The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  Four. Four of clubs, nestled hard by cousin six.

  Twenty.

  The ace alone is a winner, if ace is even to be found. The winning combination existed before he started scratching at the surface, but likely it’s already passed him by. Far worse than the initial disappointment of losing will be after, when he scratches off all the remaining opaque latex film, and traces with jaundiced eye the course of the unchosen winning combination. His whole back aches with the strain of his buttocks clinging to the swaying bench. He’s still agonizing over his final choice when the lights go out and a hush falls in waves over the crowd. The Circus of Breaded Love has begun. With haste he deposits the ticket safe into his pocket, relieved to put off the moment of disappointment.

  The Colonel stands center stage, awash in light, his trademark patois made incomprehensible by a huge red bullhorn. Suddenly the air is full of lithe and spangled tumblers in blue and red and white leotards, swinging in wide loops from metal batons attached to wires so thin one can easily imagine them invisible, lending the acrobats the illusion of flight. The tumblers barely touch the bars, swinging wild and at seeming random, catching for the briefest moment before flying out once again into the void, somersaulting and catching the next baton as if only by chance. Gordy tries to count the acrobats, but it’s an impossible task, they crisscross and fly too quickly. There may be five of them, there may be seven, there may be ten.

  The batons are being swung across the expanse by ten clowns clinging to short chrome fire poles, which have descended from neat holes in the tent roof. These clowns are arranged at intervals around the trapeze rig, and hang from the poles by their legs, leaving their arms free. They catch the batons in white-gloved hands and throw them out again in the general direction of the trapeze artists, carelessly, without aim or purpose or urgency, and sometimes—holy hell!—they miss the baton entirely, and it floats indifferently away. Gordy is chewing the insides of his cheeks, he frets with fear, he thrums with vicarious adrenaline. Impossible for this to end well, there is no sense here, no pattern, there will be a collision, a clown will fail to throw a crucial baton, will throw too soon or too late to meet an acrobat in her moment of need. The indifference of the clowns is terrifying and exhilarating; the tumblers depend entirely upon the whims of these buffoons. Below, Gordy sees nothing to halt a fall but the most impractical arrangement, a mere sop to safety: three small black trampolines arranged in a triangle at a height of ten feet, none of them larger than a child’s inflatable pool…meanwhile, a hundred feet up, these fools practice their arbitrary tosses and catches. Gordy wants to cover his eyes. He winces with each hush of the crowd. The clowns are in danger themselves as they lean out to make their catches. They must have feet like monkeys; Gordy can’t understand how they remain on their poles. Still…there must be some method. Somehow the acrobats keep aloft; somehow a baton always floats by to meet them, and they flip and turn, catching the baton, or—sometimes, unbearably—missing it, but then catching, one heart-pounding second later, the feet of another tumbler who is being held arm-in-arm by yet another who hangs inverted from his bar by the knees, and then the three danglers each see a baton all their own and go spinning off in different directions…

  The faith of the acrobats infects the crowd, and they begin to laugh, delighted at the madness, or caught in it. Every second that passes without fatality is a new miracle. The production is effortless and impossible, complex and happenstance, flight and gravity, all at once. Gordy is in the midst of deciding whether he is watching the skillful enactment of endless rehearsal or the improvisational trapeze act of highly proficient lunatics, trying to find some hint that even the misses are all a part of the dance—when there at last comes an accident. The clowns shriek with the crowd as three acrobats simultaneously miss their bars with no rescue and fall to earth feet pointed down straight as arrows the crowd rising to its feet with horror and anticipation then groaning in furious relief and joyous disappointment as each of the three of them lands directly in the center of one of those three trampolines, stretching deep dimples into the elastic until the metal rings of the tramps are level with the crowns of their heads and then shooting back up, rising and rising and eschewing the batons the panicking clowns toss their way as they ascend, nearly touching the tent roof, holding for the briefest instance at the top of their trajectory, consecrated in the absolution of flux, the moment between rising and falling that is neither and both—and in a heartbeat, an instant, Gordy sees that the center one is a heartbreaking beauty, a woman with dark hair shot with gold, and in the way of boys he is immediately in love—yes, love, she’s the love of his life—but then they begin their plunge, and now it really is time to eat your goiter, ladies and gents, because even if they fall precisely straight down, whatever springs were in those ridiculous triumvirate tramps are shot for sure. But…wait! In the commencement of their fall, the three stop, hold, and float, and the crowd has forgotten how even to scream. Captured, the acrobats jounce up and down on consecrated air as if standing on an atmosphere of jelly. The audience stares at the hovering figures, amazed, stunned; these are not performers, they are yogis, mystics, wizards, holy people; they have mastered air, they have tamed gravity. But wait—the other four acrobats are swinging in higher arcs, and higher, they release their batons and hurtle upward to join their comrades. Seven of them, standing on nothing at all…and then the silence is shattered as the crowd sees, in uproarious unison, the seven spider-silk tightropes stretched across the tent, and they roar their weak-kneed approval.

