The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  “I think you know.”

  He says nothing for a time, then:

  “Morris.”

  “Yes.”

  And then he is gone, vanished. She has sent him out to avenge a screaming of wrongs. She imagines him the arrow, herself the bow. She lies back and remembers an explosion of salt.

  * * *

  —

  She waits for his return, imagining how it will be. What method Gordy will have devised to dispose of him, the pain of it, the suffering. But it isn’t Gordy who comes to her, but Morris. With him are a host of trustees. His trustees. Who had, until now, been on the other side of an unbreakable seal.

  She can only stare, fish-dumb: Gordy somehow failed her. Morris is still whole, still alive. Horror makes all sounds distant and indistinct. Morris doesn’t give her a chance to speak. He takes her numb arm and compels her from her rooms. “That thieving little bastard has gone behind the door again,” he says. “He’s opened the seal to do it, so now we’ve got him.” At that moment, Finch darts from the library, and Morris settles his appraising eyes upon her little bird. “Come on,” he tells Jane. “Right now.” Then, to the trustees: “Send somebody to hold onto this kid. I want everybody else outside the door waiting for him with guns.”

  They bring her out into the great vault to a waiting jeep. In the back seat is a skinny older guy with woeful eyes—Sterling, the prisoner who claimed to be Gordy’s father. She never caught his name but she can read it on his shirt: HELLO MY NAME IS. He’s holding a bloody towel over his nose. They regard each other, the two of them, baleful and wordless in their understanding of a defeat she senses they somehow share, as the jeep tears back up the slope toward the enormous gash that’s been made in Gordy’s protective seal. The trustees all take positions around the door, with Morris at their center, weapons trained upon it, waiting for the return of the errant prophet, prepared to deliver him immediately to destruction.

  They fail.

  * * *

  —

  After it’s all over and gone to hell—Gordy escaped with ticket and all—they bring her back to her apartment and Finch is waiting, but gone. Morris is there. Jane knows it the moment she sees her daughter, he’s already done it, delivered the forgetful ladle—or maybe he used one of his pocket-syringes. When she sees the oubliette, she rushes forward to her little lost bird and it’s as if she is leaving the suffering meat of herself behind. She touches the girl’s nose, touches the girl’s nose, touches the girl’s nose, in desperation she touches it and touches it until they pull her away, but the girl only stares at her, confused by the gesture, emptied of the response.

  * * *

  —

  The months pass.

  * * *

  —

  She no longer thinks of Morris and Gordy by their names. Names aren’t identities; she won’t use them. The last replenishment of paper lies on the desk. It came from him, so she will not use it. Abandoner. She refuses to touch it; instead she writes on the walls. She writes the pen dry and then selects another. There are better pens, but they came from him; she doesn’t touch them. The Captor brings her new pens, and, though she hates him too, these she uses. To not use them would be to not write.

  This is what she writes, again and again and again:

  I did not run away with the circus. The circus ran away with me.

  The room is empty. She’s destroyed all the furniture. Once she wrote stories on that same desk, for herself only: frivolous, licentious, important, aping the style of other writers into whose pages she’d escaped. Now all she can write is the one line:

  I did not run away with the circus. The circus ran away with me.

  She wants to publish the rest of herself in a crimson scrawl, so she will become real. But this is what she will write, confession and accusation and plea mingled in two spare sentences, eighteen syllables. They arrive one after the other, as similar, and as different, as traincars, as waves. The Abandoner spoke of a destroying wave. Was it ever even real?

  I did not run away with the circus. The circus ran away with me.

  Her bird is gone, she doesn’t know where. She knows where, but she doesn’t want to know, can’t bring herself to know. She doesn’t tend to the prisoners any more. She writes her phrase, because she can no longer bear to minister to them, prisoners in their refilled oubliettes, because her bird has flown, and she doesn’t know where.

  She writes her phrase.

  She writes her phrase.

  She writes her phrase.

  In time she recalls the Captor has been standing behind her. She had come to awareness of him hours ago and ignored him so long she forgot him again. At last she turns to look at him. He’s calm and still and dreadful. They wait for each other to speak, but in this at least she knows she will triumph. He clearly has something to say to her. She has nothing to say to him.

  “I disguised myself for safety. Found our friend. Tracked him to the end of the line.”

  To this she says nothing.

  “He’s in Färland. Badly confused. It’s time for you to do what I need you to do.”

  “Which is.” After such long silence her voice sounds odd to her.

  “He’s become…difficult to find. Or, if not to find, to keep once found. It’s hard to describe. I’ve gotten close to him, but I can’t get close enough. You, though. I suspect you can get as close as you want.”

  “To do what?”

  “Help me catch him. Take from the thief what belongs to me. And then you can go. Both you and your girl.”

  “Oh. Yes. Both of us. Whatever’s left.”

  “I’ll have the ticket by then. You’ve seen how it can restore. You’ll be healed and freed.”

  She draws near to him, close enough to spit. She is aware of the uncontrollable movement of her face. Whispers: “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s understandable. But really, you have no choice. Do you?”

