The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  doppler curses of the Plymouth’s operator can be heard. However briefly, the car has slowed the gang, and Gordy pelts to the far boardwalk to make the most of what seconds he has been given, racing toward the best hiding spot he knows: Crumb’s ’Mazing Lazer Arcade. Its entryway draws near: the yawning mouth of an enormous red demon head. The electronic approximation of fire rises from the demon’s head like hair, consuming the sign eternally. The demon’s eyes are enormous mirrors; in his mouth is lodged a revolving door.

  The boy hits the door hard as he is able, putting his back into it and pumping his legs, feeling in his jacket pocket for the roll of tickets he won at Skee-Ball, and then he’s in, bathed in the blink and yammer of a million games: games controlled by rows of buttons, and by joysticks and basketballs and baseballs and pastel plastic light-guns and cork-guns and pellet guns and faux fishing rods attached to fishing-game consoles and plastic boxing gloves for those who want to fight for fifty cents a minute, and jet fighter steering wheels and jet-skis and motorcycle handles and—wow! Look!—there’s a fat guy running amuck dressed up as Pac-Man and there’s four guys dressed up as the ghosts, and all about them the ubiquitous sounds of fighting shooting exploding and the boing boing boing of eight-bit characters jumping and the hectoring of animated antidrug messages and the screams of the players and those of the observers who’ve placed their tokens in queue on the ridge to wait their turn, and everywhere the mechana-whir of bills being sucked in and the jangle-clatter of slotted tokens cascading into the hollow basin, snatched up by greedy hands. But Gordy, with no time for any of this, is up and making his way past the ranks of Skee-Ball machines, to the laser maze in back, where he will at last be safe. The boy rips two tickets from his roll and hands them to the attendant as payment for entry.

  Here he is safe. Here is the twisty mirrored heart of Crumb’s ’Mazing, more a home to him than the place he shares with dad. When Gordy is allowed to flee each morning after a quick breakfast, wherever he may choose to go first, or second, or third, it is here he will inevitability arrive. The maze squats on an acre and a half of Crumb’s facility, its walls covered by large mirrored panels stretching from ceiling to floor, a crazyhouse giving you infinite diminishing copies of yourself as you charge down the corridors. Ceiling and floor are painted black, broken sporadically by lighting fixtures and more mirrors. The halls are lit in some places by strobes, refracting and blinding, while elsewhere the only light seeps from dull red bulbs screwed into recesses six inches deep, dim enough for you to mistake your own reflection. Many of the panels are hinged, allowing players to swing the walls to create hundreds of distinct configurations; and Gordy has learned all of them. At night he maps them in his mind until they are engraved there. Gordy’s spatial awareness is already uncanny, but he’s been in Pigeon Forge all summer, and here, in the maze, he decides who dies and who lives. He’s snaked through this crazy maze for hours until he knows it well enough to dream it. He is the master of the sneak attack, the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t, the laser ricochet; he has devised and improved and named a pantheon of evasive maneuvers: the noodle-walk, the crane, the turtle, monkey-stepping; he spends hours preying on newcomers and tourists, invisible, invincible. He hunts out-of-state kids for an entire game, startling them with carefully placed noises, eliminating any blunderers who target his chosen victim. Only when he knows time is running out does he pull the trigger, once, twice, thrice. The sap never sees him, but only his reflection, and then only when he wills it.

  Once inside, Gordy discards his gear. He is here to hide, not to hunt, and a toy gun will provide little defense from real fists. Quickly, he arrives at his destination: a familiar back-corner hideaway, a sanctum. He has never seen any other player, not even a fellow savant, in this small room, which can be created only by specific manipulation of panels. Push here, pull there, and you create a T-shaped room, sealed off from the main, which none but the lucky will ever discover. The only entryway is the panel at the end of the short hallway he now faces, which will push in but cannot push out. The exit, should he need it, is the panel on his right, which swings out but not in—but he doesn’t expect to need it. Gordy sits at the confluence of the two short halls and leans against the brick and mortar—the back wall of the arcade, which forms the border of the shorter leg of the cavern he has created, the lintel of the “T.” It’s a waiting game now. His pursuers will be enraged at his escape, their expectations defied, but Gordy is familiar with bullies. Dim-witted, used to easy gratification, they will soon grow bored and trundle off, seeking some other distraction. Having to pay the fee to enter the maze may be enough to discourage them, but even if they pursue, avoidance should be a simple task. He thinks he can hear them shouting out for him at a distance—come out, you pussy, be a man!

