The Revisionists (7 page)

“Freedom. Joy. Innocence.”

Derringer looked at his glass. Wills and I exchanged glances. “Guess you’re right,” Derringer finally said. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

We all were. We finished our round and decided we’d sufficiently bleached our brains and should return to campus.

We started to walk back. I was disturbed by what Derringer had said but more disturbed to realize that I agreed with him. The people of our modern world
were
strange. I had never thought of them that way before—I was part of them—but this was one of the first glimpses of the present I’d had in a while, not counting my time on campus. This was my city, what I’d been born into, where I’d fallen in love and worked and toiled and suffered, but it seemed so different. Colder than I remembered it. Fewer people on the street, the air fouler. I barely recognized certain blocks. It made me worry about what the job was doing to me.

We’d been walking for a few minutes when Derringer turned around and faced a wide intersection, a few pods lined up patiently. “Lemmings!” he shouted at no one in particular. “You’re all lemmings!”

Wills clamped a hand on Derringer’s forearm. Derringer shook him off, and both backs straightened as the space between them narrowed.

Before a word could be spoken or fist thrown, a Security pod pulled to the sidewalk and out leaped four officers. The synthetic material of their black uniforms reflected the streetlights. Their visors were down but I could read their alarm from the tension in their jaws, the thinness of their lips. They encircled us, visors twitching back and forth between our drunken trio and the outside world, in search of some nonexistent enemy.

“Are you all right?” one of them asked.

“We’re fine,” Wills said, taking a step away from Derringer. “Lovely evening for a stroll.”

“You aren’t supposed to be off campus.”

“You telling us what to do, Officer?”

“I have my orders, sir.”

“We were heading there anyway,” Wills said. Derringer seemed too angry to speak. I was holding back to see what would happen next. I’d gotten so used to working my beats, to knowing all the plays in advance; I was thrown by this sudden spontaneity. “Care to walk with us,” Wills asked, “or were you going to try to stuff us all in your little pod?”

The officers eyelessly looked at each other. “We can walk,” one of them said, as if doing us a favor. “I’ll radio the SAC and let him know what’s happened, but I’d appreciate your explaining what it is you’re—”

“Give it a rest, buddy,” Derringer said, “or next time they send me back I’ll kill your great-grandfather before he hits puberty.”

“Shut up, Derringer,” Wills scolded before I could.

It was unclear if the officers understood the remark, but hopefully they didn’t. The three near androids pointed their mirrorlike visors at each other again, dark reflections of reflections of reflections.

We walked back in silence. A siren occasionally rang out, but not nearly as often as they do in my current beat. A heart attack maybe, or a pod accident. We heard laughter and saw smiling faces through the ground-floor windows of new towers, more people in bars and restaurants, some of which I’d visited with my wife so many, many lifetimes ago. And at the same time, only yesterday. Grief is funny that way. Time stretches and stretches and you think you’ve eased into it, but then it snaps back at you and you feel you haven’t moved an inch from the moment you first heard the awful news.

A few days later, as I was preparing for this assignment, one of my superiors mentioned that Derringer “had been removed from the Department.” No one ever said what exactly became of him, but we could guess. It was a warning to the rest of us.

During Training, they crammed various theories into my uncomprehending brain, ideas on how time travel works, theoretical frameworks I supposedly needed to bear in mind as I muddled through my beat. The one I understood best was the Great Man theory. There are so many minor players scurrying about, and we all like to kid ourselves about how important we are, about our own impacts on the lives of others. We like to think we can change the world. But we can’t. A few can, the great men and women of history, and if a hag was to disrupt those life paths—if he was to prevent George Washington or Joseph Stalin or the first grand magistrate from being born—then history would tail off in an entirely new direction, not just an alternate path but a previously unimaginable one, foreign to what we see in our Perfect Present. This is precisely what the hags want. So they attempt to assassinate historic leaders, or they send themselves to major historic Events, turning points at which the very axis of humankind seemed to shift. Which is why a group of hags is running around in pre-destruction Washington, D.C., the very epicenter of the tectonic rifts that set off the Great Conflagration.

