The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  and then she wakes with a mouth like sandpaper. Her body gone.

  Nettles’ eyes lift from her book. “Back with us?”

  Bailey says nothing. There seems little point in speaking.

  “Want to get up now?”

  “I’m not getting up today.”

  “Doctor’s orders. You’re getting in the chair, and you don’t get to decide about it. What you get to decide about is now or later.”

  “Later, then.” Bailey sighs, then glances at the flask with the steel nozzle. Nettles, attentive as always, raises it to Bailey’s lips. Nettles intuitively understands what Daniel hasn’t grasped even after a month: For her, a certain type of glance represents the same gesture as an arm extended, finger pointing might for another…but it has to be a certain type of glance. You have to think not just about gesture but intuit intent. Daniel hasn’t managed the trick. They’ve already had one massive fight about it. That was a month ago, just after it happened. Right? Yes—a glance at the calendar—a month. Today, the clock says it is just after six in the morning. Ninety minutes from now, she will receive her breakfast, which Nettles will feed to her. Eggs scrambled, orange juice, drugs à la paper cup. One hundred and eighty minutes from now, one of the doctors will slide in, read some chicken guts typed out on a sheet of paper, murmur a few thin pronouncements, and evaporate for the day. Three hundred and sixty minutes from now, her lunch will arrive, along with more pills. Seven hundred and twenty minutes from now will come her dinner, and the sleeping pills, and finally she will find the Attic again. Somewhere between now and thirty-one million, five hundred thirty-six thousand minutes from now, she expects her body to finally stop pushing oxygen and blood to her head and all this mess will finish at last. Her body (the doctors assert with crisp buoyant assurance) is—spinal injury aside—relatively healthy, recovering nicely, so there’s no reason not to hope, with proper medical care, she can’t live a perfectly normal span. Although (they further aver with sober shades of admonition), given her condition, they will have to be vigilant against the usual complications…

  Given the tone the doctors use when they talk about “complications,” she imagines them as squat beasts with the short-bristled hair of a boar and the gaping mouths of anglerfish, lurking in dark places, waiting to strike. Maybe, Bailey considers, you have a matter of months before a complication swims out from between two seaweed trees and gets you. Or maybe there are none coming, and you’ve got decades of this to go. Daniel’s purchased devices for her she can use to read endless books, or else watch hours and hours of film or television, stand-up comedy, documentary, but thus far she can’t focus on any of it. She sees little point. She used to be able at any moment see every way she might die. Now she can’t find a single plausible path.

  Daniel still visits. She wishes he wouldn’t. It’s so clearly out of duty, so clearly a function of his need for something else. He comes empty and uses her to once again fill himself with the thirst for vengeance. He’d been there when she awoke, and what had been the first thing he’d told her? Nothing to do with her prognosis or her condition, no expressions of sorrow or of relief, no news about the condition of her shop after the riot; no, he’d told her about the culmination of his revenge with Ralph. It’s done. He’d told her with declining gusto, the disappointment in his eyes increasingly evident as he went on; he’d expected her to be ready to celebrate with him. Or no—that wasn’t it. He’d expected to be celebrated. Later, it occurred to her—it was for this he was waiting for me to wake up. To tell me his triumph. To feel it through me. But their plans for Ralph now seem like something in a book unread since childhood, and she disappointed him with her reaction. Even more remote to her are Daniel’s pronouncements about Morris, the man who left her in this state. No matter; Daniel has energy enough for them both. Morris is all he can think of—getting Morris. He’s like a Mad Lib, a find-and-replace, the same old sentences with Ralph taken out and Morris set in his place. She sees Daniel clearly at last: a creature built only for secret revenge, someone who has carved within himself concealed channels and hidden reservoirs optimized against corrosion, able to hold endless quantities of vengeance’s thick and bitter syrup. What would such a man do if he allowed it to drain from himself? Would he slowly turn brittle and hollow, like an abandoned seed shell? Would he fly around the room, sputtering angrily until flaccid, like a punctured balloon? He’d finish up empty either way. You’re lucky Morris came along and did this to me, love. You’d have been at such a loss without this fresh outrage to dig your toes into.