  Yes, it’s clearly them, the same voices: coarse, gross, and eager to inflict pain. He doesn’t understand this kind, but knows his understanding of them is no prerequisite; they won’t require him to fathom their motivations, they’ll only expect him to bleed and whimper. Worse, these are almost certainly his future classmates, since dad’s been making increasingly serious noise about moving here, an impossibly cruel notion. Gordy’s a youngster in his class—precociously literate, he skipped grade 1—and now he’s facing a junior year as a transplant in some whole new tribe. Dad, who’s caught up in his book about whatever, hasn’t even considered the impact. You couldn’t even speak to him at breakfast. And now you’re going to have to spend what should be your high school victory lap dodging a trio of dim bullies…the voices draw nearer and then fade. Gordy waits, stands, sits, closes his eyes—and then, startled, opens them wide. The voices have returned, suddenly close. They seem to be on the other side of the wall now, right at the entrance to the “T.” Gordy creeps, careful and silent, to his feet. He eyes the exit panel to his right, and tells himself to play it cool; to leave would be foolish—nobody has found him here before, ever. The mirrors reflect his fear back to himself. He can hear them distinctly; in the way of adolescents acting out postures of toughness, they’ve talked themselves into greater fury. Enraged voices. The door will swing open now, he thinks, and it will be too late for you, they’ll have you where nobody can find you or stop them, it will be too too late when the door swings open…

  And then—no!—the door does swing open, it really does. Perhaps it does. Afterward, he will be unsure on this point; certainly it’s at least possible he only caught one of his own movements reflected in the mirror and panicked. Gordy darts right, twitch of legs and animal instinct, no looking back, his moon eyes growing closer as he reaches the mirror and pushes the panel out and away, closing it behind him, revealing a new corridor, which immediately turns 90 degrees right and then again to the right, leading him into an unmirrored hallway with red brick on both sides. He knows instantly this is wrong—this is not the configuration of maze he was expecting—but, in the teeth of instinctive flight, Gordy keeps moving. The problem is simple: He had been right up against the wall of the arcade, the brick-and-mortar boundary of Crumb’s establishment, meaning a right-hand turn out of his T-shaped room should have been impossible, unless it were a passage through the brick wall and out of the building. The corridor into which he has turned is long and straight with no tributaries and appears to terminate after about fifty feet. The fiddle-strings beneath Gordy’s ribcage tighten, but he is more averse to pain than he is to confusion; he puts one foot before the other, fearing a dead end.

  There is no dead end, but rather a hard 90-degree left, and then another left and another corridor heading, yet again, back the way he has just come. The tunnel is straight and once again appears to terminate after about fifty feet, but the boy, having grasped the pattern, starts forward, fascinated, only faintly anxious anymore about his pursuers, whose voices he can no longer hear. There will be no dead end; this he believes, and he is correct. Another turn right, then immediately right again, and, sure enough, here are fifty more yards of corridor heading ba
ck again. Young Gordy passes through this strange redbrick intestine, thinking to himself with equal parts panic and joy and fear nobody will ever find you here, not here, nobody could find you here ever. On the fifth turn, he begins to feel strange. With each step a strange growing sensation, like a massive bending, a refraction not of light but of everything, as if his perception has become a funhouse mirror. There’s not enough reality, and at the same time too much of it. It feels like the world is getting thin, spreading out wide and flat in all directions, like it’s fading away and bringing him along. He turns to his instinctive sense of space, of knowing his location in the world, but it’s failing him, all he gets is a sense of Dad sitting and reading something boring, and guided by some unknowable impulse Gordy reaches out—I don’t know where I am, Dad, don’t let me go alone, come with me, come with—but then he’s passing into the thinnest places and he’s got no time to think more before he’s gone

  Gordy blinks and looks around. He’s still in the redbrick intestine. It’s so odd, so strange…the universe is changed, somehow…his very way of being seems modified. Isn’t it? Or is it? He looks at his hands, his surroundings. It all looks right. Same as before—isn’t it?

