The Office of Historical Corrections(52)
“It would seem not,” I said.
“I better get back to the counter,” said Susan, finishing her cigarette and grinding the butt into the asphalt.
“Are you OK?” Nick asked.
“I’m fine,” I said reflexively, though I felt shaken. I thought I should call the office and alert them that there might be press after all, but I felt like I’d screwed up already, even though I knew, rationally, that it wasn’t my fault. I wanted to blame Genevieve, to imagine that her insistence that this job was controversial and worthy of TV had conjured up the danger and made it newsworthy, but I also knew it wasn’t her fault she was right.
“Should we start looking for this guy?” asked Genevieve. “Do you think it’s worth talking to the cops?” I assessed her, in her bright yellow sundress and camera-ready makeup. I wanted to laugh, but she seemed dead serious, as though she expected that not only was this now a joint mission, it also included fighting crime.
“I am not going to go chasing a villain who calls himself White Justice. Either a town is going to let a person run around goddamn calling himself White Justice or it isn’t,” I said. “The police will investigate the graffiti and I will investigate the facts on the sign.”
I pressed my fingertips to my temples and closed my eyes. When I opened them again the crowd was thinner, but the graffiti was still in front of me, violent and wet. I felt bad for snapping at Genevieve. Her eyeliner was smudged, like while we had been taking things in, she had been blinking away a tear. I wasn’t used to thinking of Genevieve as desperate. I could judge her for courting publicity only because I knew my rent would be paid no matter what happened here, and it wasn’t exactly my doing that she couldn’t say the same, but I didn’t feel good about my role in it. I filled Genevieve in on why I was actually there, and told her I was tracking the past and not the future, so if she wanted to wait for the cops and focus on this part of the story—the present—I’d stay out of her way. I asked if she was going to call the news, hoping I could at least give the director a warning, and when she was sheepish, I realized she wasn’t going to call anyone yet—right now there was nothing she had to make herself central to the story, so no reason she’d hand it to a reporter. I retracted my flicker of sympathy.
I walked with Nick to his car, where he put his arms around me and leaned his forehead into mine and asked if I was all right. The intimacy felt startling, a shock and not the fabled spark. I was afraid, and my fear indicted the idyllic morning we’d had, reminded me why I had come here and why I had left him. I had not wanted to be tricked into thinking I was safe—not with men like him, not in towns like this, not in crowds of good white people. I pulled away and got into the passenger seat.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Nick asked once he’d settled into the driver’s side. “I don’t like the idea of this guy being around. He’s obviously pretty close, and he may have seen us earlier. That show was probably for your benefit. I can drive and we can get your rental car later.”
“What are you going to do if he’s following me? Distract him with chitchat about the bylaws of the master race?”
“Do you know anything about whether or not this guy is dangerous?”
“Maybe he’s the kind of harmless white supremacist who threatens genocide for fun,” I said.
“Cassie,” said Nick.
I shushed him in the interest of answering his question through an internet search. It took a few tries combining keywords, but I summoned the right monster to my phone. White Justice had apparently been posting weekly videos for years. Considering the time he must have put into it, he had a sparse number of followers, but judging from their comments and upvotes they were mostly adoring. The top-rated video was from a year ago, just after Genevieve’s sign had gone up. I pushed play. White Justice’s large face filled the video window. He had panicked hazel eyes and patchy facial hair and a face that seemed like each individual feature could be attractive, but they somehow didn’t work together. His voice was booming, even with the volume low. The video zoomed out; he had given the phone camera to someone else. He stood in front of the sign, in the place where we had just been standing, wearing the trademark ascot and a fedora that appeared to be his own doing. A crowd of about a dozen people in the same getup was gathered near him. He gestured to the sign and ranted at some length, his speech punctuated by cheers. “The point of this is shame!” he continued. “Shame for white people! But we built this city! We built this state! We built this whole country! These people don’t build things! These people don’t love themselves! If death makes them so sad, where are the memorials to Milwaukee’s dead? What about Chicago’s? They kill their children! They don’t love their children! They hate us and they want us to hate us too! We do not! We are proud! We will fight back! We are the future!”
At that, the crowd joined in—this was one of the Free Americans’ rallying cries—We are the future—a cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn’t genocide or terror but the fact that it hadn’t completely worked yet. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans and their claims on being the only Americans transcended facts and time and progress, the way they always seemed to be around the corner, the way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the Do they know I’m human yet? the way they took delight in saying no, the way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.