The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  Donk says nothing.

  “And I can’t deny that you have been…effective…at expanding the effects of the Fritz Act, as desired. I can’t help but wonder why someone with skill and influence would give over so completely to mine.”

  Donk says nothing.

  “Are you frightened?”

  “It’s not a question of fear.”

  “You know I might kill you.”

  “I think it’s unlikely.”

  “You intrigue me. It’s possible you’re the first intriguing person I’ve met in a year.” Donk has nothing intelligent to say to this, so he says nothing, which allows Morris to keep telling him things. “You aligned yourself with me, before you even knew of me. That’s rare. Very rare.”

  “I get feelings. I follow them.”

  Morris shoos this thought away with a microscopic shrug. “You appear to have function. I may have sent you to help me without knowing I was doing it. Maybe you’re a lesson of my rise rather than my struggle.” Morris pauses, as if to invite comment. Donk, utterly confused by all this, keeps mum.

  “You’re going to live for now. But it’s important you don’t think I’m placing any trust in you when I tell you the things I’m about to tell. Which is why I wanted you to have a look at this.” Morris rises and walks to the thing in the middle of the room. It’s all right angles, a perfect steel box. The gurney upon which it rests has a panel of some sort built into it. In a corner of this panel is a keypad, into which Morris now swiftly keys in a complex sequence, causing one side of the thing to lower with a sigh, revealing a mass of tubes and metal instruments. There is a powerful light emanating from inside. Morris releases two catches on either side of the box’s lid and lifts it up until the stems lock into place.

  “What I do with my true enemies,” Morris says, “I put them into an oubliette. What I do with allies who fail me, I put them into an oubliette. What I do with strangers who have no function, I put them into an oubliette.”

  An unbidden sound comes from Donk. Morris, taking it for fear, looks pleased. “Let me show you how it works,” he says, with a clinician’s detachment and a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for minutiae. “Here are the most obvious restraints. Extra-strength Velcro, NASA-caliber, more than ten times the hook density. Difficult—” demonstrating with a grunt—“to open, even with two hands. Here for the wrists, here the elbows, here the shoulders, hips, knees…but the Velcro is only the second line of defense. These—” indicating a series of small U-shaped brackets set within three shallow grooves running the length of the padded space—“latch into the tenant’s harness—full body, high-quality nylon, fully breathable, untearable, firm. You can’t struggle against it. Only authorized movement is possible—but there is authorized movement. It’s necessary to prevent the total atrophy of the musculature. We keep the body strong, you see—” at this Morris jabs some buttons and robot arms in the guts of the oubliette begin gyrating in controlled rhythmic ellipses—“the crèche has enough space to allow mandatory exercise of limbs and core. Tubes provide hydration here, nutrients here, voiding waste here and here. Weekly, we flush the crèche with antiseptic and water, to prevent bedsores and other skin ailments—the hydraulics lift mouth and nose out of the stream. A tenant can stay in my oubliettes a long, long time without fatality. Decades. A lifetime.”

  Donk peeks deep into the crèche, imagines the merciless hug of Velcro straps and harness, the latches hooking you into your coffin at forty-eight points of non-articulation, paralyzing you along the spine at the back of the heels, the elbows, knees, ankles, wrists, thighs, a trio of latches in isosceles formation along each shoulder blade, a parallelogram affixing your skull to the back of the crèche, tiny, recessed, so reticent that were you to find yourself interred in an oubliette you’d never guess they were there, you’d never understand the cause of your total immobility. Donk notices the interior is mirrored, and it comes to him: the bright lights from within make sense. Not even the escape of darkness. You’d have nothing to watch but yourself, losing your mind, day after day, year after year.

  Perfect.

  Morris presents Donk with a bland but meaningful countenance. “I see you understand about my oubliettes?”

  “I do,” Donk vows, knowing he has selected the proper agent for his wrath. His new boss is, in his own way, also a man of many compartments. Even disapproving Bailey will have to agree that, whatever else it’s cost them, he’s at last discovered the penalty to fit Ralph’s crimes.