  Strangely, there’s no panic. Somehow, what just happened seemed a familiar sensation.

  Well. You’re here. Nowhere to go but back or on.

  Gordy goes on, doubling and redoubling through the odd one-way maze. On the tenth turn, he is surprised by sudden strobing colored light.

  It’s gaudy here, and loud. Straw lies scattered on the dirt ground, and tinny music squalls from an unseen nearby source. A gamy animal reek hangs in the air, tart and ripe. All about him, suspended from tall poles, colored lights flash arrhythmically from strings of grapefruit-sized bulbs. Ghostly shapes in the distance glow and turn. Before him rise humongous toadstools, painted in bright wide vertical stripes the color of candy—pinks or blues or reds or whites in alternating sequence. One enormous toadstool, blue striped with white, looming in the distance, dwarfs the others. The toadstools expand slightly in the breeze; they are cylindrical at the base and pointed at the top and seem to be made of some sort of cloth…

  Ah. Tents. Yes. Away to one side, a smallish Ferris wheel is lit up and turning against the night sky. Hmm…tents? Ferris wheel? That would mean a…fair? Gordy’s knowledge of the rides and events of Pigeon Forge is near encyclopedic; his pursuit of them is an obsession tuned to a pitch only the young can maintain. A fair? It wasn’t advertised. When did a fair spring up?

  Behind him is the hole from which he was disgorged. Gordy sees it is nothing but a precise rectangular gap in a fence made of rough pine boards, resting hard against a low building, above which, in the distance, he can see, barely, the tips of the horns of the Crumb’s ’Mazing demon head. He sees a figure fly briefly into the night sky on the rubber band of the X-Treme Slingshot, silhouetted against one of the many spotlights meant to entice tourists from their motels to take in the shows and rides and shops. He fixes his location: He’s made it to a place behind the main strip. He’s spent months exploring the town; he thought he knew it all, but he knows immediately he has not been here before, and the thrill of discovery is in him.

  The fence is long and plastered all along its length, at cockeyed angles, with identical posters. The nearest poster reads:

  Gordy returns his attention to the peppermint-stripe mushrooms, sweaty-palmed and whispering to himself—Oh-ho, Gordy, I mean, oh-ho. Oh, ho-ho-ho. A fair and a circus? And a freak show?

  He’s alone—emerged somewhere behind the tents, on the side not meant for fair-goers. Typically, this is the side he prefers, the side for explorers, but here there is only grass and the backs of tents, the only mystery they hide is the passage, through which he has already passed. On the other side, however, he can hear the human buzz of carnival nirvana, and he follows its song. Gordy cuts between two of the canvas tents and is immediately in the cavorting midway mix of the crowd. A human press…men at the booths winning prizes for their sweeties, shooting cork guns at tin ducks or attempting to throw tiny plastic rings onto pegs slightly smaller in circumference than those rings; teenage sweethearts strolling with hands entwined or on each other’s rumps; young boys and girls darting around long legs in an intricate unknowable game, faces glazed in a tacky glucose base to which the powdered sugar of donuts and the granulated sugar of fried dough (the concoction sometimes known as “fried dough” or “elephant ears,” apparently marketed here as “Breaded Love™”) clings like stubble, and to which wisps of cotton candy are affixed like beards; barkers calling from their posts—guess your weight, test your strength, dance with the Fuggly Wuggly, win a prize, getchyer snackfood right here, hot dogs, ’tato chips, getchyer ears here now hot yummy Breaded Love, getchyer Breaded Love…screams come and go with the clatter of a smallish wooden roller coaster and shrieks of at least partially justifiable fear from the swinging cars of the ancient Ferris wheel…

  Gordy revels. He wanders and dawdles and gapes. He has found the impossible passage, has come through the unlikeliest doorway, the one all children instinctively look for; he has fallen up into the sky, into some wonderful other world; he has somehow managed to climb onto a cloud. In the gap between two tents, he can still see, small in the distance, the back of Crumb’s demon-head entrance, he again sees the riders of the X-Treme Slingshot leap up to kiss the moon, and this glimpse back to the known world feels like looking from a great height at a terrain, still visible, from which he has managed to become gloriously separate.

