The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  At this notion—that a being might evolve in such a way as to cause, within the mind of that being, a disbelief in evolution—Julius grins, despite growing nervous anticipation. An engine making itself invisible (or partially visible) to its own gears—that’s an irony for the finer sensibilities. The people who seek Gordy, now, those cardinals…have they ever seen him, or do they swing their swords for a phantom about whom they’ve only received instruction secondhand? Do they, casting about, resemble you? Do they chase without belief, with only some hope of future belief, that there truly might be a Gordy? And what about you? Flip the tables, Father; maybe you resemble them, not they you. If the faith of Gordy’s pursuers is blind, then how, exactly, is your relationship to Gordy different? Isn’t this all really about your young friend’s claim that he speaks to God? Don’t you see him as a way in to Him? A portal to the divine?

  Troubling, to consider one’s motives and suspect them impure. Right, Julius: You’re going to get Gordy out of this pickle and then what? Will he get you to the front of the line and on the chosen side of the velvet rope, elected among the elect with a face-to-face introduction to the triumvirate? Finally get the proof you’ve thirsted for. Gordy, introduce me to your friend, I’m a big fan, I’ve got all his books—incidentally don’t mention to him that until meeting you I always secretly thought he was a big old lie, at best a well-meaning hoax…but, but, but, listen, Gordy, listen, I, um, I’ve sort of devoted my life to the hoax on the hope it’s true, so could you put in a word? Ask Him to be so good as to justify the investment? Maybe he could autograph a photo of the two of us together, something I can show around?

  But whatever misgivings the priest might have about his own motives, there’s no keeping Gordy here a moment longer; he has to be spirited away as soon as can be managed. He’s got the most awful haunted eyes Julius has ever seen. When you see them you think—This is a man pursued by God. Which means, by logical progression, there is a God. The old ontological dodge: If a being capable of pursuit can be imagined, then it is a being greater than one incapable of pursuit. If God is pursuing somebody, there must perforce be a God in pursuit. Even if the logic’s off, here at last is some broth, however thin, which uses a divine stock; here at last may be the proof Father Bernadette could never furnish to you or Dave. Here at last are Daddy’s goddam rabbits. God, speaking. Even if he won’t speak to you, he’s speaking to somebody.

  And another thing.

  This also means, by logical progression, that a man, to whom God speaks, runs away. Troubling: The Almighty exists, and the vessel of his revelation is…fleeing? For what possible reason? And…fleeing how? Can God create a being so slippery even He cannot apprehend him? And aren’t you yourself that same slippery being, a fellow who pretends belief rather than experiences it, a fellow who believes not in God so much as the empty spaces where God ought to be, but isn’t?

  This is uncomfortable. Luckily, there are more practical matters at hand, like finding Gordy a safer place to hide. The Neon Chapel isn’t viable, not with the cardinals so near and your fellows at risk. Slantworthy Manor is out of the question; you’ll never set foot. And Donk’s not the first choice for this, for reasons you can’t even define. How odd to truly mistrust Donk, rather than to merely pretend it for public appearance. So, it’s got to be Dave Waverly. Good old Dave Waverly. You rarely think of him as just “Dave,” these days. He’s “Dave Waverly,” all of it together, like it’s one word, a single carved block of solid wood indicating a specific and predictable form. A fellow former sunrise enthusiast, Dave Waverly; he’d even been lurking back there your first morning, sequestered deep in the gloom, hidden though not hiding. He and Father Bernadette, watching you. What did they think of you as you came stumbling forward, intruding on their custom, casually vandalous, clumsily sacrilegious? Likely they’d at first stared bemused, but before long, I wager, they were laughing at you, silently but kindly. He hadn’t yet become “Dave Waverly.” Back then he’d been “Wavy Dave.” Still in possession of all the skills that make him such a formidable boardroom proxy on your behalf, but also in possession of his other demons, fully in their grip, bathed in filth and pain, showering in morning sunlight. “You’re taking a gamble,” Wavy Dave said, the day you recruited him as proxy. “I’m afraid you’ll regret it.” He took the job all the same, but warily, and then only because Father Bernadette goaded him. Wavy Dave taking a wary dare. But I haven’t ever regretted it, Dave Waverly. You took to that job like a duck to another duck, and you’ve always come through. And, once the sight of the flickering man melts your understandable skepticism, you’ll figure out that flight to Färland.