I think about this as I sit here in a neighborhood park named after a great man, President Lincoln. I’ve learned that he set this nation’s slaves free during a vicious war that pitted brother against brother. In the center of the park is a statue of Lincoln pointing forward, standing above a depiction of a cowering unshackled slave. What strange images these people celebrate.

I’m sitting on a wooden bench before a brightly colored playground of slides and ladders and swings and various other structures children could conceivably fall from. Toddlers and their older siblings climb up the steps and slip down the slides; they gleefully push toy trucks into miniature collisions and wreak other disasters, all while pointing excitedly at the life-size recycling trucks and backhoes that amble along the nearby road. Scattered on the benches are pale young mothers and darker-skinned women tending other people’s children. They talk to one another in various languages, or chat on their phones, pacing in distracted circles, or walk alongside their little ones, fingers extended to guide them.

So many people outside, reveling in their ability to let the sun shine on their skin, as if they know that their descendants won’t be able to do this. It feels funny for me to be outside for so long—I instinctively sit in the shade, afraid of the radiation that their atmosphere still manages to protect them from.

I spent the morning monitoring two of the hags’ next targets, but all seems well. Today’s Event is still a few hours away, so I decide to wander the neighborhoods.

“Which one is yours?” a young woman asks me. She’s pale as soap, wearing a shapeless green shirt over black jeans. Her unwashed blond hair is pulled back, her eyes are puffy with exhaustion, but she looks content. I remember that look.

“None of them.”

I’m still watching the kids, this quotidian scene of marvels tiny and huge, and it takes a second for me to realize the mistake I’ve made. She’s staring at me and her body is rigid.

“I used to live here, with my wife and daughter,” I lie. But I mix in some truth: “They had an accident.”

I’m too consumed by my own past to look back at her. I just stare at a little girl, maybe four years old, who reminds me of my lost jewel. Little pink and white baubles bounce at the ends of her braids as she darts across the playground, an autumn sprite spreading joy without even realizing it. I scan the adult faces, looking for one with a genetic similarity to the child’s, wonder whose she is.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman says.

I shouldn’t be here, revealing myself to so many contemps. And I certainly shouldn’t be sharing memorable stories, horrors that will haunt this young mother as she puts her child down for a nap.

So I try to hold the past inside me. I mix in more lies, cushioning my vulnerabilities in them. “I live in Philly now, but my company sends me here a lot. I can’t help dropping by the old playground sometimes, watching the memories dance around me for a few minutes.”

I look at the kids again, staring at a world that has no place for me. The woman’s eyes stay on mine.

“I’ve made you uncomfortable,” I say. “I’ll go.”

I don’t look back at her as I walk away. I bend to unlatch the childproof fence, swinging it closed behind me to lock the children in and keep them safe.

4.

L
eo Hastings’s employer, Targeted Executive Solutions, was not terribly executive, and it did not always offer solutions. But the work did involve targets.

TES occupied a building in one of the many nondescript office parks that sprouted from the Northern Virginia asphalt thanks to heavy watering from the government’s defense budget. Also in the building were the offices of a dentist, an accountant, and a real estate firm. Across the pedestrian-unfriendly street was a Chick-fil-A, and faintly in the background was I-395’s constant arterial hum of personnel and dollars into and out of the capital. TES’s office had no windows. Anyone curious enough to Google it discovered a slick though merely three-page Web site offering bland assurances about the company’s commitment to its clients’ success. The listed phone number led to a voice-mail box that an employee checked once a week. Clients used a different number.

This was where Leo had beached himself after being thrown from the Agency’s boat, a mere half a mile away. Some of his ex-colleagues had encouraged him to think of it as a sort of promotion. Plenty of people were leaving the Agency, which was still being blamed for 9/11, for failing to predict the future, for not having a crystal ball, for not being perfect. And being blamed for everything it was doing to prevent another one. Talent was leaching from the government side to the contractor side, but it wasn’t really going anywhere, his ex-colleagues explained.
Hell, you’ll get to do basically the same thing, and for more money.
Spooks and analysts were trading in their blue government ID tags for green contractor ID tags, patrolling the same halls at Langley, only this time as consultants in better suits.