  The midway is wide with booths and tents in ranks on either side. On the side from which Gordy has emerged, the booths press close together; beyond them lies the high fence, which looks to enclose the entire carnival ground…though there must be an entrance somewhere around here, mustn’t there, I mean all these people didn’t all come in through secret passageways, did they?…On the other, there are large gaps between tents, allowing easy flow to the pasture, where rides have been erected. Gordy considers these, but the lines are long and he is low on funds, and he’s enticed away from rides by the tent ahead, the really big one with the blue striping, looming ahead and to the left at the terminus of the midway. The big top, the big show: clowns and fire-eaters and trapeze and who knows what all else—but no, you know what all else; the poster told you. Freaks, that’s what. Colonel Krane with his traveling freaks. Human forms taken a wrong turn somewhere. You can’t look, but you can’t look away. Oh boy.

  Ahead, the midway bends toward the big top, and…is the width of midway?…it could be a trick of the senses, but it’s getting tighter somehow, closer, functioning like a funnel. Ahead, he hears someone on a megaphone, and though he can’t make out the words, he judges—by the buzz of the crowd, by the sudden movement in that direction—the late show is imminent. Gordy goes with the flow, trying his best to rush forward, fearful of being left without a seat. It occurs to him he has no way of securing admission, but maybe he can just crash the gate, blunder in with the main press…Drawing closer, he hears the megaphone’s bark more clearly. He can’t see the man speaking yet, but he can hear him machine-gunning words in bright psychotic hiccupping cadence void of pause or reason:

  “…BLUE ticket to the side, BLUE to the side, GREEN ticket yes GREEN ticket gets you into the most unbeLIEVEable show in the world don’t miss the opporTUNity of a LIFEtime STEP Right up That’s right folks come ONE come all to see the SHOW we’ve got it all RIGHT! HERE! Folks! We’ve got CLOWNS! We’ve got the TIGHTrope walkers! we’ve got the man in the CANnon! and FOLKS I’m telling you right NOW you’d better believe that we’ve got the freaks! Freaks freaks FREAKS by the yard by the HECtare by the FURlong friends by the very MILE we’ve got freaks folks so hurry aLONG folks because seating is LIMited folks and this is our very LAST show of the SEAson folks you’ll be aSHAAAAAAmed to miss such a magNIFicent array! SEE! the aMAZing Plastilica bend like a trick balloon for your aMUSment See! Eddie the EYEball! SEE the m
ost FAmous SUperinTELLigent goRILLa in capTIVity see the fear-RO-cious MIDgets not ONE no folks NOT one I say but TWO of the little beggars TWINS they are and they’d as soon KILL you as look at you…”

  At the mention of limited seating, the stampede begins in earnest. The fairgoers stream from all sides; food vendors lose their patrons—even those next in line scamper away—and some of the booths even lose their vendors. The ring around the fire-juggler evaporates; lonesome, he douses his sticks and slinks away. There’s something more than the usual desire for spectacle here; Gordy senses it even through the haze of adolescent obliviousness—this group has been seized with a panic, everyone at once is in a fever to get into the show. There’s an apparent and palpable tension, a growing fear, carrying with it the ominous sense of some undefined penalty for failure—some will be outcast, and it might be you. Gordy curses even as he dodges through gaps in the crowd, improving his position. Green ticket? Might that mean a greenback? Where could I get a green…

  Look.

  There is a man in a powder-blue suit ahead, standing between two of the tents, his face made garish by the carnival light, and partially obscured by the smoke that emerges from between his teeth. He is looking right at Gordy, tracking him, Gordy realizes, through the crowd.

  The boy stops, frozen, and immediately the crowd is pressing him forward, impelling him to the sideline to avoid being carried along or trampled. There’s something about this man. There’s something about him. There’s some thing about him. You may have never seen him in your life, but you have heard of him. If he exists (and yes he does) then you must have heard of him. If you have not heard of him, how could it be that anyone has heard of you? He is one of those. As if some incompetent and all-powerful fiend has put a disproportionate amount of work into his composition. In his presence, the world seems to be a story about him. It certainly isn’t a story about you.