The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  GONE

  I’d have to say, given how it played out, Bailey was Donk’s blind spot and always was. She’d been his older brother’s younger girlfriend, but you have to remember how ages work around such things. Yale was a rising star in the gangs, but that still only made him an older teenager. His brother Donk was nothing but a kid, but still old enough to have a worshipful crush on his hero’s girl. In the years after Yale was killed, they hid from what they assumed was Ralph’s hot pursuit and the same bad fate that had befallen the rest. It never occurred to them to leave the only neighborhood they knew; and anyway in Loony Island you can get pretty lost from the world. As they hid, hungry and scared, and plotted their return, they eventually became each other’s worlds. As Donk grew, so, too, did their feelings for each other.

  From a long time, all they had was those feelings; that, and each other.

  But enough time goes by, you get used to anything, then you stop seeing it anymore. Feelings are no exception.

  Love most especially, maybe.

  * * *

  —

  What nobody realizes about me, thinks Bailey Ligneclaire, is I’m in love with that idiot.

  They’re outside Ralph’s Market. She’s watching the surge of the loony tsunami pass by; there’s nothing better to do. Donk, the idiot, dangles from the big green RALPH’S GENERAL & SPECIFIC sign, deep in conversation with a loony who grips the left-handed diagonal slant of a sans-serif A. The loony is up there because he’s a loony; Daniel is up there because it amuses him to follow suit.

  Daniel Coyote. Her idiot and lover. Her lover and idiot. What a maroon.

  Daniel’s got his arms hooked around the L’s lintel; a ten foot drop to merciless asphalt. Not far to fall at all, just a hop—but still she can see it: the slip, the awkward grab at air, the flip, the sick sledgehammer thuck as Daniel hits headfirst, and the grotesque crack as the weight of his body uses the fulcrum of his forehead to send his upper spine out through his throat. Such a possibility would never occur to him—he never worries, realizing you’ll do it for him. As though worry were a transferable commodity. There he is, hanging half a story up—not high enough to ensure fatal or incapacitating injury in the case of a fall, but certainly high enough to allow for the possibility—discussing with this strange loon the intricate matters of Loony Island’s mechanics: of local politics, of process, of the differences and duties and jurisdictions between gangs and how to tell one from another, how to know which of the bluebirds are on the grease, the taxonomy of graffiti, the unspoken commentary of unwritten street laws: Daniel reveling in his authority, in the display of this arcane knowledge useless outside a four-mile radius. The genius moron, dangling dangerously from the name of the man they serve, and whose bad death they plot.

  Lately it seems to her it’s all they do: plot Ralph’s death. Is she the only one who still remembers there are three phases, and not two? Infiltrate, vengeance, yes…but what about phase three? What about escape?

  Which is the exact thing you’ve been hoping to hear Donk mention, Bailey thinks. Ever since that window got broken, and we met the man who broke it, and learned just how close we might finally be to the end of our plan.

  The plan has three phases. They crafted it together, in the aftermath of Yale’s bad death and the horror of the greenhouse, whispered it to one another beneath scrounged covers each night during the long hungry times when they hadn’t yet learned to earn for themselves, knowing they had to keep alive, if only so that Ralph and the greenhouse wouldn’t be their final word. They’d lie together in their customary strange and intimate posture, forehead-to-forehead, clutching each other’s ears, and talk, and plan, and plot. Phase One—long since accomplished—was to infiltrate Ralph’s organization, using their particular skills to gain power and influence and trust and wealth. Phase Two—upcoming—is to kill Ralph, and make sure he knows why death has come to him. Phase Three is escape. Live a life, at last. She and Daniel have decided upon touring the Caribbean, then the Mediterranean, then the Pacific islands, scouting without urgency for a permanent home. Bailey’s ready. She’ll miss her donut den. She won’t miss the rest.

