The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  That’s where the circus comes in.

  Promise the kid his circus, the return of his precious bearded lady Jane, and he’ll wait. And Morris will have to gift you a couple valuable weeks to maneuver without his eyes on you when he goes to fetch her. Only Gordy can’t be allowed to wander far, that’s the main thing, at least not until he coughs up the ticket. The ticket is key. Donk’s not sure he believes it works the way Tennessee said, but he’s seen enough flouting of natural laws—Gordy’s flickering being first among those—to believe there is something that gives power. Also, the prohibition of harm between Julius and Morris is a mystery, but it is real for both of them. Yes. The ticket, whatever it is, will give you the power you need to give Morris the punishment he’s earned.

  The room hardly moves now. Donk reads for a time, then rises and leaves the room, walks briskly to Domino City, keys himself into the most decrepit of the six dominoes, the one most given over to ruin. He jogs up the stairs—the elevator’s been busted so long nobody can remember if it ever worked—to the fifth floor, which is the foulest floor of the foulest building. Nobody comes here unless they’ve got nowhere else. The smell hits you like a wave. Bums and drifters passed out—some seem dead—filth piled in the hallway, half the lights punched out. He goes to this one now, the one at the end, the only other door still opening onto a room Donk keeps. About this room even Bailey knew nothing. It’s small and sparsely furnished, a single room containing only a television, a kitchenette, a cot in the corner, and Tennessee on the cot. Tennessee stirs when the door opens.

  “What’s the story, captain?”

  “Morris has the cardinals all still out sweeping for you. All day and night. Morris says he’s not going to rest until he finds you. They’ve got posters up with your face on it.”

  Tennessee moans and sinks his head into his hands, fingers in hair.

  “I need to know where Gordy’s keeping the ticket. Hoping you have a clue.”

  Looking up, hopeful: “Gordy-Gord? You’ve found him?”

  “Negative. Both he and Julius are still missing. But if—when—I find them, we’ll need to be able to locate the ticket, and quick, if we’re going to stop Morris.”

  Tennessee rolls back onto the cot. “Your guess is as good as good as my my mine. Back in the day he just kept it in his pocket.” This probably isn’t helpful, but Donk knows he can’t complain to Tennessee; it would lead only to questions better unasked. Every day, he knows, he’ll worry over the lies he’s told. Keeping each one properly discrete.

  “Are you sure there’s nowhere else it might be? Nothing you remember?”

  “Nothing,” Tennessee says. “Nothing comes to mind. I wish Gordy was here with us.”

  “I told them to stay with me,” Donk says. “But they wouldn’t listen. They ran off and I don’t know where. It’s just you and me against the world. I’ve been out and about. Let me tell you the lie of the land.”

  GORDY READS: GUILLOTINE

  “Rule Ten!” Father proclaimed. “The most important one. Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man drew in.

  “Rule Ten,” he said. “Don’t ever trust those darned rabbits.”

  Returning to the table, he rescued the bottle and drank deeply. I saw his mirrored headgear resting like a paperweight on top of the largest stack of documents. It was the sight of the headgear, I think, that finally caused me to break.

  “Rabbits!” I shouted.

  “Shhh!” My father seemed suddenly unsure. He sidled up to me, draped an arm around my shoulder, guided me to a chair by the table. “Let me explain.” He leaned in conspiratorially. The candlelight played on one side of his face, while on the other the gloom made canyons of each crease and groove.

  “The rabbits are invisible.” he whispered. “But they’re there. You’ll see. They hide in the corners of all my mirrors”—here he pointed to the mirrors covering every inch of laboratory wall—“and come at me at the very worst times. They gang up on me and pull me down and nibble at my energy. Judging. I thought they wouldn’t be able to get at me down here, but they finally found me. Now it’s worse. Now I know there’s nowhere else to go. But I didn’t give up.” He puffed up with ridiculous pride. “I’m taking the fight to them.” He leapt to the shape beside the table. It was tall and blocky and covered by a sheet, which he soon had lying in a puddle on the flagstones. I looked at the revealed object, no more enlightened than I had been before.

  It was a guillotine.

  As guillotines go, it was a beauty, reflected to regressive infinity in the lab’s wall mirrors. The frame appeared to be made of cherry wood, varnished and lacquered to radiance. The blade was ice-blue stainless steel; pinpoints of candlelight danced from its surface. It had one feature unusual to guillotines: the gap meant for the head lay higher than usual, as if designed for a standing victim. My father beamed with lunatic pride.

  “What are you going to do with…?”

  “My forehead.” My father’s tone suggested the guillotine’s purpose was self-evident.