  “We’re nearly here,” Dave Waverly murmurs. Julius feels the centrifugal pull of the curves; they’re on the switchback road leading in. “Remember, tell the fellow whatever he needs to hear to get him into the car. We can worry about the rest later.”

  The car soon becomes a hassle; the loonies are making more of an obstruction than yesterday; they’re in the street, some of them, making a show of blocking the road. Dave honks, and they honk right back, pounding the hood before finally giving way. “I’ll try not to be long,” the priest tells him as they pull up to the Wales, opening the door before the car’s come to a complete stop. Dave Waverly says something that might have been “Be careful,” but it’s lost.

  Walking in, Julius is sure he’ll find the common room empty, but no—there’s the poor frightened fellow, hunched forward on the front of his chair, nary a flicker thrown. “Morris took me out of Färland,” Gordy says, beginning without preamble as soon as Julius draws near. His voice cracking. Coming on dark, Domino City out the windows shows black against the dim slate-blue smudge of clouded sky serving as tonight’s sunset. Julius, in a froth to get moving, bounces on his chair. “Things were…different in Färland,” Gordy says. “Very different. I can’t explain it. I stayed there for months and years. I told him everything, except what they wanted to know. He says I stole it but I never.”

  “Tell me later.” Fearful that an interruption will trigger another disappearing act, Julius knows he has no choice but to interrupt. Hours not days, Boyd had said. Well, it’s been hours. “I have a car waiting. We’re going to hop in and vamoose.”

  “I can’t go out there!”

  “The car’s going to take you wherever you want. Can’t help that bearded lady acrobat of yours if we don’t get you safe away, though. Time to go.” Julius peers into the gloaming of the sitting room, where long shadows might conceal anybody, wishing he’d had the foresight to have flipped on the lights as he entered—he’d considered doing so but deferred, thinking not to alarm his…friend? Ward? Target? Gordy stands.

  “Back to Färland?”

  Julius decides Dave Waverly had it right on the concept of untruth. What’s a little guilt next to the relief of implied incipient forward motion? “Absolutely yes. Right away. We’ll head to Färland just the way you want, we’ll find your bearded lady, and—” Julius feels a swick from someplace behind him as something cold passes easily through his denim robe and bites his arm hard. In the moment he feels it more as pressure than pain. Looking down, he sees the sheet of bleed seeping its way over and throughout the sleeve and the sweat stands up on his forehead as his head feels light and heavy and his left knee buckles. It feels important, suddenly, to lie down. With the strength remaining in his right leg, he attempts to lower himself carefully, but he loses his balance halfway and lands heavily on his haunches as the wetness tickles silent down his ribs and pools on the floor and he sits fighting against the tremors happening in his stomach and there are now cardinals all around him with their wooden swords swinging swing-swing-swinging until one of them knocks up against some portion of Gordy who’s invisible again but no matter he couldn’t have avoided the five of them working the room together with ruthless efficiency, catching him—how funny, now that Gordy’s invisible it looks like pantomime, they drag him over to another cardinal
who pushes a stretcher on wheels and he sees the shape Gordy makes invisible beneath the blanket they’ve thrown over him sees the frenetic movements of leatherstrap restraints affixed with expert hands Gordy struggling invisible from the end of a long tunnel as Julius lays his impossibly heavy porcelain Faberge head down as carefully as possible onto the beige carpeting and watches a man dressed not in cardinal red but civvies who strolls around to the stretcher which rocks with the struggles and Julius creates a thick puddle of vomit all around himself into his beard and hair, the man in civvies puts his face down close next to the stretcher headboard whispers something to the space there his face distorted hateful and fierce, and shit o my that must be the famous Morris Love, the stretcher rocking with struggle and stars popping up in Julius’s vision and his head going up and down and up and down waves on the beige carpeted sea, sinking into a cold and blessed stillness yet there’s a sense it’s terribly important he remain above water he brings hand to mouth sets his teeth against the pad of the thumb