  “You’re obsessed with retirement,” Daniel admonished her, when he returned this morning with no explanation. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were getting lazy.” He said it with a tone just arch enough that she was forced to take it as a joke or face charges of sensitivity, but with enough of an edge that she knew (but couldn’t prove) he meant it. This left her untethered; suggested the goal they’ve worked toward for so long had become, for him, an obstacle. Has the enticement of his position exerted a greater gravity than she can overcome? Being the top cat in this dogfight is what gives him his shape, his name, his knowledge of himself. Can he even imagine himself apart from that? For years they’ve dragged out their revenge; for the first time, Bailey wonders about the excuses for delay Daniel stacks up against progress—and what if he decides he wants to stay? You’ve been living together toward this future for such a long time. There’s a great emptiness at the prospect of entering it alone.

  The first sign of unusual activity came during morning office hours. Across the open gap of the newly broken window came Tennessee, running at full pelt, pastel bathrobe trailing out behind him like a toothpaste comet. Behind him a cardinal gave chase, efficient and silent, holding what appeared to be a syringe. It all happened too quickly to do more than register it, but she was tending a register of her own, and office hours were an inopportune time to investigate. Later, from the break room, she noticed other loonies, not being chased, but much more energetic. Running. Cartwheels. Odd. But there was money to count, business to discuss, and then later there was store and donut shop paperwork to attend to. It was a little before dinnertime that the full mob slammed into them, and all the merchandise quickly walked out the door, loonies racing down the aisles pushing wire shopping carts with misaligned wheels, emptying the shelves, singing to the tune of Alouette:

  OooooOOOOOOoooooh

  We’re the loonies

  We’re the looty loonies

  Hear us crooning

  Give us all your food!

  Normally, a looting would have been the time for Daniel to go into full retribution lockdown. Examples would have to be set and executions administered; nobody steals from Ralph. Bailey had already picked up her baton and grabbed the pump-action Mossberg when she realized he was simply leaning one-armed on the billiard table, smiling. When she’d bestowed a quizzical look, he’d twinkled.

  “Leave them to it,” Daniel said. “That’s all Ralph’s stuff. And Ralph is toast. He doesn’t know yet, but he’s about to find out.” But then he said something that made her look askance. “These—” pointing to the loonies—“are our new army. Morris is giving them to us.” And then he’d run outside. By the time she’d collected herself and followed, he was already hanging from the sign, getting gregarious up there with a loon named Garf. To listen to him now, Daniel sounds as though he isn’t in the least planning on leaving the Island. On the contrary, as he speaks to Garf and his apparent girlfriend—a wan lady named Azrael—he speaks in the future perfect. He’s got a sack of cheap phones, and he’s instructing Garf to distribute them among the loonies, to pull the drawstrings of communication tight. This isn’t merely passing the time. This is making plans. He was already expecting this. For how long has he known? Why has he not bothered to mention it? It suggests a total abdication of the part of their plan involving escape, a life together—which leads to the question: What other parts of the plan are out?

  Did you assume, Bailey wonders, that if you changed the script I’d go along? That I’ll work at your register forever? Forever?

  Forever is a problem for Bailey.

  Long ago, years before she met Donk or even Yale, Bailey awoke in the unspecified middle emptiness of night with a startle, seized by an immense and inescapable terror: Something is wrong. Sh
e’d lain there a long time before grasping the nature of the terror: She would die. Not at that moment, surely. Not even soon. But she would. It would happen. Incapable of intellectualizing it, she nevertheless perceived that, this, now, was a time when she was, and that, inexorably, there came rushing toward her the day when she would not be, and after that moment would come forever, and there would be no end to forever, none, none, none. Forever approaching at velocities at which time becomes relative, where an instant is a millennium, a millennium an instant, each drop within Forever’s ocean itself oceanic in size, yet merely a particle within the vastness of her eternal not-ness. She thought none of this yet; she was as yet incapable of putting language to it. She could only feel it, from the moment of her waking, and for the rest of her life thereafter. She was ten years old. That night she’d risen from bed and gone out looking for a fight.