  “Your…?”

  “I’ve got it all planned out. Look!” He scrambled to the table and rooted through the largest stack of papers. The hat and side mirrors, resting atop it, began to slip, and the old man caught the rig, placing it absently on his head, making him look like a deranged moose. He retrieved a handful of documents covered with stains and geometric figures and trigonometric equations, and waved them in my face.

  “It’s all in this report,” he announced, surveying himself once again in the mirrors. “The angles, blade weight and sharpness, my cranial curvature, cauterization, everything. It’s all planned out to the most minor detail. Except how to make the damn thing drop. It all depends on absolute stillness. But I have it rigged. A rope with pulleys. Frictionless. No movement to the important components. But I need to hold absolutely still. Somebody else needs to hold the rope and drop it for me.”

  His fevered eyes rested, at last, upon me.

  Something brittle within me began to splinter and crack. In that moment, my childhood arithmetic was finally solved, and came to nothing. I was amazed, I was tired, I was sad, most of all, I was surprised—not only by what I’d found, but because I realized I no longer cared if I were allowed to stay. I saw myself clearly at last: a sad boy, taking moments, glances, a single conversation, and pasting these together to craft a story he could tell himself, some fine tale transforming him into a figure of consequence. A new story became brutally clear: I was not the faithful son. I was not even something so interesting as a madman’s apprentice. I was nothing but a boy who had spent his childhood hoping to become the madman’s apprentice, an aspiring Igor. I was the boy beneath even the madman’s consideration. The idea that he had been waiting for me to come to him? Ridiculous. And here lay the awful truth: Part of me still wanted to join him, and, in so doing, receive my meaning.

  I ran.

  pit

  The line on display in her portfolio was clean and steady; even so, Juanita Neato’s hands shook at the first meeting.

  Sir, can I, can I just say, what an honor it is to meet you. Your book, it’s…there’s so much, I mean, I feel like I just get lost in it. I’ve been reading this since I was a kid.

  You smiled then, because she was still a kid. The only hitch: Neato was such an enthusiast—a fan—she’d balked when she heard your plans for the book.

  But…they’re your main characters.

  Trust me.

  They’re coming back…aren’t they? Tell me they’re coming back.

  You smiled: Just trust me.

  You wrote the script in a blood fever and sent it by express courier. Neato in her zeal returned the pages a week ahead of schedule. You looked them over, chuckling—Why, these are perfect. Donk and Boyd and Bailey dead, vaporized, dropped into an enormous mechanized blender with blades the size of swords. Readin
g the pages became the culmination of each month, and therein lay the hollowness of it, the emptiness; to achieve ultimate victory but to experience it only in two dimensions. Your subjects, kingdom, fountain…all of these lay on the other side of the study door. The temptation of the study door remained ever-present—back there, you could be anything, do anything, really see it. You reminded yourself: There’s a higher plane. As you perfect the lower story—each month providing fresher and higher triumphs for the one you replace—your power will grow in this place, until once again you rise.

  But signs of this power remained elusive on the artist’s side, which was given to mundanity: groceries and bills and emails, fan mail (diminishing), long hours alone. Meanwhile (as Rupert Paddington informed you with increasingly resigned despondency) your publishers grew impatient with what they called the “Morris Tangent.” Worried by the lost readership and (more to the point) lost revenue, they demanded a triumphant return of the heroes—even as Juanita Neato grew presumptuous. In the margins she began scribbling commentary: alternative story ideas, frantic notes, angry messages. She delivered issue 136 with her own signature inked on each page. You’d been forced to meet with her then.

  I think I’m being used. And not even for good cause.

  You’re being paid. And it’s the best cause I can imagine.

  You’re ruining one of comics’ greatest works. It’s time to change it back.

  Or else…what?

  Or else nothing.

  Not a very strong bargaining position.

  No. Or else, nothing. Nothing more. Not another line or dot. I won’t be a part of it.

  Then you’re fired.

  Then I talk about who’s been drawing the book uncredited for the last year.

  The baboon rage had risen then, a desire to remove her from existence, to make her not be. You’d been on the verge of snarling something hateful, but then, all at once, you understood the nature of your error. It’s always this way when you finally understand your lessons to yourself. You wondered at how you’d missed it—how ridiculous. You can’t even kill her if you want to, here on this side. There would be actual consequences. See how neutered you’ve become? Never mind your inability to mold reality here; think how reality imposes upon you. You have to follow laws. This isn’t a mountain. It was never a mountain. Think where the power lies.

  You made yourself soft then—You’re right. No. You’re right.

  I—What?

