The Office of Historical Corrections(37)
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Back at Eileen’s, Vera found William circling the living room, clutching a teddy bear while Eileen typed a paper. Vera made grilled cheese for lunch. She told Eileen that she and William had another bus to catch, all the way to California, and would be gone that evening. In the afternoon, Eileen left for class, and told Vera to lock the door behind her on the way out. Vera hugged her goodbye. Eileen ruffled William’s hair.
“Lucky boy you are,” she said. “Such a big trip, for such a little person.”
The moment Eileen was out the door, Vera set fire to William’s forged birth certificate with a cigarette lighter, afraid she’d be unable to resist the temptation to keep him otherwise. She started a letter three times. On the first attempt, she emphasized that she hadn’t meant to take him, that it felt like he’d been given to her and she just hadn’t questioned it. A paragraph in, she realized this wasn’t her story anymore, that the point was not her own defense. In the second version, she focused on all of William’s milestones: her favorite things about him, his best days—she wanted to show he’d been happy and unharmed, but when she reread the letter it seemed cruel, to emphasize the time his father had missed and wouldn’t get back. In her third and final effort, she tried to account in a matter-of-fact way for the time she’d kept him, to assure his father that she’d done her best not to damage him, that he had not fallen into terrible hands, that he had suffered no irreparable trauma, that she was not a person who would ever harm him, though of course she understood now that she had. She held William in her arms until he fell asleep, then picked him up and tucked him into Eileen’s bed. She texted to confirm Eileen was on her way home. She left the note for William’s father and the note she’d written for Eileen, with William’s father’s name and address, sitting on the coffee table, next to Eileen’s apartment key. She walked three blocks and hailed a cab.
On the way to the bus station, the city went by in a blur of brick and beige and gray. Vera was startled and shaking. Adam and Derek were waiting until they could be found again, but Vera understood now that she would need to be lost forever, would need to let the whole of the murky country swallow her up. The cabdriver thought she was drunk and kept offering to pull over if she needed to throw up. The third time he offered, she said yes, but when she opened the door and leaned out, nothing came up. There was just the shock of the cold, and the dry empty heave of her belly.
The Office of Historical Corrections
Our office was tucked away in a back corridor of one of the city’s labyrinth brutalist buildings, all beige concrete and rows of square windows. I had never minded DC’s lingering architecture; I had been in college before I understood I was meant to find it ugly and not cozily utilitarian. But I had grown up with the architecture, grown up idealizing people who worked in buildings like mine, and besides, I liked to remember that the term brutalism came not from any aesthetic assessment, but from the French for “raw concrete.” Since starting at the institute, I had formally corrected mistaken claims about the term’s etymology seven times. Small corrections usually made me feel pitiful and pedantic, but I liked making that one, liked to think of us, not just the people in my office, but all of the city’s remaining civil servants, as people trying to make something solid out of what raw material we had been given, liked to think that we were in the right setting to do our jobs.
Of course, as a field agent, I rarely spent a full day indoors. Often that freedom felt like a luxury, but it was June—not quite the worst of summer, but hot enough that walking my regular daily rounds left me flecked with sweat and constantly looking for excuses to go indoors. Some days I went into shops full of kitsch and corrected souvenirs with their dates wrong just to absorb the air-conditioning. After everything else, I would remember how often I had been bored at the beginning of that summer, how worried I was that our work had become inconsequential, how I had wondered whether I would ever again be a part of anything that mattered.
The vision for the Institute for Public History that summoned me from my former job as a history professor at GW had been grandiose. An ambitious freshman congresswoman demanded funding to put a public historian in every zip code in the country, a correction for what she called the contemporary crisis of truth. It was pitched as a new public works project for the intellectual class, so many of us lately busy driving cars and delivering groceries and completing tasks on demand to make ends meet. Government jobs would put all those degrees to work and be comparatively lucrative. The congresswoman envisioned a national network of fact-checkers and historians, a friendly citizen army devoted to making the truth so accessible and appealing it could not be ignored. We had started as a research institute, loosely under the direction of the Library of Congress—an NIH for a different sort of public health crisis. We were the solution for decades of bad information and bad faith use of it. Our work was to protect the historical record, not to pick fights (guideline 1) or correct people’s readings of current news (guideline 2).
The post-election energy that created us had stalled almost immediately; the former congresswoman was now a TV pundit. At the institute, we were only forty people total, twenty of us headquartered in DC. The reduced parameters of our mission often led people to assume we were overzealous tour guides or long-winded museum employees who had strayed from our home base. Some of my colleagues leaned into the misunderstanding: Bill circled monuments correcting tourists with their facts mixed up, sometimes just by reading them the placards they’d walked by; Sophie rarely worked beyond the Smithsonian grounds; Ed hung out in breweries all day, but he checked in each week with such a lengthy log of plausible corrections no one was sure whether he was a friendly and efficient drunk or a gifted writer of fictional dialogue.