Thomas Mullen - The Revisionists

For my sons

When we act, we create our own reality. And while youre studying that realityjudiciously, as you willwell act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and thats how things will sort out. Were historys actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Unnamed aide to President George W. Bush, quoted in
Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the
Presidency of George W. Bush,
New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004

Mailer was haunted by the nightmare that the evils of the present not only exploited the present, but consumed the past, and gave every promise of demolishing whole territories of the future.

Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel,
the Novel as History

History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

A trio of bulbous black SUVs passes sleekly by, gliding through their world like seals. The city shines liquidly off their tinted windows, the yellow lights from the towers and the white lights from the street and the red lights they ignore as they cruise through the intersection with a honk and a flash of their own beams. People on the sidewalk barely give them a glance.

I cross the street, which is empty in their wake. Most of the National Press Buildings lights are still on, as reporters for outlets across the globe type away to beat their deadlines. Editors are waiting in Tokyo, the masses are curious in Mumbai, the public has a right to know in London. The sheer volume of information being churned out of that building is unfathomable to me, the weight of it, and also the waste. As if people needed it.

Its just past ten and my mark is on the move. He has an important datea date with history, in fact, though he isnt thinking of it that way. Hes meeting his source, the mysterious individual who has provided him with glimpses of a golden but dangerous truth, a mythic grail whose existence he was beginning to doubt. The source has promised him the grail, tonight. But only if they meet in person.

My mark is thin, harried. He doesnt look like hes slept much lately. Even my rough understanding of contemp style tells me he has little: his white shirt is stained with coffee and is untucked in the back; his jeans seem tighter than hes comfortable with; hes had to adjust himself in the glass elevator that isnt as private as he believes it to be. He is thirty and aging too quickly, his thin hair graying along the temples (but then, my judgment of age in this beat isnt good either; the legacy of their insufficient medicine, diet, and hygiene is difficult for me to puzzle out). He lives with the realization that his lifes work, his reason for being, is overlooked by this world he thinks he is serving. He is unimportant. He doesnt say this to the people he works with, but he blathers about it on his pseudonymous blog, and in the constantly revised, unpublished memoir hiding in his computer, both of which he turns to late at night after filing a story few people will read.

Oh, but you are important, Mr. Karthik M. Chaudhry! You have no idea how much value is placed on what you do, and how terrible is that value.

Ive been watching him for days. He talks on his phone and attends press conferences at which he is relegated to the back rows, then he sits in libraries or cafs with his laptop and reads and writes, reads and writes. So much information here, they spend the majority of their lives losing themselves in it. As far as I can tell, he doesnt have any friends. His apartment is devoid of womens clothes or toiletries, not even a secret photograph of an idolized, untouchable someone in his top drawer. Its because of his dedication to work, or thats what he tells himself. He is, after all, very good at what he does, and its getting him into trouble.

We crossed paths in the hallway of his building earlier today and I slipped a Tracker onto him, so I know when he leaves his office and enters the elevator. Thats why Ive left the bar across the street, the Anonymous Source, where Ive been staking him out, nursing a couple of drinks against Department regulations.

I walk into the lobby, past the elderly Chinese man selling his magazines and newspapers and brightly colored candy bars, past the tie boutique and the shop of tourist paraphernalia: framed photographs of the White House, coffee mugs and pencils emblazoned with U.S. flags. My mark is descending in the glass elevator.

Seeing him is all the confirmation I need, so I walk back out and get into my car. I know where hes going and when hell be there. I also know that he doesnt own a car and will take the Metro, which, due to a disabled train on the Blue Line, will make his ride a good ten minutes longer than my drive. Im in a rented tan Corolla, which the people in Logistics had recommended based on its not being conspicuous. Before they sent me here, I trained on a replica they created for me, but I find the real thing awkward to handle, and I have to hope I dont break some obscure traffic rule and get pulled over. The vodkas I drank make this even more surreal, the vehicle large and bulky, this sprawling extension of myself, numb and careening into a world I barely understand.

And what a city! The perfect geometric layout, the wide avenues and clean sidewalks, all the monuments bathed in celestial light. The contemps around me have no idea how long it will take to rebuild something like this. Do they see the beauty around them? Are they dizzy from the heights of this pinnacle their civilization is teetering upon? Nothey troop along, necks crooked into their ancient phones like bent marionettes. Their right cheeks glow.

The night is cool and I drive with the windows down. I love the air here, the crispnessI forget how bad our air is, despite the recent improvements, until I come back to a time like this, before all the burning.

At a traffic light I check my internal GeneScan and see that the hags too are in motion. The GeneScan tells me when someone of a non-contemporary genetic makeup is in the vicinity, allows me to track him down. Right now the hags are doing some tracking of their own. One of them, I think, but possibly more; despite the best efforts of the people in Engineering, my GeneScan detects hags accurately only within a mile, and anything much beyond that comes across as just a faint shimmer, a certain foreboding.

Yes, Mr. Chaudhry, you are important indeed. You have no friends and no lover, but you have me, your guardian angel. Well, not really thatindeed, the furthest thing from it. But you do have me, as well as a few otherswere all intertwined like strands of DNA, like subject and verb and object, unspooling into the future, the generations and sentences extending endlessly.

Again, not really. The end for you, Im afraid, is quite near.

I protect the Events.

Thats the most succinct way of putting it, and thats how my superiors at the Department first explained it to me. I used to know as little about these particular Events as anyone else did, but now Im an expert on this era. I know why these people are fighting each other, why they hate those they hate, what they most fear. At least, thats what they told me in Training. Dont be intimidated, they said. You will know these people better than they know themselves. After all, how well do we truly understand what were doing, and why, as were actually doing it? Its only later, as were looking back, that events fall into easily definable categories. Motive, desire, bias. Happenstance, randomness, intent. Cause and effect, ends and means. One thing this job has taught me is that when people are caught in the maddening swirl of time, they do what they need to do and invent their reasoning afterward. They exculpate themselves, claim they had no choice. They throw their hands up to the heavens or shrug that Events simply were what they were. They used to call it fate, or God, or Allah, though of course such talk is illegal now.