  “Good. And, as somebody who’s made me promises, who has raised my expectations…you understand why I’m showing this to you?”

  “Yes. If I don’t deliver, what you do is, you put me into an oubliette.”

  Then Morris smiles, makes his face friendly save for blackberry eyes. “Good. Now for business. I’m interested in only a handful of changes.”

  “Changes.”

  “It’s already started. My people are the first change. Obviously, you’ve noticed them. The former JAWPI inmates will be the next. I have plans for ‘the loonies,’ as you call them. You assisted already, with your arrangements to expel them all at once. They’re ready and totally accessible for what’s coming next.”

  “Which is?”

  “My trustees are valuable. Each represents significant investment: of time, attention, money, molding, training. And this is a compromised place.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “As such, I’d prefer to keep them separate, and maintain a separate force for everyday use. What makes our friends ‘the loonies’ so perfect is precisely their disposability. They’ve been disposed of already by the world. Can there possibly be any complaint against my making use of them? Dr. Ragesalad and this hospital’s staff have had their use of the patients for years, pharmaceutically speaking—but I’m a bit of a pharmacist myself. Soon they’ll be ours forever, if properly managed. Therefore—lucky you—I need a manager.”

  Donk remembers what Boyd said about the loony at the bowling alley, and the syringe. He says nothing.

  “You’ll take charge of them. They’ll be your assistants. Gophers. Cannon fodder, when needed.” Morris closes the lid on the oubliette, deactivates it with another keyed sequence. “Now let’s talk about you, and let’s talk about Gordy. That slippery little invisible bastard.”

  “Lot of manpower out. You must want him pretty bad.”

  “He has something that belongs to me.”

  “Tell me what it is, I’ll keep an eye out for it.” Staying casual as possible.

  Morris ignores the offer. “I’d begun to fear he’d gotten away clean,” he says. “Now you bring me this idea he’s somehow still wandering the hospital.”

  “Accurate, I think.”

  Morris smiles. “Well, let’s say this: It had better be, for your sake.”

  Donk looks at the control panel of the oubliette, asleep save for a single slowly winking red telltale, and nods.

  “This is the part where you tell me exactly how to find Gordy,” Morris prompts.

  At the precipice toward which he’s been running for weeks, Donk doesn’t allow himself to pause as he hurls his last shredded principles into open air. Forcing Bailey’s disapproving face from his mind, he collects his thirty pieces, hopes to flip his silvery chips to the felt with enough backspin to keep his annoying, hairy, holy friend alive.

  “My understanding is Gordy appears to people who trust him.” Every word feels like a distinct object peeling off his tongue, each requiring an extraction by force. “There’s a man Gordy trusts. A civilian who has a weird sort of juice on the Island. He’s…useful to me. Valuable. Likely that means valuable to you. It’d probably be in both our interests if he stays active.”

  “Name. Now.”

  “His name is Julius. ‘Father’ Julius. Poses as a priest, sort of. Denim robes. Big beard. You’ve seen him?”

  “
I’m aware of him.”

  “Watch for him. He’s coming to the Wales common room. He’ll make your man come to the surface.” Donk pauses, then commits fully. “He…may be trying to move your guy. Out of this facility. Very soon. In hours, not days, I believe.”

  “Move him where?”

  “Somewhere else. Out of town.”

  “More precise.”

  “More I do not know.”

  “You’re supposed to be the guy who knows things, not the guy who guesses things.”

  “My guesses are right more often than the facts you’ll get from another.”

  “But you don’t know all things.”

  Morris’s eyes search his face again. Donk doesn’t know what to make of this. Clearly some point is being made, one which he lacks the context to grasp. “No. I don’t.”

  “Good. Do you know who does know all things?”

  “You do,” Donk says, immediately. Morris watches him for a long time, the gaze of a man who is trying to figure out if he’s being bluffed. “You do make me curious,” Morris murmurs. Donk, his instincts pristine and lucid, clears his throat and takes a plunge. “I have a request,” he says, and watches suspicion bloom on Morris’s face.

  “After the agreement’s made is a bad time to negotiate.”

