The Revisionists Read Online Free PDF

isn’t considered important by the Department. So why did the GeneScan lead me here?
    During my gigs it’s tempting to think of myself as the only living person in a land of ghosts, and the effect is heightened now. The city feels peaceful from inside the park, as if the silent prayers of all these people can blot out the world’s noise.
    Then the names stop, and, one by one, the people blow out their candles. Little flecks of hope are extinguished all around me. The world grows darker; orange glows scar the inside of my retinas and dance like a busted GeneScan. Some of the people drop their candles, ends still smoking, into a pile. Others hold on to theirs. They stay where they are, alone or huddled in sobbing groups, or they leave the square, slowly. There was no announcement calling this activity to its end; it was as if some telepathic message were sent, or some genetic instinct requiring no conscious thought.
    It’s amazing how sadness can be so beautiful.
    Ghosts are floating past me in every direction, and I slowly walk around, looking for I don’t know what. Something. Something of obvious import. As if the job is ever that easy. Again I’m revealing myself to countless contemps, egregiously violating Department norms, but I don’t know what else to do.
    “You look about as skeptical as I feel,” a woman’s voice says.
    Her skin is very dark to my eyes, her hair tied in thin braids that fall behind her shoulders. She wears glasses with thick purple frames. We’d been standing next to each other, just looking at the square. Some people have relit their candles and are walking around with them, as if needing the light to guide them, or afraid to let go.
    What does she mean? Maybe I’m not doing a good enough job blending in—she noticed I’m one of the only people here who haven’t been crying, whose eyes aren’t red. But neither are hers.
    I motion to the extinguished candle resting in her joined hands. “Who are you here for?”
    “Lieutenant Marshall Wilson, my brother. He was in the army. Killed last June.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss.” We don’t say that in my time, but I learned it in my Customs training.
    She looks at my empty hands. “How about you?”
    “My brother too.” The lie just comes out because I don’t want her to realize that I don’t belong here. A harmless mistake, perhaps. And I want to keep her talking to me. Her eyes are so wide and somber, and the air feels charged with its candles and prayers and memories of the lost.
    I burn her image into my drive, but not for any report I plan on filing. Just a little something to carry inside me after she’s gone.
    She repeats what I said to her, expressing her sorrow for my “loss,” completing the ritual, our little tragic circle.
    “So I suppose if it really mattered what people think,” she says, “if all this combined yearning could do anything, then they’d all come back somehow. What happened to them would be undone. But that’s crazy. So it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what the point is.”
    I don’t know what to say.
    She continues. “Some socially acceptable way to make us feel better, I guess. And maybe I did feel better, for about two minutes.” She shakes her head. “But now I’m only angrier.”
    I’m not sure if people here always speak so freely with strangers or if she’s given herself up to the mood of the event. Or perhaps she assumes from my mere presence that I agree with her on all things, or at least the important ones.
    I met my wife at a public gathering—very different from this one, of course, but I can’t help thinking of it. It was so very long ago, and so far in the future. I miss her. I wonder if that’s why I’m still standing here talking to a woman who desperately needs someone to hear her.
    I notice that she wrote words on the circular piece of cardboard that rings her candle. “What did you write?”
    She instinctively angles the candle so that I can’t see the words.