The Revisionists (18 page)

That too was odd. References to the past—even oblique ones—were too freighted, and I was surprised she would say this to someone she’d just met. She was nervous, talking without thinking. It was the first clue that she liked me.

She was a financial analyst, a few years out of school and working for one of the HumanTech firms. Her company had made a breakthrough on skin protectors, something to help block the sun. If everything went well, we’d all be receiving injections of her company’s product in a year or two, but that was the extent of what she could tell me. “Proprietary information.” She smiled. “Corporate espionage is out of control these days.”

She asked what I did.

“I work with the Security Department.”

“So neither of us can say much about our jobs. That doesn’t leave us with much to talk about.” That could have sounded like a brush-off, but she said it differently.

“I suppose we could just make things up.”

“Okay. If you weren’t in Security, what would you be?”

I thought for a moment. “An astronaut.”

“Huh.” I’d bored her. I was predictable. Plus, there were no astronauts—there hadn’t been any since before the Conflagration, though more than a few scientists were arguing for a new space program now that our planet was in so much trouble. “Why?” she asked.

“I heard we used to send people to the moon, to Mars, to Pluto.” We all trafficked in rumors, false snippets of history. Gossip became legend. But I really had seen an image of a man in a balloonish metal suit, a human zeppelin, standing on the moon beside a flag, hadn’t I? Or had I only imagined it? “It would be fun to get back there, see what we left behind. Maybe we have colonies there that got cut off during the Conflagration.”

“You think it would be interesting to get back in touch?”

“Unless they’ve all starved to death.”

“In which case, being an astronaut would be rather bleak.”

“Good point. All right, if you weren’t a financial analyst, what would you be?”

“A writer.”

“What would you write about?”

“Maybe I’d write about a Security agent who becomes an astronaut and travels to a cold, dark world populated by corpses.”

“And the masses would flock to read it.”

We did have writers and storytellers, yes, but most were employed by the Government. Their stories were vetted for intergroup bias, past fetishizing, that sort of thing. Most of what people knew or thought they knew about the past came from the stories. A good writer used just enough of the real past (writers had low-level clearance, could get access to some parts of history) mixed in with his nonsensical fictions. It made things seem real. Even though the readers themselves didn’t know the past, they all thought that they
understood
it somehow, on some innate level. You’d read a story about two young lovers on a doomed vessel in a northern sea, or a tale of a couple reunited at a North African bar during a world war, and there was something in there, something indefinable, that felt true to you, that seemed like it had happened in your own life, or maybe in the lives of your subconsciously remembered ancestors. It reminded you of half-forgotten bedtime stories your grandparents had told you. It reminded you of yourself.

Every now and then a writer would be accused of writing real history, of only pretending that it was made up. The writer’s story would surge in popularity for a few days, everyone reading voraciously to steal this glimpse of the true past before the Government deleted the story. Then (if you bought the rumors) the writer was arrested, and the literature officials who had negligently vetted the story were arrested as well. There were cynics who didn’t believe this, who thought the Government actually started these rumors to make people
think
they were getting access to real history when really it was all untrue, propaganda. Were the lies truth, or not?

When Cemby was alone, she would scribble her stories, little pieces of herself. Even after we were married, she never let me read them, said they were too personal; she made empty promises to show them to me when they were “finished.” But they were never finished—eventually she deleted them (or the Government did, if the expiration period had passed) or burned them, saying they weren’t any good, that it was more like therapy, something for herself. Occasionally, she’d gaze off into space and I’d ask what she was thinking about and she’d say it was a story she’d written a while ago. It was actually pretty decent, she’d say.
Then let me read it
. I can’t, she’d reply. The time ran out, I had to delete it—it’s gone. A piece of me, somehow, but vanished forever.

So,
I’d say to her,
tell me what you remember.
And she’d try her best.

At the time of the accident I’d been promoted to intelligence officer. I raided the secret libraries of rebels who wanted to disseminate their stories, poison the society. We shut down publishers and pulled the plug on writers who were sending out missives on the Net and the wires; we tracked down extant copies of texts that were supposed to have been burned long ago. As a result of that privileged position, I knew more than the average citizen about the past, but only so much. Sometimes on raids I would pore through the materials before the Elimination and Deletion crew arrived, would marvel at the wars, the exterminations, the genocide. The things we had been capable of—no,
were still
capable of. That’s why my job was important. These evils were buried inside us, and it was my duty to keep them dormant. I protected people from themselves.

One day my wife went to pick up our daughter at school. Two hours passed. I did a quick scan for them and turned up nothing. Surprising, but not totally unheard-of, as some buildings had walls specially designed to prevent scanning. Another hour passed and she wasn’t answering her wire. Then someone buzzed in, and the monitor showed three men waiting to come up. Three men I had worked with in my Security days.

They came up and I knew why they were there the moment I opened the door. An accident on the thruway, they said. Possible error by the other driver, maybe a pod malfunction.

I felt dizzy. Someone leaned me against a wall. Then I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Afterward I felt hot, like my body was being pulled through a tiny opening from one world into another. I didn’t want to leave this world, wanted to stay in this place where I’d been so comfortable, but there was nothing to keep me tethered here anymore.

They said they were very sorry.

I don’t remember much of the next few days. My memory blessedly wiped clean. I received calls and wires, words of encouragement. The funeral service passed in a blur, images without sounds, leaving no impression, just a heaviness. Old friends of my wife whom I’d forgotten about, parents of my daughter’s playmates. Many people I didn’t even know, and I began to see the different life Cemby had led, the mysteries I hadn’t known about, the coworkers and jogging partners, the elderly cashier from her office cafeteria who said my wife had always been so friendly. I was given two weeks off, two weeks with nothing to do. I walked the city, going nowhere, returning home without any recollection of the preceding hours. My mind had been with my family the whole time, hiding in memories.