  and bites down

  hard

  New pain sends adrenaline splintering through Julius’s bloodstream, bringing his mind if not his body back to him. Julius musters his already depleting reserves of alertness. Here is the room. Here are five cardinals. Here is the stretcher, rocked by unseen panic as though possessed by a plethora of poltergeists. Beside the stretcher, Morris—cropped hair, short, wire-muscled, large eyes protuberant with well-controlled rage. To the tallest of the cardinals, he says:

  “Watch the priest. Clean up after.”

  She nods toward Julius. “Finish him up?”

  Morris seems to give the question serious consideration before giving his head a curt shake in the negative. “Not unless he misbehaves. It’s possible he’s important. If he survives, bring him to the place.”

  The tall redbird grunts: “Man’s going to bleed out. I hit something big.”

  “If he’s of any importance at all,” says Morris, “he won’t.” And then he wheels the still-rocking stretcher past Julius and out of his reckoning. Julius tries without success to sit. It’s gone to hell; difficult to grasp much more. The Game of Gordy is utterly lost; time to move on to the Game of Not Dying…yet Julius finds himself unable to focus on the bird in the hand for the sake of the one lost in the bush.

  “You chickenshits.” He intends to growl, but his voice betrays him, producing a nonagenarian quaver. Weak as a sparrow chick.

  The tall redbird comes over to him and settles her foot, ever so lightly, on Father Julius’s balls. The foot hovers. “Impolite,” she says, and leans forward, then back, making Julius say

  Julius fights to control his bladder from going. There’s a crazy howling noise happening somewhere in the distance. Some sort of raucous squabble, thousands of voices yelling at once, a party going either very well or very badly. The tall cardinal’s sword is a pendulum tick-tocking. She says: “I hate impolite. I hate waiting around more. So the story we’ll tell the boss is this: You fought. Pulled a knife. Misbehavior. So we cut you up and dumped you. My friends and I”—with her head she indicates the advancing quartet behind her—“We’re going to make bits of you.”

  “Gkkkkkk,” says Julius. In fury, he tries to get up with his one arm—at least bite her on the calf before your kebab gets shished—but the cardinal looks bored and leans once again upon Julius’s outraged scrotum as the priest cracks the back of his head on the floor, feeling the wetness there, blood seeped into the sopping carpet beneath. The cardinal shakes her head regretfully.

  “Resisting. Struggling. You leave us little choice. We’ll start with your guts.”

  The sword swick swick removes a quadrant from the denim robe above Julius’s still-unbloodied belly, a precise scrap perched upon, then flicked away from, the sword tip.

  “See what we do is,” the tall cardinal says, “we cut a little hole in the belly. Expose a gut. That’s going to hurt. What we do next, we cut tiny little slices in that gut. It busts like a casing. Going to feel like we lit a campfire in there. Pity for you is, you’re a tough pig, so I’m betting it’s going to take some time before you faint. But first, a few seconds of silence. You understand. Just to let you sit with it.”

  This is it, Julius thinks. Nettles, I guess it’s—

  The cardinals disappear. All of them. One moment they are there, the next they aren’t. It’s the damnedest thing.

  Great, thinks Julius, delirious—more invisibility. Fearing some perverse cat-and-mouse, he cranes his neck, searching fruitlessly, every crawling measure of his far-too-flayable skin contracting, anticipating the unseen sword coming in and taking a slice from here or here or here, no way to hide, curl into a ball and they’ll skewer your kidneys, lie on your back and they’ll pry your stomach open like a manhole cover…Julius lies supine, his damaged arm cradled on his chest, his squashed nuts killing him. The crazy howling noise is louder.

