Revolution Read Free Page A

shrinking? Over the last year, has it declined by half or risen a third? The count was affected by invisible forces. A flock of birds rising and falling. The number was out of control, a wind coming up in the night, the way those bodies appeared on the streets or in the fields—not that we saw the bodies themselves, we only heard about them, the numbers of them, attached to phrases like “totally false,” “a fabrication of subversives,” “a massacre.”
    *   *   *
    We were standing alongside the bus. It was maybe the tenth or eleventh time we’d had to get off the bus and now it was nearly dawn. Every half hour, all night, the bus had stopped and we’d had to get off, over and over. I was saying to George that I’d told him this wasn’t going to work. Then the soldiers said, “You two stay here,” and they waved everyone else back on the bus. There were about six or seven soldiers. They took all of our things out of our bags and lined them up on the ground. They took away our map. “Forbidden.” They gestured with their machine guns for us to pick up our belongings and explain what each item was. They asked questions with their machine guns. “You,” they said, pointing at me with a machine gun. “What are you doing in El Salvador?”
    â€œ Turismo ,” I said. (I’d been told that if a soldier points a gun at you, you should always say “ turismo .”)
    It was still dark, but you could feel the light on its way. “What’s in this bottle?” they said. “What is this book? What does it say? Read it. Read it aloud. Translate.” They were passing around our passports. They spilled the plastic bag of cassette tapes on the ground. “What’s this?” They took one of the cassette tapes and put it into our cassette player. We didn’t know for a moment if they had picked one with music or interviews on it, and George looked very grave. They turned on the cassette player. They had picked one with music on it.
    â€œSing,” they said. “Sing along.”
    We sang. It was a song about a transvestite who loves another transvestite, or maybe only one of them is a transvestite. George and I sang about how girls can be boys and boys can be girls and how mixed up that is. A sad song with deep tones. Behind us the sun was coming up.
    â€œTranslate,” the soldiers said with their machine guns. “What does it say?”
    â€œLove song,” George told them, and they did something that looked like a laugh.

TYPICAL MAN
    I met George when I was seventeen and a freshman in college at a large state school in a large state, the entire student body united behind rituals involving their sports activities. I was new to that part of the country, had grown up in Chicago, but George had been raised nearby. He’d grown up in the western middle of America, in the kind of neighborhood where most people don’t have passports and no one speaks any language other than the one they’d been raised to suspect was God’s favorite. George had played tag among these people, had attended their schools, dated their daughters, and so by all counts he should have been like them, but he wasn’t, or he didn’t seem so to me.
    *   *   *
    I became his girlfriend at a protest. I’d heard the chanters and the bullhorn from my window, and I’d come out of the dorm and over the grass to watch. I’d never seen a protest up close before. It was one of those anti-CIA protests of the Cold War eighties, back when the CIA still made it serious business to come to campus once a year to interview possible recruits, and the hippies left over from the sixties showed up to exercise their right to object.
    I remember seeing George that day. I’d met him once before. He was a friend of a friend from the dorm, and we’d talked one night at a concert. Now he was