  “Call it a preference if you want. I doubt you’ll have a problem fulfilling it. I suppose you’re going to need to get rid of Ralph.”

  “There’s no use trying to save him.”

  “You misunderstand,” Donk says. “When you get Ralph—when I help you get Ralph, what I would like you to do is, I want you to put that son of a bitch into an oubliette. And let me be the one who closes the lid.”

  Morris smiles slowly. “You do interest me,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Later, out in the urban retch that passes for fresh air in these parts, amazed to be alive, Donk wanders, dodging open manholes, carrying a sack full of cell phones, tasting life and freedom. Nearby, less than a mile distant, the outlines of Domino City projects rise up against him like idiot giants, and Donk yet again imagines himself rushing at them with a crane and wrecking ball, swinging until the spheroid mass is windmilling in a taut circle, running up on the Dominos and smashing them until all is rubble and ash and dust, smashing them until not one cinderblock is whole, until not one more child has to live hemmed up inside one of those dim gray training-prisons…his is what Bailey doesn’t understand. It’s not about getting Ralph, it’s about going as far as you can, taking down not just Ralph but a world that might allow a Ralph to rise.

  It was Bailey and Boyd who found him, three days after he’d made the tenth shot, standing in the middle of a project room that may as well have been a cell, hands curling and relaxing, gathering a new rage he’d never felt before, bringing himself to a new and terrible resolve, climbing out the vent above the door, wandering the Island, lost and alone. The Ligneclaires, already a part of Yale’s burgeoning organization, discovered him huddled against the rain under an abandoned scrap of corrugated tin, hungry and frightened and filthy, and brought him to the greenhouse. Brought him to Yale, to his own brother. So, in its own way, the tenth shot really had brought Yale back. There had been good months then, maybe even a good year.

  And then Ralph took it all away. He’s never had to pay any price for that.

  Donk walks—slow at first, but then more briskly as the finality of the course he’s set for himself begins to percolate into his consciousness—in the direction of the Domino they call HQ—the Headquarters. Home of top gangsters in shiny shark-suits of silver and purple and emerald, who make deals and plan scores, who give out orders—and oh, do they hate having to shuck and jive and come cap-in-hand for a bag-boy in a suit like Daniel Donkmien. Oh, do they resent him his clear influence, his slippery unknown-ableness. Where he came from. What his angle is. Why he has Ralph’s trust. It would be insanity to visit HQ if you were so hated by the bad cats who ran it, insanity to show your face in a place where an accident could be so easily arranged, an accident without blame or accountability, what a shame…madness to even walk past the place alone. Donk heads for it. The fire escape will take him to the roof. Morris has set him a tail, of course—likely one of those dangerous little men—but let him watch and wonder why I’m here. Nobody’s keeping me from that spot; not tonight.

  He has a hidden cache on the roof—another compartment. From it he grabs some wine and two glasses, sneaks out, and climbs up the fire escape to the roof to await the coming morning. He knows he should return to Bailey. In her fear for his survival she’ll be fuming for detail, furious at his absence, but a realization has been settling on him: Soon it will have to be over with Bailey. This new arrangement will crash into you, swallow you, consume you. You’d thought of escape for all, but for you there can be none. You’re the monkey with his fist in the jar. Morris isn’t the sort to release someone who’s gained his attention.

  He sips the wine. Beside him, Yale’s memorial glass holds its measure. Behind him, the burned and shattered frame of a structure lurks, black against the midnight-blue sky of pre-sunrise morn, twisted in the gloaming shadow into strange shapes suggesting arachnid ancestry. It looks nothing like a greenhouse anymore. Donk faces toward the coming sunrise. From the roof, he can see over the municipally funded barricades, overpass and trestle, which isolate the Island from the mainstream; beyond, the city life still twinkles artificial brightness, and in middle distance the skyline grasps for the clouds; mastodons of commerce reaching illuminated fingers to the sky, flattening out into streams of twinkling orange and white lights rushing to him and escaping away to the horizon. All this gorgeous madness we’ve created, Donk thinks, deep in the poetry of morning wine. This entire artificial cosmos—it can’t last. Impossible to sustain it forever, but we won’t stop building it larger until reality forces implosion. No stars visible in the sky from here; only a setting blood moon beneath the lone eye of Mars. The only stars to see in a city cling to the streets in straight lines. We’ve purchased the stars and brought them down to earth.

