The Revisionaries
Page 29
Squinting, he tries to decipher this code. At, away. At, away. It’s a familiar expression, one he’s sure he’s seen before. In a movie, perhaps? Gordy smiles, awkward. Is she playing a game, does she want him to—could it be?—meet her somewhere? A clandestine assignation? Canoodling in the grass in the glow of the circus…oh, well, shucks, ma’am, I’m only fifteen, but, yeah, some people tell me I look old for my age, I guess…What? Laser tag? Yeah, I guess I’ve been known to play a little laser tag…
She rolls her eyes, and then redoubles her attempts. It’s amazing, but she can make her eyes practically prehensile; she glares at him, with a force that leaves no doubts regarding her target, and then, just as forcefully, away, toward the tent flap, the exit, the scrap of night air.
He recognizes the gesture now: Get out of here, idiot.
This breaks the spell. The insanity of his situation leans its full weight upon him—he’s been standing here, watching…this, risking capture and subjugation to whatever grotesque ceremony this is. They’ve slid a shelf out from the side of the silver box now, revealing some sort of cavity filled with tubes and other scandalous inner workings, and the acolytes are forcing the young man into it. Propelled by sudden awareness, Gordy nevertheless pulls himself away from his life’s love with regret. I’ll find you again, he thinks, somewhere, somehow. It strikes him as a fine thing for a young man who has been killed by the love of a beautiful woman to think. This goddess and he—between them they have exchanged no words, but he knows they’ve exchanged something far deeper: a connection, an understanding, hidden depths leading to even deeper hidden depths of mutual knowledge. I’ll find you, he thinks, and knows with a smitten boy’s assurance she is thinking it, too.
Gordy sneaks to the far end of the risers. There are perhaps a dozen feet separating the termination of his hiding spot from the opening in the tent. He might make it out unseen. Certainly, between fountain and box and barrel and struggle, this will not be the most closely observed dozen feet in the tent. Then again…he looks back to the tapestry from which he came. Perhaps the wiser escape would be through the curtain within, not the curtain without. The real trouble would be getting caught here, in this room, not being caught out there. A kid wandering around out there, on the circus side, there’s no reason to suspect he possesses newfound dark knowledge of evil secrets. If he can go out the way he came, he should be able to leave by the front door. Also, this will give him one final glimpse of his new true (as-yet-nameless) love. This settles matters; Gordy is about to enact this plan when the chance of it is stripped from him.
At the below-bleacher abutment of tapestry and tent, from which Gordy himself arrived, a red-masked head peeks. Gordy sees the head, sees the eyes go from boredom to shock. The head disappears, and then a sword is cutting the hook from the ring, making an opening through which a larger man might pass.
Gordy darts out across the open ground toward the gap, covering the dozen feet in what feels like a single step, passing out into the cool of night. Behind him, he hears the sudden disturbance, a shrill outcry cutting through the pounding pandemonium of the circus: He’s been made. Here the circumferential edge of the grass is blocked by buildings; the drab backsides of establishments press against each other, wall-to-wall, forming a sort of stockade. Gordy desperately runs along them, looking for a gap between, a low fence, an open door, anything. He sees the first of his pursuers—one of the Andrews—erupt from the tent as he finds an open alley.
He hasn’t even cleared the alleyway before he feels a hand on the scruff of his neck.
Things happen quickly after that. There are long missing gaps of time where the terror is too complete to even think.
* * *
—
Now there are threats and pain, until he tells them where to find Dad. It doesn’t take long.
Now, Dad’s brought in, and even beneath the blindfold he looks scared.
Now, they’re being taken back there—to the fountain. Worse, they’re led down stone stairs to a huge room beneath it.
Now Dad’s on the ground; he’s been knocked on the head and is making small noises.
Now a short man comes down the stairs. Not tiny like the dread Andrews, but short. Gordy recognizes him; the man with the ladle, the man who stood on the platform, the man with the bird and the spade. He’s no longer in the ceremonial robes; he’s wearing a plain light blue shirt and jeans. He’s got short cropped hair and the corded muscles of an older man used to hard labor, but his face doesn’t look old, rather it is unremarkable in aspect, save for those steady, protuberant, measuring eyes, and that habit of looking frequently over-shoulder. The short man has Dad’s papers and a couple of his research books—one black, one red—and he looks through them for a while and then he kicks Dad around for a while.
Now they are on a ledge, and below is a cavern holding what Gordy takes to be a library; one wall of it is comprised of enormous steel card-file drawers. Then a forklift is pulling two file boxes from the wall, one from low and one from high, and as the boxes draw near, Gordy recognizes them as identical to the boxes from the ceremony. They’re brought by an elevator up to the ledge. As attendants wheel them over, the short man reads their fate to them from the parchment bearing the image of the spade. His face betrays no emotion while he does it, and his eyes do not blink. He’s as unreachable and beatific as a saint on a stained-glass window.
Then come tubes, and connections, and syringes, and then nothing for a while.
DOOR
The fountain drove Isaac mad, in the end. It ate his life.