  At this moment, the poles from which the clowns are suspended detach from their fixtures, and the fools swing one-handed, tossing their now-detached silver poles to the men and women on the tightrope. At the apex of their swing, each clown releases, double-somersaults, lands on one of the platforms, and bows, as below everyone hoots and brays at their fabulous funambulism. They descend down-ladder as the tumblers begin the tightrope routine—not walking the tightrope, you understand, but using their poles to vault, hopscotching from wire to wire, somersaulting hodgepodge past one another in catastrophic hurdle, sometimes jousting with one another, twisting just before collision.

  The crowd rises to its feet and commences stamping, which throws off the pattern of the bleachers’ sway—the pattern Gordy has, unconsciously, learned to ride. Without warning it whips, sharp as a roller coaster, to the left. For Gordy—staring with wonder between splayed fingers, himself rising to his feet—this is enough to disrupt his equilibrium, topple him; he overcompensates, pinwheels his arms, screams, tilts, falls. No one sees him go; none takes note of a boy disappearing between bleachers and canvas backing. Gordy hardly notices it himself, so caught up is he in a frisson of sympathetic tension for the plight of the tightrope vaulters, so convinced a deadly fall is eminent for them, that when he finds himself falling, surprise barely registers. It seems axiomatic; if they are to so boldly defy physical laws, then some other must pay gravity’s price. This is it he thinks, and, even as he thinks it, he hits.

  Gordy lies on his back, listening to the crowd and contemplating the sensation of death. Happily, he has serenity; there is little pain. It feels like nothing more than having the breath knocked out of you. He worries briefly about his poor father. Poor fellow. The roistering above continues, and Gordy thinks of his fellow circus-goers warmly, with parental goodwill, with quick sympathy toward the common living—poor deluded children! So quickly enraptured by the crumb-bummery of tumblers, the cheap and silly vicarious thrills gravity offers to the earthbound. To have fallen, to have plunged into the unknown, to have transcended, ah!—therein lies the true daredevilry…all these thoughts pass through his mind in a matter of seconds before he realizes, with distinct embarrassment, he has fallen no farther than a few feet.

  Looking around, he finds himself on a short platform of sturdy plywood, and he sees he has not died after all—though his position is not unprecarious. The platform upon which he lies is only a few fee
t wide, bolted by flanges to the vertical iron poles providing the bleachers their dubious support. Liplike, the platform extends all along the back expanse of the risers. Perhaps it has been placed here by management, a stopgap against legal risk, a sop to the mortal and litigative dangers brought on by the grandstand’s decrepit state. Perhaps its intended function is merely to draw tight the canvas festoons backing the grandstand, lending them a pleasing aesthetic, a sense of depth. It has saved him either way.

  The crowd roars, overjoyed by some topside marvel, and Gordy considers climbing back up, reclaiming his swaying seat. He need only pull himself back up to take in the spectacle once more, but—wait—here is a novelty even more entrancing. From here, he can see the bleachers from the inside. He looks about, taking in his new subterranean vista: a steep cave-wall comprised of inverted terraced boards falls out from his position, the inside of a mountain seen from the peak. Between the slats he can see feet, shoes, pant legs, and between the gaps, tawny hints of fur. The trapeze act has finished, then. This must be a lion tamer—one not to be missed, if the quality of the acrobatics is predictive of the quality of ensuing acts.