  “They aren’t invisible,” a deep voice says. Not low, this voice, but deep. It moves around him, throughout him, within him; in strange frequencies it dissects, reassembles, catalogues every part of him…pushing up with his good arm, Julius sees nothing but shadow…no—there. A figure stands in the corner. Not much of him revealed but silhouette, save where a triangle of light from the nearest window reaches him, disclosing a sneaker, a length of powder-blue trouser leg. Julius can deduce the Deep Man’s height from the red tip of a lit cigarette hanging in the gloom where his mouth must be. The Deep Man speaks again. “They haven’t gone anywhere. Same latitude. Same longitude. Now…I did send them about half a mile upward. But they’ll be back real soon, sort of, on the roof and spread around through parts of the upper floors.”

  From above comes a shuddering noise: a titan drumming impatient fingers in staccato upon the roof of the Wales, enormous birds spudding into watermelon viscera and feather against a windshield the size of an aircraft carrier, bowling balls dropped from an airplane. “There they are now,” the Deep Man murmurs. He’s coming near, farther into the light.

  “Don’t,” Julius moans. “Don’t. Stop. Don’t.” He tries pushing back with his heels but blood loss and shock have betrayed his body into kittenish weakness, and he simply threshes on the carpet. One whole side of him—the side he shares with his injured arm—drags, unbearably numb, impossibly heavy, but as he moves, he also senses an even greater weight setting in, the unmovable final load, heavier than earth, heavier than time.

  “You don’t need to be afraid, you know.”

  “Stop.”

  The Deep Man pauses, face still obscured.

  “I hate moving anyway. God, I practically gift-wrapped the thing, and look at you. You’re in no shape for what’s next.” The Deep Man’s red coal eye pulsates; smoke scuds into the dim. Julius has the sense he’s supposed do or say something, but he’s forgotten his line in this play, it’s all rushing away from him now.

  “Next?”

  “Yes. Next. The thing that happens next. You need to rescue Gordy from his vile captor. Time to be a hero, Father. Your big chance to fulfill destiny. You could say ‘your reason for being’ and not miss the mark.”

  Julius tries to force his mind into regular grooves of cognition. He considers biting his hand again, fresh pain for fresh mental sharpness, but his arm is heavy, heavy, weighed down by rabbits the size of whales, his senses fading in and out; he’s sinking for good. This Deep Man has an interest in Gordy, with haunted eyes. who whispers fearfully that God talks to him, who claims he’s running from…a terrible conclusion presents itself.

  “Are you…God?”

  The Deep Man considers, then says: “Yep. Sure. That’s me. I’m God.”

  An infuriating answer, an infuriating tone, all the more so because it may be true, because this—this—may be his long-sought-after meeting with divinity…

  The Deep Man says: “You’d better ask me to heal you soon. Your arm’s half off.”


  Julius falls back and it feels like he’s sinking into the floor.

  “Well. Are you going to ask me, or aren’t you?”

  Julius decides—To hell with it all. You’re being cruelly toyed with either way. If he’s God he’s even less worthy of your pleading than if he isn’t. After waiting so long for a sign, anything, to be presented with such a One, bored of you, who comes to you only as you lie nearly empty of blood and life, taunts you for your failure, expects you to beg for a continuation of years stacked upon years of indifference worse than shunning…the opacity of the Deep Man, the presumption of him…it would be better, wouldn’t it, to bleed your life out here in this beige-est of all rooms, than to provide your service to such a Thing?

  But then he remembers: Gordy needs you either way. The way he made the stretcher buck and shake. The haunted look in his eyes. What his abductor might do to him.

  “Heal me or don’t,” Julius shrieks, or whispers, maybe only thinks. “Don’t pretend you haven’t decided already.”

  And oh god that was the last of your strength the room spinning dark and spinning and for some reason he thinks of Boyd—why Boyd?—is Boyd in some sort of, of, I wait, what is “Boyd” anyway or is it, is it “boyed?” Buoyed? Boit? but that makes no sense either, some of those aren’t even words, my mind can’t hold on to you, boyed, I’m sorry, the Deep Man has stepped from the shadows looking…amused? To hell with him hellhellhellhellhell with him Deep Man, I guess if you want Gordy’s salvation why not save him yourself