By the time he died, he’d dug out everything behind the door. You could see the shape of the space the door would open up on, if ever it was to open: a short hall leading into a room about ten feet square. Love removed the clay from around that room on all four sides, and he cleared it from the floor as well. In my day you could walk around the whole thing—a cube with a panhandle extending from it, and a door at the end of the panhandle. You couldn’t dig under; the walls merged into the floor, which was made of the same stuff, a single piece with cube and hall. After several yards, the floor sloped quickly downward. By the time I was captured, Morris had dug stories deep down along the slope to make room for oubliettes. Not so much a cliff as an incline, a steep hill of smooth impervious gray stone. Down there at the bottom, you could see it pushing up like the Hoover Dam, and up at the top, if you made the long walk up there—way, way up, higher than the uppermost shelf of the oubliettes—you’d find Isaac Love’s door and cube and panhandle, and beside them the stairs leading to the outside.
The door never did yield to Isaac. One day he collapsed beside it and never rose. They hauled him to his bed, where he lay for years before the breath finally stopped coming, but the lights never turned back on; old Isaac was gone. The family held to some traditions of the Assizement—bird and spade and fountain—but the door beneath passed to legend, part of the liturgy delivered from father to son, weakening generation by generation as the family fell into the ready ease of hereditary wealth. Happy enough to keep the Assizement going, happy enough to wear the secret name of Continuity, but doing it in increasingly desultory fashion. It seems likely to me that these descendants felt about the traditions of their forebears the way such folk usually feel—as if they’ve been tied their entire lives to some inexplicable medieval apparatus, something strangely shameful they’re obliged to conceal beneath bulky clothing. And why wouldn’t they want to loosen the straps, slough off the unwieldy contraption, leave it to rust in the field? It’s tempting to view Pigeon Forge’s transformation into a tourist stop as a passive-aggressive nose-thumbing, all the way up the family tree. If Pigeon Forge could have become something Isaac might have found more distasteful, I can’t think of it.
But then came Morris, the distilled essence of the family vinegar. Anyone familiar with Isaac and Morris might even wonder if the old man had somehow passed through time to infect h
is distant heir. Morris hated what his father had allowed Pigeon Forge to become, as much as Isaac might have. It’s probably the main reason Morris killed him. You’ll think I’m indulging now in in in conjecture and calumny. No. Morris told me about it himself, down in the cavern—but that was much later.
Morris was never charged with his father’s death. He was never even a suspect. There were no suspects. There was no corpus to habeas. The facts are: Morris’s dad disappeared, and Morris returned from a self-imposed exile and installed himself almost before the missing person’s report was filed. His father wasn’t declared legally dead until the following year. Yes, Morris was the first of the line since Isaac to install himself as Continuity.
On the day Morris returned to claim his birthright, he visited Isaac’s cavern. For the first time in almost two centuries, someone tried Isaac’s door.
And, as with Isaac before him, it ate his mind.
* * *
—
His father lies on the oak floor of an upper library in the sprawling Love family estate, breathing a slow, drugged rhythm. Morris stands nearby, quite calm in a tailored gray suit, a crisp white shirt open at the collar, holding a steel syringe with a depressed plunger. He opens his jacket, revealing three specially designed pockets holding syringes still full, and stows the empty one in a fourth. Spares his father a cursory glance, produces a cigarette, lights it. The smoke billows from his mouth, and, in the dim, it curls around his head like an obscuring wreath. At the designated moment two of his people appear, dressed as instructed in the ceremonial red. With his head Morris indicates his father, and they take him away to his waiting box.
Now two others appear—the specialists. The compulsive necessities of their jobs preclude the ceremonial red; they are dressed in fiberless and unabrasive body stockings and masks—ghost suits. It will be their job to dress the rooms meticulously for any potential detectives. They eye his cigarette, which will make their jobs more difficult, but they know better than to complain. They carry cases of obscure tools: tubes, brushes, ultraviolet lights, three different sizes of vacuum cleaner. Various tiny blades and blowers to scatter the correct atomy of human detritus in the expected places. Ingenious adhesive strips to leave behind the trace of the corner of one thumb-print, but not enough to go on. If there are any inspectors, they’ll look for it and find it, if they’re skilled, and then Morris will manipulate whatever expectations arise. If they’re unskilled, they will find none of this, and so much the better.
Howsoever they search for Father, Morris thinks, they’ll never find him. The poor fellow, he never even found himself. The lost fool, before you put him down, he even asked you if you think you’re Isaac. Such slow questions. I’m me. Isaac’s only virtue was that he suspected he might be me. I am the peak. I am the wellspring of matter and history. I am the consciousness. The consciousness. Behind that door is the consciousness, the control I deserve. Isaac failed. I will succeed. Then, as you drew your syringe, Father raised his hands weakly to ward it off, began to babble: There’ll be an investigation. You’ll be caught. It’s not like the old days, Morris. People can’t just disappear anymore. Lives have value these days. You can’t do this.
He’d even believed it, maybe—that you couldn’t do it. In any event, he looked surprised when you did do it.