  CHASE

  The loony release was nothing like the smooth transition Representative Fritz insisted it would be. Someone let us all out early, and all at once. It was as if someone beat her to it, opened the locks before everyone had taken their place, a bull-run when people were still putting on their shoes. A nightmare for all parties involved. A major embarrassment for both Fritz and JAWPI. It hadn’t been the plan. An intelligent mind might ask how it was done. A wiser soul might ponder why.

  As to “how”: You’d need someone on the inside. Someone familiar with the layout of the building, a trusted nobody looking for a fat payday, some janitor or low-rung orderly. Someone who had keys to open and close the place. And someone else to organize, who knew exactly how the Fritz Act would play out, piece by piece. And you’d need somebody brokering it, someone locally connected, someone who knew where all the levers of Island power were hidden and how to pull them. The inside person was a hire, unimportant; whoever they were, their identity never came to light—but I became more familiar than I wanted with both the organizer and the broker. Morris convinced Donk to let them out early; I think it’s fair to say he wanted to create an embarrassing situation for powerful people. And, just a day later, he created the solution to the problem he’d created—with himself primed to profit. That appears to be Morris’s way.

  I can’t say precisely what that solution was—Donk kept stingy with those details. But I know it was pharmaceutical in nature, and I saw the effects. It was the cardinals that gave the doses to the loonies and kicked the whole thing off. They started early in the afternoon of the day, roaming with backpacks full of doses in tiny syringes, covering every bit of Loony Island, catching patients and sticking them. Based on the behavior of those they caught, you’d have to guess the doses held some sort of amphetamine, but I suspect some other element, t
oo. By evening the whole thing had built up a head of steam—loonies rioted in the avenues, tore down street lamps, and looted the shops—and none of them with a thought or memory left in their heads, it seemed. Around the Island, folks remember it as the Loony Riot. It changed things.

  It was an unconscionable thing to do. A nightmare. Morally depraved. Naturally, it worked like gangbusters. The upshot for the institute—whether intentional or not—was a total reclassification of the issue. It was a problem, yes, but it was no longer a medical problem, it was a crime problem. Reported on a different part of the newspaper, so they could all just scapegoat the Institute’s director and relax.

  Nor was JAWPI the only beneficiary. Donk got savvy, as was his habit. Where others might see only theft and destruction, he saw a work force. These loonies were blank-slate absorbent; they could assimilate all the best practices of the existing gangs, and, better still, they’d work for almost nothing. Totally expendable when taken individually, but vital as a whole. Before long he couldn’t remember how anything ever got done without them. And it stands to reason that whatever helped Donk also benefitted Donk’s new boss. So there, maybe, you have the “why” of it.

  I know it was the cardinals who started things, and I know it was doses, because they came after me with their syringes, too. After all, wasn’t I a loony? We were pretty easy to catch, most of us. The only ones who escaped were the few who had wandered out and away into town already. And me, of course. I wouldn’t let them dose me.

  Me, I ran.

  * * *

  —

  Dave Waverly’s car purrs toward Loony Island in Friday’s evening light, Dave at the wheel, Julius trying not to let his frenzy of anxiety show; he napped far longer than he intended, then they spent far longer than he wanted this afternoon with Dave’s paperwork. Anxiety aside, Julius is pleased enough to ride rather than run; Gordy’s existence is leading the priest down deep trails of speculation, which might make negotiating Loony Island on foot—its open manholes and free-range mental patients—a tricky business…How does Gordy flicker? Might it be some sort of involuntary telepathy, developed evolutionarily, as indeliberate in deployment, as untargeted and unconscious as a chameleon’s progression from brown to green? You’re not up on the latest pamphlets. As a good priest, are you meant to believe in evolution? Or wait—have you evolved to believe in evolution? Have others evolved to disbelieve in it?