  She turns back to the wall. Soon she will agree, she knows, but before she does she’ll make him wait. A beggar will wear whatever dignity she can even if it is nothing but a rag. For now she will wear her rag and make him ponder, and she will write.

  I did not run away with the circus. The circus ran away with me.

  WAVE

  So where did the existence of the ticket leave Morris? Was he nothing but a scrap of this other man’s will? He must have at least considered the possibility. Imagine what he must have thought when one of his own prisoners escaped the prison he’d designed, opened a door he’d failed to open, then came from beyond it displaying the absolute power Morris sought for himself.

  Up to then Gordon had been like everybody else as far as he was concerned—beyond insignificant, nothing but another rebellious but quelled protuberance of his wayward psyche. The thought of another living being having a separate existence, unattached to himself? Inconceivable. None of us are people to him. We’re not even objects. We’re object lessons. We’re something he’s showing himself, to teach himself some deeper truth. But now, a figment of his imagination had stolen his birthright: A lottery ticket for control and mastery over the universe. And somebody else won it.

  What lesson could he have possibly derived from that?

  The door drew Gordon back a second time before he could exact revenge on Morris. I watched it happen. When he came out again, Gordon ran away. There’s no other way to say it: He ran. And, per his usual, he brought his old man along, almost as an afterthought. This time, though, he didn’t bring me the whole way. He deposited me somewhere else; here, in fact. I suppose he thought I’d be safer than I was with him. And, to be fair, you’re safe in a booby hatch, sort of. Three squares and sedatives, a roof and a bed.

  He birthed me from that place into this one. He birthed me in fire. You know the story, Father. I’ve heard you tell your own part in it; I was part of your miracle
, the one you didn’t really do. You and I arrived in Loony Island the same day.

  That was the last day until today I ever saw my boy.

  * * *

  —

  There is the paralysis of no options. And then there is the paralysis of all the options. What can you do to him? Why, anything, or even everything: Choose one option, see it through to completion, then spool back time itself—you’ve never dared try this before—and choose another. Though you didn’t seek justice, the opportunity for justice lies now in your hands.

  who?

  you know already

  morris

  yes

  Casting out your awareness you find him in his usual place, keeping vigil in your own apartment with Sterling. Your two constant companions; the one who pretended to be your adviser, the one who claims to be your father. Look at him—Morris. You draw all your shades and avatars back into yourself to give the matter your full attention. For the first time in months, there is only one you.

  Morris notices you looking at him.

  So, he says. You’ve figured it out. It took you long enough.

  You give him no reply, only your loathing gaze.

  And now you’ll kill me, I suppose.

  You approach, seething. Nose-to-nose. Without warning, he leans forward and kisses you full on each cheek.

  You’ll do nothing, he says. How could you? Can the web trap the spider?

  Your hesitation isn’t born of fear. You’re afraid only that your imagination might prove unequal to the challenge. It must be a punishment worthy of a decade of hell, with compounded interest, multiplied on behalf of hundreds of others; the hells of mirrors and remembrance and confinement, minds made slippery from the pain of it, all of them screaming from their oubliettes, retreating even now from life. He is rounding on you now, whispering. You feel the remembrance of his disgusting kisses on your cheeks. He says you have no power. You will show him otherwise. You must phrase your intentions within your mind very precisely.

  You turn his brain to ice.

  You raise the temperature of his blood to boiling.

  You metastasize a cluster of kitten-sized spiders behind his eyes.

  You dissolve each of his cell walls, converting him into a puddle of pink slurry.

  You fill his intestines with air until they burst shit throughout his abdomen.

  You fill his lungs with water and he drowns in confusion.

  You bury a pickaxe up to the handle in his skull.

  You sever his head from his body.

  You drop him from on high.

  You run him through.

  You think, die.

  Die.

  You do none of these things. It doesn’t seem possible.

  Every time you try you lose the train

  the train of your thought stops

  (no I won’t do that wh

  why would I do th

  Defeated, you

  quit.

  * * *

  —

  Someone is calling your name, soft and familiar and persistent.

  —Gordy. Gordy. Where are you?

  You try to object, to protest, but this voice is in you and you are compelled—or, it is more apt to say, you are propelled—out of your apartment, through door, over balcony, carried like a recalcitrant child up the slope of the vault toward the great confining seal. It isn’t that you’re forced to; it’s worse—you want to. You remain in control but the voice is calling you and you come. You don’t intend to open the seal. You won’t. But you do it joyfully. You open it larger than you intended. It’s not even that you want to; you need to. You’re barely aware of your movements until you pass through the door, where you find yourself still standing, fully present, upon the wild and waste of the endless beach and the wave stretching up without termination.

  —Gordy.

  –Here I am.

  —What are you doing?

  –What has to be done.

  —You resist the task set to you.

  –You asked me to heal. True healing needs justice.

  A minute sound comes from everywhere at once, a susurration frustrated or else amused.

  —Observe.