What toff. Had your father really believed what he’d said? You can’t just make people disappear, Morris. There’ll be investigations. Lives have value. Lives have value? Yes. Every life has a label attached to it, and on that label a number is written, value in hard currency. But the appraisal of some lives—many—is in arrears. Men wander the streets without prospect, hungry, agitated, violent, unprofitable, wrapped in filthy rags, holding signs on street corners. Women and children abandoned by those men to desperate lives, crawling with lice and disease. These lives have value? They do—a negative value. A drain. They diminish the value of property. They make people of value feel unsafe. You increase their worth by removing them to a more suitable place, where they might again be made profitable; otherwise you remove them entirely. The bird or the spade isn’t our way alone; it’s the way of the world. And he worried the authorities might catch on? Catch on? They need us. Even better, they want us—they’ve hired us. It’s the most perfect industry yet devised, prisons. We present a solution to the problem of unwanted people. Even if everyone of value became aware of all we do, they’d allow us. First they’d sputter outrage, yes. They’d write letters, publish tasteful opinion pieces, and then, having with an emptiness of words expunged their moral discomfort, they’d proceed to forget about us, because the truth is this: The problem of unwanted people is still a problem, and we are a solution that causes them no pain.
His car is parked in the courtyard’s large circular driveway, but Morris decides on a whim to walk to town. Some events are too momentous to approach quickly. He makes his way on foot down to what now must be thought of as the Pigeon Forge “strip.” Disgusting. A circus is in town; the posters plastered along the fence of a construction project. In the distance he can see the blue and white stripes of a circus tent. They’re building a “Comedy Barn” here, whatever that might be. To how many projects has his family’s corporation committed itself under his father’s leadership, how many partnerships have been taken on, how many severed fiduciary arteries are there to tie off? His people showed him a brief, but he was too offended at the time to take it all in. A tourist trap. It’s the gaudiest form of apostasy imaginable. Now is the dim before sunrise, and the tourists are tucked away in their RVs and motels, but after sunrise they’ll cluster in the circus tent, or walk the strip, or wander the newly formed amusement park at the far end.
Presently he arrives at the place where the street bows out in a wide swing, where the buildings cluster beside each other, two-story edifices heightened by false fronts. He takes one of the hidden pathways, and there it is, the sequestered fountain, white and untainted and perfect. He takes his time looking at it, appreciating it, and then walks to the place, nearly perfectly square, where the uniformity of the middle concentric black stone ring opens into the cavern. Unless you knew to look, the opening would not be apparent in gentle dawn light. There they are; the granite steps, leading down beneath the fountain. Here he pauses. This is the culmination long dreamed of. It is better to go slowly, experience the moment, take ownership of it. To gather himself he takes a cigarette before starting, tries to make himself aloof. He dares to hope it will open for him at once, but does not dare to let himself know he dares. It may take some time, he tells himself. This is natural. If you are not yet perfect, you will make yourself perfect, and then it will open.
He descends. The door is there. So small, so ordinary. Nothing ancient about it. The caverns are there, dug out around it on either side and above, carved far back by his failed ancestor. So strange to be in the presence of things believed in but heretofore unseen. He allows himself another cigarette while he contemplates this. When it’s gone he throws the butt to the floor and puts his hand on the knob. He pauses, breathes deeply, then attempts to open it, and the world becomes gray and indistinct, slowly at first and then all at once he
When Morris comes to himself again, he is on the hard clay floor. His head feels as though it has been stuffed with soft packing for transshipment and his mouth feels raw. He rises to his hands and knees, aware of the damage he has done to his clothing. The flashlight is still on. He retrieves it, then looks around; the door remains closed. Nothing else has changed. Nothing has changed. There is a sharp pain in his neck, as if he’s been recently stung by a hornet. Nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed.
The thing behind him is still behind him.
He looks over-shoulder for a long time at the thing behind him, but nothing has changed, so this means nothing has changed.
Here is the flashlight, and the batteries are still powering it and nothing has changed. Here are the stairs leading up
into open air, and that is the same as well, and nothing has changed. Everything is fine, and everything is fine, and everything is fine and nothing has changed. He still has all his memories, he knows who he is and why he is here and what it is he intends to do, and the thing behind him is still there behind him, and so nothing has changed. The thing to remember is that nothing has changed, and for this reason it logically follows that nothing has changed.
This fainting spell—that is what it was—was not caused by the door. There are so many other explanations. You haven’t eaten since morning. You haven’t mastered your nerves. You just slipped; this floor is slick clay. Leaping to his feet, Morris grasps the handle, as if daring it to send him into another fugue state. It doesn’t do this, but neither does it open. The handle rattles but the door is locked. He walks down both excavated hallways on either side of the door, knocking at intervals on the seamless stone slab that separates him from his birthright.
The sun has carved its path across the sky when he once again emerges. The sun is there and nothing has changed and the thing behind him is still behind him. He has made himself calm again, aloof again—Had you truly been expecting success on the first attempt? No. In a way, immediate success would rob your inevitable triumph of greater meaning. One of the lessons of this world you’ve projected around yourself is this: The natural way of attainment is struggle. This is truth. It was true yesterday, and since yesterday nothing has changed. The days and weeks stretch ahead, a long project from which you will eventually extract your destiny. Your destiny is your own, and nothing has changed.