  The crowd roars. Come see the see! it cajoles. You won’t believe what they’re doing now! They’ve, why goodgolly, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve got tigers waltzing with chimpanzees out here! But the singular entrancement of cave-life beckons. From this vantage, the iron framework looks like ribbing. Easy to imagine a whale has swallowed you, or you’ve been inserted somehow within a dirigible. Rather than climb back into light, Gordy clambers down into the girders, climbing dexterously in the gloom. Tricky business; these poles are spaced wider than monkey bars, and the whole thing shakes like a topmast in a typhoon. Gordy forces himself not to imagine a collapse as he keeps descending, because now he is inside, invisible, deep in the secret place, and once he reaches the sawdust ground he can walk anywhere he pleases along his own exclusive boardwalk, peer between the toes of the privileged kids in the first row. He’ll have to scamper across the aisles between the various sets of risers, but there isn’t a seat in the house that can’t be his, from one end of the backstage curtain to the other, why he can even…

  Gordy stops, thunderstruck, suspended halfway down the rigging, amazed by a fantastic idea—no, a perfect idea. He continues his descent, knowing what he must do. He has by accident discovered the backstage pass the rest of the children above would kill to get their grubby mitts on. Gordy doesn’t hesitate when his feet touch sawdust, doesn’t waste a second peering between Little Billy Frontrow’s stained Converse All-Stars, because who needs the front row when you can sneak backstage, when you get to see the see that no one sees? Who wants to simply watch the magic when you can tickle the wizard behind the curtain? Gordy runs deaf to the stomp and yammer above, toward the tapestry dividing the show ahead from the show behind. Reaching it, he sees it extends past the bleachers, into the outer ring where the freak cages and vendors are; peeking out, Gordy can see it’s been affixed by interlinking metal hooks and loops to the outermost canvas wall of the tent. Tightly attached, but…? Yes! Not so tight there isn’t some slack. Enough to climb under? No, no good; there appears to be a metal bar threaded along the bottom, stabilizing the curtain and weighing it to the ground. Even if it could be lifted, it wouldn’t be sly work—the entire curtain would move. Sneak in between curtain and tent wall, then? The hook-and-loops situations attaching tapestry to inner wall occur at distant intervals. It’s certainly possible there’s enough room for a kid to squeeze through, but this will mean leaving the cocoon of the bleachers…Gordy peaks out and sees the outer ring empty. Nobody there, only Wembly the caged gorilla sitting in parody of the thinker’s repose. Knuckles dug into the cheek of his mournful face, Wembly turns the massive hillock of his head to follow the boy, who scampers from bleacher to wall, works his body halfway into the opening between tent and curtain, pauses in the gap, then disappears entirely.

  What Gordy sees as soon as he gets his head and shoulders through the tightness of the tapestry is this: He is beneath another set of bleachers, albeit a much smaller set than those he’s left behind. Still, this is unexpeced. Bleachers? To what purpose? Is somebody watching the backstage preparations? Or…and here Gordy thrills and flusters with revelation…is it possible, is it even possible, Gordy-Gord, we’re dealing with a circus within a circus situation here? A smaller, even better circus for the few elect lucky enough, wise enough, or bold enough to find it? And why stop there? Might there be a tapestry providing a backing to this smaller circus, behind which, if you possess wisdom or luck or boldness in sufficient quantity, you might find still another circus nested, even more exclusive, even more refined…but itself backed by yet another curtain, whose veil (if you were truly boldwise or luckybold) you might pierce to find the final, most exclusive, best, most wondrous circus of them all? Or—or!—maybe it never stops. What if it’s circuses all the way down…from the far side of the curtain, he hears the tumultuous stamping hooting braying oooh-ing aaaaah-ing of the crowd, the music from the loudspeakers, the never-ceasing pronouncements of Colonel Krane. The noise fills the tent entirely, makes it hard to prioritize thought, creates within Gordy a pulsing imperative urge to push forward, and, caught in this eagerness, effects within him a sort of selective blindness; Gordy pushes himself the rest of the way into the backstage area, failing to notice, as he darts up to the front of these back-curtain risers, the comparative sparseness of the legs and feet, or the fact those seated seem to be sitting placidly, without stomp or shuffle. These are not the legs of hooters, not the feet of stampers, they don’t sit in the posture of oooooh or aaaaah. He peeks between two of these curiously lethargic legs, and sees something hard to explain.