  Perhaps, she considers, this is what she finds magnetic about Daniel: This is a man who has never considered the idea that he will die. Who would, were you to confront him with the rushing wall of Forever, simply laugh, finding the concept of his own death preposterous. No, death is something Daniel believes is for other people. Just as he sources his worry to her, so he must think when the time comes, he will find somebody else to die for him, either by charm or by hire.

  Always the what with Daniel, never the why. He’s still hanging from the L and yelling over to Garf: Choose five of the best loons you can find, have them choose five of their own…the network will be the king…take a device from the bag, pass it along…this is the ground floor, the whole pyramid’s getting shaken up, there’s opportunity to find yourself near the top…Every once in a while, she calls out to him and he pretends not to hear. She knows the reason he’ll give for ignoring her—for safety’s sake nobody can guess their bond—but it’s getting harder to distinguish which is the fiction and which the truth; he’s become so good at pretending she means nothing to him. Nobody knows I love that moron, she thinks again, and nobody knows he loves me. Maybe not even him.

  Look at them: the loonies. More of them joining the throng every minute—up and down the street, they rampage; three of them have found one of the neighborhood’s few unfilched manhole covers, they’re rolling it across the parking lot and right into a gnarly knot of gangsters, who amazingly appear amused enough by the novelty they don’t retaliate though one of their number nurses a kneecap; crouching nearby, a clutch of madmen learn knife tricks from Arlene, an old hooker who retired years ago, who now trains young pimps in the art of the blade; across the parking lot, loonies have captured Bailey’s Donuts. At Daniel’s insistence, she’s gone against her better judgment and given the place up to insurance claims rather than defend it with her shotgun, but it’s a wrench to see it crawling with rioters. The loons appear to have started the cookers, conveyer belts of frosted O O O O O O O O O popping out of the fry grease still painfully hot into immediately scalded mouths. In two different places she sees the unmistakable glow of a building on fire, though whether this is the handiwork of loonies, or else the random accident one should expect from chaos of this magnitude, she can’t tell. A loony lurches out of the donut shack shrieking and holding a rawburned hand. It appears to have gone into the deep fryer to the forearm. This feels like an omen, a tipping point. She calls for Daniel again, and again is ignored, so she grabs him by the legs and yanks. He holds on, resistant as a green crabapple, so she dangles from his feet until finally he releases and collapses atop her; Bailey, careful to shield Daniel from the worst of the impact, rolls beneath to catch him. She sees his face; he’s spitting mad—Good.

  “What the hell?”

  She cuffs him on the head.

  “Hey!”

  She cuffs him again. Grabs him by the ears.

  “Hey! I’m conducting business here…”

  Nose to nose, eye to eye. Holding his ears in her fists, but he’s not holding hers. “You’re ignoring me. That stops right now.”

  “Hey. Hey hey hey. Hey.” He unfurls the ingratiating smile that’s charmed Loony Island; it’s a smile insinuating some undefined secret shared by the two of you against the universe, a smile that promises it belongs only to you. “What happened to trusaaAaaaaaah! that hurts.”

  “Tell me what you haven’t told me yet.”

  Like a mechanic would discard any ineffective tool, Donk discards his charm, selects instead a serious obtuseness. “What haven’t I told you?”

  Bailey keeps her grip on his ears. “We’re going to go inside now and you’re going to explain to me exactly what’s happening here. And then you’re going to explain why you haven’t explained it to me already.” She’s enraged to find herself close to tears. Bailey hopes he gives her a reason to knock his head on the ground…but he nods. That’s Daniel. Fights when you want compliance, goes slack when you want to fight. He’s like wrestling a jelly.

  “Stay here,” he tells Garf. “Keep the sack of phones. Couple more things I need to tell you. I won’t be long.” Unbelievable, the presumption, the dismissiveness. It’s become commonplace. He’ll say secrecy equals safety, but the logic has drained from this explanation. Here you are, Daniel, she thinks. King of the hill. Everybody knows you, and you’re still here. Still alive. Nobody’s made collateral damage of you. How does acting like I’m nothing to you but Ralph’s hired muscle protect me? No, I’m a secret—we’re a secret—not because you crave safety, but because you prefer secrets. Because what other people don’t know, you never have to explain.