But Leo was hardly doing the same thing for TES that he’d done for the Agency. He wasn’t sure if he
wanted
to do the same thing anymore.

How he had become involved in this sort of work was a complicated tale, one he himself didn’t always understand. Part of the problem was that he couldn’t tell anyone. And isn’t that how we learn things, how we commit them to memory and make them a part of ourselves, by telling other people, wrapping our experiences into tidy stories? Sitting at a bar having drinks with old friends:
Hey, let me tell you how I was recruited by the Agency.
Or lying in bed with a woman:
Have I ever told you about the time I helped track a cell of Islamist terrorists in Jakarta?
Or on the phone with his father:
There’s this time I fucked up and a bunch of people died. Anything like that ever happen to you?
These were stories and questions he was not allowed to voice. So they silently caromed in his head like echoes of words that hadn’t been spoken, soundless reverberations, ghosts of stories. They took on a spectral power, haunting him.

Leo had always been a thinker, a quiet one, studiously independent. He’d grown up in Bethesda, the son of an energy executive and an intellectual property attorney who had heroically managed to have a child despite their hectic schedules and who seemed disappointed that they weren’t congratulated for this more. Leo read a lot. He scored a spot at Harvard, majoring in history with a focus on modern Asia; took a semester in Kyoto; and spent his first two years after college teaching English in Indonesia, living in a borderline-prehistoric village three hours from Jakarta. Why there? Mainly because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, partly because he wanted something unique, and, yes, partly because he was intrigued by hints from an acquaintance about how even normal-looking white guys could easily score with hot Asian chicks (which turned out to be woefully untrue at the Muslim village where he was stationed). He spent another year backpacking the continent, and then it was back to Harvard for grad work.

He somewhat perplexed his parents by choosing neither law nor business but political history as his field. They reminded him often of how paltry a salary professors earned. The brilliance of their son was never in question, only the best way to make use of that brilliance.

Leo spent years crafting an unwieldy dissertation on Asian dictators, paying particular attention to the Kims in North Korea and Suharto in Indonesia. Despots fascinated him. The cults of personality, the secret police, the godlike ability to not only rule but also define reality for their subjects, the various and unbelievably creative ways to kill dissidents—how could anyone not find this interesting? The thing that uncomprehending citizens of free countries often missed was how charismatic tyrants were, how frighteningly
likable
these guys could be when they weren’t torturing you or murdering your family. Kim Jong Il was beloved for the way he’d fought off the Japanese invaders, appreciated for his backslapping bonhomie. Suharto had a magnetic smile, a way with women, and was cheered for cracking down on Communists and convincing the islands’ hundreds of ethnic groups to play nice. That sort of charm was a mystery to Leo. He learned to speak Bahasa while in Indonesia, he taught himself rudimentary Korean and Cantonese while studying the Kims and Mao, but that certain
something
that the great leaders possessed, that
it
quality, was utterly beyond him. Which made it all the more fascinating.

Leo was preparing to defend his dissertation when the Twin Towers fell. He was in Logan airport that very morning, awaiting a flight to Washington to visit his parents. Maybe he was even sitting in the same chair one of the hijackers had occupied a few hours earlier. The burning tower had been on the TV for a few minutes before Leo realized it; he only noticed when he found himself staring at a young coed, maybe ten years his junior—God, he was getting old—and finally he heard what the announcer was saying, saw the screen. He stood, walked closer. By the time the second plane hit, there was a crowd. First everyone so quiet, then one by one the gasps, the cell phones materializing in shaky hands, the airport staff running in both directions. People watched the planes on the tarmac with a sort of helplessness, as if those flights too were doomed but the passengers inside them didn’t know it yet. Then the planes stopped lifting off, the constant rumbling on the other side of the glass was silenced, and unhelpful announcements droned in the static as lines formed everywhere, as if people still believed that order would be restored if they were patient and found the right person to complain to.