  The room described by the tapestry’s partition of the tent is thin and long. The floor is grass, not sawdust. On the far end is a cage, filled not with circus preparations, but with a crowd of people, dozens, some weeping, some hostile and glaring, some leaning on the bars. A few are sitting. But all have, to some degree, deportments of resignation, save one: A young man, tall and strong, shakes the bars. He’s shouting but his words are lost in the adjacent howl of spectacle and crowd. The cage has a door, closed, and at either side of the door the tiny Andrews now stand guard—and there are others, too, standing at attention, not small, but similarly resplendent in red from foot to mask, black scabbards affixed to their backs. Nearer, a man, face uncovered, stands upon a short, raised dais constructed of fresh planks. He is short, muscular, and compact, with close-cropped hair and large eyes that rarely blink. The eyes, coupled with a habit of turning his head to look behind him, give him an owl’s deceptive absurdity, a bookish appearance masking a ruthless predator. Beside the man is an ancient-looking barrel. The man holds a steel ladle in one hand; in the other is a parchment, upon which Gordy sees the image of a bird in flight. Lined up along the tapestry wall, the clowns and acrobats and other circus folk grimly observe, while others prepare themselves to go onstage. Closer still, off to the side, there is an opening in the tent wall, a flap cut out of the white-and-blue striping and pinned back, through which can be seen a slice of open night. But all this is seen after. What Gordy first sees, beside the stage, dominating it, is the white thorn. The stone finger. A fountain endlessly passing doleful water from basin to figures to basin to figures. The turtle is facing him, stone eye upon him. There is a shock, a growing sensation, common to his dreams: the desire to be gone from here forever, to pass away from this place and then eject the sight of it eternally from his consciousness—and yet, unfathomably, in revolt against his own desire and need, he lingers.

  The man on the dais dips the ladle into the barrel. The Andrews, taking this act as a signal, open the cage and chivvy out a prisoner from the herd. A kid, not much older than Gordy. He’s holding a blue ticket that’s been hastily colored with a green magic-marker, and is waving it at them, apparently trying to pass his counterfeit into general circulation, but they compel him with their blades and
lead him to the dais. The man with the ladle is not tall, but he stands straight as a pin, his face not stern but ceremonially grave. Despite the crowd’s roar from the circus side, there is a hush about this moment, something darkly holy. The man is proclaiming now to the boy, reading from the parchment, presenting the ladle to him in calm but inescapable imperative. The boy shakes his head but the threat of steel overcomes his fear; he drinks, and falls, his collapse lent silent observance and approbation by the grim-faced circus folk, and by masked men in red standing beside the dais. After they pull the boy glass-eyed from the sawdust they lead him directly toward Gordy and settle him somewhere in the bleachers above. And now they are peeling another from the cage, a woman in a flower-print dress and a church hat, who is scuttled forward in scared demure steps. He watches the woman drink, then a young girl, then a tall rangy guy. Each falls, and is led, expressionless, to a seat in the bleachers, somewhere above the place where he watches, hidden. Next it’s time for the angry man, who’s been shouting all this time at the man by the barrel, desecrating the spirit of the liturgy. At a signal from one of the Andrews, six more ceremonial guards glide from their places and grapple him, bring him, still struggling, to the man by the barrel, who sets down his parchment and selects another, which has upon it the image of a spade.

  A group of red-clad guards are rolling out a silver box on wheels. Gordy feels something, a pressure, something atmospheric. Scanning the room, he sees something new, and dies. Frozen with shock and more, Gordy emits a yelp that is mercifully subsumed by the same racket that has swallowed everything else.

  One of the acrobats standing along the tapestry has settled eyes on him, piercing him through the slats of the bleachers with her naked observance. There can be no question that she sees him; she is the closest to him of the performers standing along the tapestry, and she is glaring right into his soul. The jig is up, the alarm is about to be given, it’s all over, and yet the shock of this is not why Gordy has died. It’s her; the center acrobat, the most heartbreakingly beautiful woman he has ever seen in his life. Her eyes two almonds. Her hair, dark, shot with gold, thick as molasses, a better place to hide than any maze. He has fallen into her, or has been drawn in, or has been invited. Are those eyes inviting him? They seem to be attempting some form of communication. Confoundingly, she hasn’t raised the alarm. She glares with intent: first at him, and then away. At him, then away.