  Inside is a mess. Shelves completely stripped of wares, most of the fluorescents smashed. Miraculously, there’s been no serious attempt to break any of the front windows, so the poster-paste overlap—with the exception of the newly broken center pane—conceals them from snooping eyes. Bailey Ligneclaire waits in the dark for her oldest friend to speak. Her love, her hope. The big stubborn dummy stands there in the dim and waits right back. “Well?”

  She waits. He knows what. He’s an idiot, but he’s not dumb.

  “Listen. I have actual important work out there. This loony thing is permanent. It’s the new order of things. Tonight is our window to recruit as many of them as we can. So whatever this is needs to take less than a minute, baby.”

  She doesn’t even realize she’s done it until it’s done. She’s lifted one of her precious vintage cash registers and slammed it—for the second time in a day—into the splintering tile, reminding herself not to let even a hint of tears into her voice. She’s learned to let her eyes go dead following a show of strength; now she gazes upon Daniel, wondering how and when he arrived at the center of her universe, when she decided him worthy of such promotion, how and when exactly she found herself on the dark side of his planet.

  “What this is about, baby,” she says, “is you telling me everything you know. Everything I don’t know. Baby. About whatever deal you’ve apparently done with your new boss. About how you’ve changed the plan. Our plan. About why you let them rob my store. About why you don’t give a shit they trashed my donut shop. You’re going to stop pretending you don’t know what I mean. You’re going to stop pretending you don’t know exactly what it is you haven’t told me. And then you’re going to tell me why I don’t know. Baby. For a minute, or as long as it takes. Or I’m going to beat your ass until we both wish you had.”

  For the first time, he really sees her. She moves herself between him and the door.

  Minutes pass, or perhaps no time at all.

  She can feel it all building to a terminal point inside her. Outside, through the new window, she sees the undiminished madness of the mob. In the distance she can hear sirens; the bluebirds, who are paid off but not enough to be able to credibly ignore this sort of riot, are finally closing in. Daniel’s still staring silence at her. Now he can see she won’t be charmed away, so he’s become distant and cold—an extension of his behavior since returning, late at night from his visit to Morris, stinking of cigars and
wine: deflecting her questions with generalities, blocking her out as she pushed, fleeing their apartment to go who knows where. It creeps her out, the entirety of his ability to separate himself from her, from anybody, even from himself. She feels as if he’s many things at once; a totem, an obelisk, something carved from ancient stone; or a banker assaying her credit report and finding her wanting; but most of all just another fuckhead gangster, one she’s meeting for the first time.

  “So?” Donk finally demands. “What do you need to know?”

  “What do I need to know?”

  “Yes. You seem to think I haven’t told you something. What is it?”

  “Daniel, you haven’t told me. Anything.”

  He delivers an inadvisable eye-roll. “I’ve told you this is all part of the plan. That’s usually enough. But for some reason tonight suddenly you decide not to trust me.”

  Bailey knows him well enough to know this trick: Create a sequence of blatant lies, stay calm in the face of ensuing outrage, and by this process guide the conversation so far away from the actual point you never have to address it. The only way to counter it is to push it aside and stick with truth. So, push aside this cart of bullshit, Bailey, push the cart aside—this ridiculous claim that you usually fly blind while he plans. He knows as well as you do; you’re the daily confidant, the repository for most of his secrets. Push it aside; lay it out plain.

  “OK, Daniel. Here’s what I don’t know. I don’t know why all the loonies are rioting. I don’t know why the gangs haven’t tried to stop it. I don’t know why you seem to know exactly what’s happening. I don’t understand your sack full of cash and phones, or why you’re handing them out to loonies like they’re candy. I don’t know how this ‘Morris’ comes into it. I don’t even know what came out of your meeting with him. I don’t know what he intends to get out of us—or you. I don’t know what you think we get out of it. I don’t see how it pertains to what I thought we were trying to do. And I don’t know, since you do seem to know, why I don’t know.”