much as I am.”

“Seriously?”

“What, you thought that was a pickup line?” He laughed. “We were picketing one of Hellwater’s training camps in South Carolina, filming a documentary. Cut through some razor wire, got shot at.” He pulled his right foot onto the lower rung of his bar stool and rolled up his pants leg. It was dark in the bar but she could make out something gruesome above his ankle. “German shepherd did that.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Jail doctor stitched it for me, many hours later. The worst part is they stole our film and cameras, but we’re thinking of maybe doing a re-creation instead, like a political version of
Cops
.”

“You do walk the walk, don’t you?”

“I was limping the limp for a couple weeks.”

By her second drink, the music on the house stereo had become indefinably better, the beats echoing those of Tasha’s heart. Which only made her wonder: How much fun was she allowed to have anymore? She was tired of wondering that. Everyone else seemed so damn insulated from what was happening. She was raw.

Then T.J. asked after her parents, and Tasha lied, said they were doing fine, thanks.

“That brother of yours still getting into trouble?”

There could have been no starker reminder of how much had changed in the nine years since she’d seen T.J. When they were freshmen, she now remembered, Marshall was a high-school junior at risk of flunking out. He was hanging with the wrong crowd, enraging his parents and big sister with each decreasingly minor scrape with the law. And now: “He’s dead.”

T.J. looked like he thought he’d misheard her, the music was so loud, or maybe he thought he was being fucked with. But then his smile vanished.

“Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. What happened?”

“Preemptive war happened.”

No matter how people reacted to the news, she always hated the reactions.

“He was in the army?”

She nodded.

“Jesus, Tash, I’m so sorry.”

She sipped her drink so she wouldn’t have to think up a response to “I’m so sorry.”

“Your parents really okay?”

“What do you think?”

He didn’t say anything, belatedly realizing the minefield he’d walked into, afraid to take another step. She regretted sounding so harsh.

“My dad hated the idea of Marshall enlisting, tried to talk him out of it. He didn’t realize he was only pushing Marshall toward the recruitment office. Once he’d enlisted and we all showed up for the ceremony, we had to accept it. Honestly, it was good for Marshall. I mean…” What
did
she mean? How could it be good for someone if it ultimately kills him? Just because it turned his life around, kept him out of trouble, helped him grow up? Can final moments negate everything that happened beforehand? Or is the life preceding the death all that matters? “He grew up a lot. I was proud of him. I am proud of him.”

T.J. took the hand that she’d left lying atop the table. She wished he hadn’t.

“Anyway,” she said, a word she’d been employing often, a way to end conversations, or re-steer them, or just throw up a roadblock: thou shalt not pass this marker. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring this all up. I was having a pretty good time.”

“Me too.”

She squeezed his hand and then took hers back.

“So,” he said, hesitantly restarting, “you came to the meeting tonight because of what happened to your brother?”

“I came because I’m trying to figure things out. Life used to make just enough sense for me to get by. But now, just like that, it doesn’t.” She shook her head. “You and I probably have a lot of different opinions, but… I envy your certainty. You’re certain that things are crooked and that we’re all pawns and that we need to act now before it’s too late. I don’t know that I want you to be right, but I do wish I had that kind of certainty. About anything.”

“I don’t have everything figured out, Tasha.”

“Well, you fake it very well.”

“I remember once you called me a very skilled actor. At the time I was so full of myself I took it as a compliment.”

She smiled. Then suddenly she felt like she was going to cry. She made herself cough, to cover it up.

“I’m just a skeptical bastard,” he said, looking at the few remaining people in the bar, and the empty street beyond them. “I don’t trust people. I’m always looking for the angle. When
I
see people who seem certain, like fundamentalists who insist that Jesus or Allah will find a way and that we’re all a part of a
plan
—fundamentalists in Baghdad or Tulsa, it’s all the same thing—I think
they’re
crazy. I’m too skeptical of them.” He shrugged, looking back at her. “But maybe I need to be more skeptical of people like me too.”

“I was trying to compliment you.”

“Look, if you do want to help out in the anti-recruitment thing, or anything else, let me know; I’m involved in a lot of different projects. Or if there’s anything I can do to help you, really, let me know.”