Once I was back at work, people didn’t talk about it. I noticed that the guys didn’t invite me out the first few weeks, as if they were afraid of what I’d say.

Two months passed and I received the dreaded visit.

I would have known it was coming even if I hadn’t received the official memoranda reminding me of my duties and obligations. I’d ignored them. I’d felt I deserved special treatment.

“No,” I told them at the door.

“Zed, you know how this works. We understand the difficulty, but—”

“I just need a little more time.”

“We did give you a couple of extra days.” It was one of my first bosses, from Security. At least they’d sent important people for the job. It was a show of respect. “Come on, you know the protocol. It’d be best if you left the apartment.”

“I’m fine right here.”

“Very well.” He walked in. The other three followed, two men and a woman, and set up their devices and detectors. “We’ll try to be quick.”

They dispatched the obvious items first. The framed images of our wedding, a few of Cemby years ago when we’d first met. The tech waved her wand and the images went blank, then the tech packed the frames into her case. They would be disposed of at headquarters, and I would receive remuneration for them in my next pay. I followed another tech into our bedroom and more images were erased. I watched them go through the file cabinets. It was a long process. Paper records were rare but I had saved some notes she’d written to me, mostly from our younger days when we weren’t as harried, when we weren’t raising a daughter who consumed so much of our lives. Love letters, or quick scribbles left on the kitchen table before going to work, tiny mementos I had saved. Some were notes I had written to her; the techs were going through her cabinet now. Cemby had saved more than I had. She was always the more sentimental one. I hadn’t realized how many notes I’d left her, so many pieces of myself, like molted skin. I stood there as they were destroyed.

They took her clothes and her other belongings. They found the perfume I had hidden in my own bureau. One of the techs booted into my account and busily stripped it of every wire and image of my wife and daughter. They cross-checked my other possessions against my wife’s purchasing records to determine which of my clothes and what decorations in the apartment had been gifts from her, and these too were removed.

It was when they walked into my daughter’s room that I snapped.

Seeing a tech pick up one of her old toys—a stuffed bear that she hadn’t played with in years; she’d outgrown it long ago—I clamped a hand on the tech’s shoulder. He was so small, a rookie, no idea of what he’d just walked into. I punched him in the face.

“Get out of her room!” The tech bounced off the wall, his head knocking down an image of my daughter smiling in her grandfather’s arms.

I woke up two hours later, in bed. A bed stripped of sheets, as Cemby had bought those too. My head didn’t hurt, which meant they’d used a relatively weak Stunner. It had probably been done by my former boss, who must have known this was coming. I myself had done it to countless grievers. Later, I was embarrassed when I realized how stereotypically I’d acted, as if I were following a script. Are we so predictable? Are our actions and emotions so fated?

I walked through my suddenly less decorated, more spacious apartment. They’d even rearranged the furniture so that my daughter’s room wasn’t empty; it now contained a chair from the living room and a writing desk I didn’t recognize. They did that sometimes, brought in new items to remake the space, no charge, courtesy of the Government. They’d fumigated the place too; the old scents were gone.

They had been thorough, as they always were. I had hidden a few things behind a fake panel in the kitchen—my favorite image of my wife, laughing while holding a wineglass, a crescent moon visible over her shoulder; one of my daughter’s favorite shirts, which I had buried my nose in to smell just the other night. They both were gone.

I sat in the living room and stared out the window. It was dark out, or what passed for dark in my ceaseless city. Pod lights glittered at me as they frantically rushed about; beacons atop construction cranes and new buildings blinked warnings to the aircraft that disappeared into faintly glowing clouds. I was ashamed at how I’d acted and would have to apologize.

The past was gone. It was time to move forward.

Part Two

Revisionism

10.

A
fter Tasha sent the GTK files to the
Times,
nothing happened. And then more nothing happened. Until too many things started happening.

The worst part, at first, was when she thought she’d had no effect. Realized that the nerves that had plagued her, the added degree of tension and borderline nausea she’d felt anytime she had to work on a GTK-related task over the ensuing days, had all been for naught. The
Times
reporter apparently had not been impressed, or had other stories to write, or was too busy sending his résumés to PR firms in anticipation of the next round of journalistic layoffs.

Tasha—disappointed, saddened, and finally enraged—pondered her next move. Should she try someone at the
Post
or maybe the
LA Times
? Then she got another idea.

T.J. had invited her to join him and some friends for a party/poster-decorating event; there was a big pro-immigration rally at the Mall the next weekend, and they were designing eye-catching signage. Tasha didn’t have much of an opinion on immigration, honestly. Or maybe she had two: she felt bad for the black folk in her old neighborhood who couldn’t get jobs because the new Latinos were happy to do the work for slave wages, but she also felt more than a bit sketched out by the very white, very angry nativists who claimed that the influx of darker-skinned people was ruining the country. So she wasn’t planning on attending the rally, but she went to the party because she wanted to ask T.J. something.

The party was held at an unkempt three-bedroom apartment in, appropriately enough, Columbia Heights, a neighborhood whose occupants were workaholic Salvadoran immigrants, multigenerational black families, and white professionals whose lesser pigmentation was leading to greater real estate prices and property taxes for everyone else. Tasha wasn’t sure if the other activists, all of whom, except T.J., were white, saw the irony.

The activists were sprawled on furniture claimed from Salvation Army and Goodwill and local street corners; an upholstery-spewing chair here and a saggingly invertebrate sofa there. More people were spread out democratically on the floor, kneeling on bedsheets that they were decorating with slogans, the smell of permanent ink thick in the air. Also patchouli. All of them clad in Converse and Docs, jeans and cords, dyes and hennas.