  She’s his fuel now, much as Yale had been. He’ll enact his vengeance in her memory—this is what Bailey believes he means, though he never quite says it. He’s keeping the donut shop open, getting one of his more trustworthy loonies to run it—Garf, she thinks he said—but he’s doing that in memory of her, too. And it doesn’t matter to her either way, really, about the donut shop. She has a different pride of ownership now. Donk may not consider her alive, but Bailey knows better. The problem with Donk is, he thinks that since she won’t return to what she was before her injury, she’s a nothing, a not, an un-person, an object of pity, a button sewed to a curtain. He doesn’t understand that she’s become something else, in some ways diminished, but in other ways more. She lives, but not here. She resides in the Attic, adding room after room as she slumbers, while Daniel, in waking life, erects story atop story, building up his army of loonies, raising up his monument to reprisal. The strangest thing is how much he now sounds like that stammering weirdo Tennessee, who delivered Father Julius to them on a stretcher. According to Donk, the loony ran off shortly thereafter and hasn’t been seen since; yet another little-known soul gone missing during the madness of the Loony Riot. Tennessee is a subject of annoyance for Donk; apparently Julius thinks Tennessee’s got answers, and the priest is all in a fluster to find him—he won’t stop bugging Donk about it. All the same, Tennessee’s influence shows up in Donk’s speeches to her when they’re alone; it’s all this toff about tickets of power, and Pigeon Forge, and doors. Caves and fountains.

  Julius also visits. Until he found a use for himself by making himself a conduit for the news back in the Island, Julius’s visits used to be uncomfortable. Not his fault, really, but it’s a small room; they had no place to fit all the guilt he dragged in with him. He looked at her as if she were ketchup he’d just spattered across a pristine white carpet. He appeared unsure of what to do with his hands. They grasped air, seemingly searching for some way to put her back together. During his first few visits, Julius was so unceasing in his remorse that Bailey began to think she’d have to ask him to stop coming, and then she’d have been the one with the guilt. He’s the one paying for this swank hospital, same as he once did for Nettles, saving her from choosing between the swift eradication of her own bankroll or the bedlam of the county’s ICU. A new Neon acolyte named Gordy—allegedly Father Julius’s flickering man—comes along with the priest most days. But he doesn’t “flicker” anymore; Bailey’s able to see him just fine. According to Julius he’s visible to the Neon Brothers and Sisters, and to Donk, but completely invisible to most others, which one supposes is how he can walk the streets safely. She remembers the invisible form under the sheet the night of the riot. That had been the damnedest thing. If it was an illusion it was an accomplished one; if a hallucination, it had been shared.

  “If he’s not flickering for you,” Julius had told her, “it’s because he trusts you.”

  Trust or no, Gordy seems almost shy in her presence. He treats her almost like a celebrity. “Donk told me what you did for us,” Gordy had said to her when they’d met. She murmured something about not being a hero, but he insisted, and really, she lacked the energy to quibble. She hadn’t “done it” for him, or even for Julius. If she’d “done it” for anybody it had been for herself, to prevent Daniel from turning them both into something foul. And she didn’t even “do it” for those noble reasons, because she hadn�
��t meant to “do it” at all—because, after all, what was “it”? Nothing but letting her guard down. She had meant to turn the little prick away, and had been adequately armed for the task, but he sliced her right in the spine. Her condition wasn’t the result of some brave and noble sacrifice; it was the price of momentary stupidity. But if there’s a point in explaining all this, it escapes her.

  The morning progresses. Breakfast comes. Nettles feeds her, then returns to her book.