  The entire wave—the entire ocean—rolls into an immense ball; it hovers before you in the void left behind, which is true void: not blankness, not inky sky, but antithetical spirit-quailing not-ness. The oceanic sphere shrinks to the size of a grapefruit and hangs inches before your eyes. Intricate patterns dance on its surface, and then it splits open and melts until it is a river encircling your head, flowing counter-clockwise.

  Droplets leap from the rapids. Before rejoining the water from which they issue, they turn into bottle-nosed fish resembling dolphins. They cavort in the now-roiling water, and with each leap, the fish split like cells into halves and thirds, with each division becoming some new specie, with familiar morphology as if sprung from familiar genus and phylum, yet without holding to existing forms; they are new creations unto themselves, things never before seen or thought of. Land springs from water and soon there crawl new beasts whose physiologies accommodate to gravity and air and earth and you are in it and among it even as you watch it all around; you are individual and observer, creator and created, and you feel and know you are the activator here, this is being done through you, throughout your consciousness—not your power, but your contribution nonetheless, as things resembling baboons chase things resembling butterflies (whose shining wings are spun of the most delicate stained glass) through trees that resemble palms but for their pine-needles, you think did I help bring this into being was it my hand too, seen in this…?

  And then, with a wrenching, it flows out of you and away, and the dooming wave has returned to its place before you, monstrous and beautiful in equal measures, promising the full weight of death, offering the entrancement of its impossible expanse. If you scan the line of the beach back to the curve of the sky you can get a sense of its scope; even where the beach has disappeared to a vanishing point it hovers, bulging the horizon; even at the point where it passes from sight it dwarfs the prospect of beach, ocean, all. You can’t tell how fast it’s moving. It may be here in an instant; it may not arrive in your lifetime.

  —Now you have seen. Which do you choose?

  –I…don’t understand.

  —Your task lies incomplete.

  –You told me to heal. I healed.

  —Look around you. You know better. Heal and warn. If you do not warn him, he and all he calls his own will be destroyed.

  –Yes. Destroyed. I was about to start with him. I can get to all he owns later if you like.

  Another infinitesimal sound susurrates throughout everything.

  —Even after all you have learned, you still misunderstand? Look around you, learn and listen. Should he fail to turn from his path, he and all he calls his own will be destroyed.

  –I know. I’ve been waiting for your wave. It’s taking its sweet time.

  —If it comes it will come. You must deliver the warning. Give the sign I gave you.

  –The sign? What sign?

  —You call it a ticket. Give it to him.

  –Give him the…

  —You call it a ticket. Give it to him. It will be warning enough.

  It settles upon you in sedimentary layers, the import of what has been commanded, the reality of the command, the ramifications upon ramifications, the injustice of your fate. You allow yourself to imagine it for a moment, what Morris would do with the ticket. Imagine justice’s oncoming wave halted forever. Imagine a monument to the tamed wave, remade in Morris’s image: a silver wall reaching to the sky, tray upon tray, the human warehouse underground no more, a silverfish sardine wall of oubliettes, holding half the world’s population, a prison so immense it is visible from space. The Assizement administered globally.


  This is impossible. You have been asked the impossible.

  —Give him the ticket? Give him?

  —Yes. That, and no harm.

  –Are you insane?

  —You have only to look around you to know him.

  It’s a nightmare. It’s is an abomination. You’ve been commanded to bring it about, and you will be compelled to enact it. No, you have been summoned to enact it, in the same way you were summoned here, and with terrible certainty you know you will answer that summons in the same way you answered this one: transported by an awful inescapable joy, without meaning to do it, intending not to, and then doing it all the same.

  No. No. No you say and no you think and no and no and no. You summon the remainder of your will in resistance as the voice again speaks throughout your being:

  —Go, and I go with you. You are in me, and I in you. I will not forsake.

  –Go, and fuck yourself.

  The door is still behind you and you pass through it, leaving behind door and beach, wave and the insane voice who through you called it all into being. What you see as you pass through is unexpected: a crowd. You speed your perception, petrifying time. In front, Jane and Sterling—your father. Crouched around them, cloaked in scarlet, trustees with rifles pointed at you. Behind them, also in scarlet, stand others with swords drawn. Among these you see Morris. Him. You must kill him if you are able.

  You create a host of tiny vermiform parasites, each equipped at one end with a microscopically small chitinous spike, which is used to burrow through the body of the host, piercing a winding course through flesh and vein, sinew and bone, until the worms reach their real sustenance, the heart. As they go, they secrete from their skin a unique blend of enzyme and protein, which paralyzes the surrounding tissue while exciting the adjacent nerve endings. He won’t be able to move, only feel. He’ll feel it all, like fire and ice, their slow progress through him. They move a centimeter each month. They are far too small and far too numerous to extract; they multiply far too quickly to eradicate. You place thousands and thousands of them on Morris, covering every millimeter of the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. This is your intention, but you find you are unable to enact it. The parasites are created, they need now only placement. You can bestow them upon any ready host in the world save one.