  Nettles understands the value of silence without it having to be explained to her. After all, there would once upon a time for her have been a soporifically beeping hospital room, a part of her body gone; Nettles, too, has once upon a time been forced to learn new ways in which to point. In her company Bailey feels understanding and presence and little else. It’s a bearable thing, and there are few bearable things remaining. In ways none of the rest can possibly apprehend, Nettles understands. Scratches her nose, distracts her from the pains and itches and heat and cold emanating from her phantom body by tickling her still-sensitive scalp, keeping silent except as needed, save for the regular crisp turning of a page, or the snoring from her chair.

  Nettles had been there already when Bailey first woke up, but she hadn’t thought much of this at first; they’d all been there: Julius, Daniel (with a couple of loonies guarding the door for him in a hyperbolic pantomime of attentiveness), several of Julius’s congregation, including Nettles, whose face Bailey vaguely knew. It wasn’t until later, after the rest had departed, that it became clear Nettles intended to stay. She pinched a chair and dragged it over to the bed.

  “I’m going to keep this short,” she said. “It’s going to be hard for you now. I wanted to quit when I was in a situation sort of like this—” displaying her interrupted fingers—“and I didn’t lose nearly so much as what you have. Hell, I did quit. I quit all the time. Pretty much every day, and for weeks together sometimes. But Julius came and sat with me. He was my spare tire. Whenever I quit, he didn’t quit, so there was always somebody trying. Anyway, that’s the deal. I’m going to stick by you. Quit whenever you want; I won’t. You won’t have to entertain me. You won’t have to talk to me. I’m just going to be here. You’re not going to always like me for it, but I’m your spare tire. And I’ve got more tread on me than you know. Got it?”

  True to her word, Nettles rarely leaves. It’s a comfort—usually. Right now, though, Nettles is pestering. Apparently it’s past time for her body to be pressganged into some physical therapy exercise and some hours in a seated posture.

  “I’m not doing it today. Please.”

  Nettles just gives a grim smile. “Come on, kiddo. You know better than that.”

  Bailey shrugs. Or—and this is the oddest part of waking life now—her brain goes to shrug. She makes her brain do the “shrug” thing, but no shrug is forthcoming. She wants to explain—to Donk, to Julius, to the cascade of nurses and orderlies and doctors, even to Nettles sometimes—how impossible it is for her now to keep these things straight. How much she lives elsewhere. How all of this has become for her a sort of toll, the price of admission paid to access the wonder of the Attic. She’s passed through a painting and into something far greater than anything she’d known before her injury. Nowadays, when she’s awake, she makes her brain do the “regret” thing, the “sorry” thing, and nothing happens. As for the motions, so with the emotions. Her brain does them, but they will not come.

  “Must have forgotten,” is what she mutters.

  With some assistance from Nettles, the nurses drag Bailey into the chair, so she sits and waits until the time when she’s not compelled to sit in the chair anymore. Chair-time drags on, second after impervious second. Orderlies occasionally shift her position to prevent bedsores—this is the great medical bugaboo, bedsores. Then lunch passes like a street sign on a desert road. The orderlies bathe her with sponges. They massage her fundament to prevent blockage. They inspect her closely for bedsores and are pleased to find none. Everybody except for Nettles praises her for this with tones of exaggerated cheer, as if she is an exceptionally well-behaved toddler, newly toilet-trained. The nurse informs her that soon she will be eligible for home care. Bailey takes this news in with a total lack of enthusiasm or interest, and sees Nettles note this apathy with a sharp and knowing eye.

  In time, the day ends and sleep finds her.

  In the Attic, she finds rooms with flowers growing from floor, walls, ceiling. In the Attic, she finds a high-ceilinged trampoline room filled with hamsterlike creatures. The hamsters shoot up high when you bounce, then deploy their furry parachute tummy-pouches, making wee chuckling noises as they descend. In the Attic, there is a room, which has a room in it, which has a room in it, which has a room in it, which has a room in it, which has a room in it, which has a room in it, and each room without holds so much of the room within that nothing is left of any of it but a thin hallway and the door to the next room. In the final nested room, she finds an enormous cylindrical aquarium reaching up five stories, and a spiral staircase, which you can climb to reach a series of observation decks, set at intervals, until you arrive at a domed roof. In the roof is a door, which opens onto a balcony overlooking a cathedral nave. A huge glass window depicts a rock spewing water, and a prophet striking the rock with his staff. The sun rises beyond, illuminating the glass. Climbing down from the balcony, she discovers the altar, which lifts on hinges like a trapdoor, revealing a slow ramp leading down into the round, glass-bottomed carriage of a dirigible thousands of feet above the earth. It occurs to her she has managed to unshackle herself from the physical; her mind is now, piece by piece, giving her a tour of everything that is, was, will be, or might be. At the end of each night, she wheels around at last to the final inevitable room: the room with the Thing in the bed. But now the Thing’s hair is growing back. Now the Thing is still thin but not so frightfully thin as before, eyes somewhat less sunken. What month is it? They told her but she forgot. She’ll ask again. Might they have found some bedsores? Is this the dreaded and hoped-for complication? In any case, the nurses look concerned. Doctors arrive. It’s not her problem; she drifts back.

  In waking she has clearer and clearer memories of the Attic. She muses as deeply as she can, allowing the daytime routine to pass by quickly through haze of remembrance. Some days she discovers herself in the Attic, unsure if a day has passed in between, unsure if this is a new visitation or the memory of an old one. She finds it is no longer necessary to respond to the orderlies, or nurses, or to other visitors. For the increasingly worried Nettles, to whom she feels some small debt of gratitude, she still reluctantly surfaces on occasion. Daniel still has his specific and creative and boring plans of revenge—something about eyelids this time. Happily, she doesn’t have to solve it or even remember it exists until the next time Daniel comes visiting, at which point the mystery will surface once again, as unattainable and illogical as one found in a recurring dream.

  Even the waking hours have gone funny. Right now, for example. Right now she thinks she sees a strange and vivid man in the shadows, wearing a tailored suit of powder blue, smoking and watching her. Nettles is gone for some reason. No, not for some reason—there’s a reason. Nettles told it to her, but she had been thinking about the Attic and doesn’t remember. Oh yes—there’s a circus in town. Daniel was talking about it. A circus in the Island, imagine that. Announced just last week, practically no advance notice, no lead time. Tickets free to all Island residents. Apparently, it’s all the buzz. But no—Nettles isn’t attending the circus. She told you that. What did she say? She’s gone to the Neon Chapel for something. Yarn and needles? No, it’s to do with Julius; he’s called her back; he’s got something to say to the brothers and sisters. She turns to ask the smoking man if he knows, but he’s gone, too. Bailey returns to contemplation of the previous night’s Attic sojourn, and, in contemplating, drifts back into it without noticing. In her wandering she finds herself passing from a room s
haped like an inverted ziggurat into a leaking room. Water pours down the walls in runnels, and she chastises herself for not having patched the roof, which she’d known needed repair—Now look, the plaster is coming apart, and you just painted. In the corner of the leaking room is a chair. In the chair sits a wan gray young fellow, the first person she’s encountered in all her wandering. He’s dressed like a greaser—denim jeans and leather jacket, impressive pompadour. He’s sitting in the chair and knitting a poem about sardines. She looks to see how he’s doing it, the trick of using the needles to turn yarn into ink on the page, reads:

  Yon sardine incommodious and crampéd home

  Composed of nothing more (nor less) than tin.

  With twenty fish all told caught up within

  Sunk far beneath the sea in deepest black

  Six fathoms straining sight, murk’d dark as sin.

  Deep buried ’neath the ocean’s silt and loam;

  Doomed to this fate, with no hope to atone;

  For tin was sealed tight, nor ridge nor crack

  Would let them pry with tail or lip or fin

  Nor could they budge, mewed back to back to back.

  “And so,” said one, “as we shall never roam

  (Nor teeth shall e’er with mercy pierce our skin,