  There’s been a lot of pressure. You displayed the hand you claimed was your drawing hand, for which you’d claimed injury. It’s…been difficult. To not be able to draw. To lose the ability all at once. But…I owe you an apology. An apology, and more. I just…I think that’s why I killed the characters off. To see somebody else drawing them…you see?

  I…yes. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine—

  No, I’m sorry. I’ve been so focused on myself. Look. Here’s what I think we should do. We’ll bring Donkeyface and Boyd and Bailey back. And we’ll get your name on the book.

  Don’t kid me.

  You want me to call Universe Comics right now and tell them?

  They’d go for it?

  They don’t have a choice. I created the book on my own, and I kept ownership of the characters. They don’t own me. They’re distribution partners.

  I…don’t know what to say.

  You laughed as easily as you could manage. Well, you say “It’s about goddam time.”

  She laughed, but she did repeat it, and she sounded as if she meant it, too.

  Actually, you should come to my studio. We’ll be more aligned then, as we work.

  No. Way.

  We can start right now if you like.

  You got a surprise dragging Neato unconscious through the door. “Morris” was still lying there, exactly where you left him. So you learned: The door always opens upon the same moment—though from there you can jump to any moment. By focusing your mind, you can be anywhere, be anything, do anything. Think it and it is—Why hadn’t you seen it before? This cavern side isn’t the lower tier at all, it’s the higher. You weren’t climbing a mountain to reach the prize; no, you descended into a pit to retrieve it. It’s so obvious. Consider how upside-down in character it is, how perverse in design, how inconceivably contrary to nature, for your author to be such a failed thing as he manifestly was. Consider how much less power you have on the artist’s side, how much less influence you possess, how much less you you are. Here you preside, plenipotentiary in rightful dominion, your territory the map and your map the territory. Here you can be the clouds, you can make the sky the mountains. Turn the streets to rubber, the trees to steel, the people from cats to dogs to monkeys and back again. Here you can separate the land from the water. “Say” and “is” are at last conjoined, exactly as you knew they must be, for here, all is as you say it is.

  Neato lay on the clay beside the author as you pondered her—It won’t do to leave you here. You can’t belong to the story. I need to erase you and build you another life, then do it again, then again. Backstories onioned all the way in so you’ll never be found. Living on the far side of the country from the story, amnesia piled on amnesia, hidden from a reader’s prying eyes. Not a Juanita, no, nothing so distinctive.

  You’ll be a plain Jane.

  Returning to the artist’s side, everything remained as before, except…

  There it was. A new stack of paper, inches thick, on the table. The first revision you ever created.

  You’d known, certain past supposition, your journey had generated them. Remember your sense of triumph in that moment? Letting yourself believe it was better than you’d hoped, that you’d be able to make the book without an artist as imperfect interfering intermediary, that you could make it over there, on the other side, with nothing but your will to make the changes, while the pages wrote themselves. Your mind your tool; reality your craft.

  Before reading, though, you concentrated on the clean-up. Rubbing every surface with a cloth to erase traces of Neato, the thought met you—Rupert Paddington. They might trace her back to you through him. He won’t be suspicious…except…over the past year it was Paddington who’d passed along each of her notes to you, and yours to her. If Paddington read them, he’d have picked up on the increasingly adversarial tone…or—or!—if she had spoken to him about you…after all, he arranged for her employment…How did he find her? Were they friends? Relatives? Lovers? By sunrise, convinced you’d wiped away every trace of her, you dialed Paddington.

  Rupert, you told the phone. Call me back. I think we should drop Universe and go back to self-publishing. I’m sick of their constraints. They need us more than we need them.

  Paddington took the bait; he arrived a little after noon in a stampede of agitation. A short man, almost perfectly round, with an amazing curlicued mustache. He paced inside the study, his voice rising and falling in a minister’s cadence, red-faced, puffing, canNOT beLIEVE you’re even conSIDering this course of ACTion, you’ll be KILLing your REVenue STREAM, Land, Landlandland LAND have you conSIDered the impliCAtions…

  Carnival barker, you thought, making careful note of anything Paddington touched. You’re nothing but a little round carnival barker. I know the place for you, right beside your whatever-she-was-to-you. You brought Neato’s effects through the door with him. Anticipation for the pages heavy on your mind until you returned. Was the stack thicker than before? You couldn’t be sure, but you thought so. Breathless, you rushed to the table.

  This is how the first man taught himself fear of the first rattlesnake: hungry for meat, he reached out his hand and grabbed it.

  Thought Morris:

  Is the thief still in the Island? Does he still carry the ticket? The Coyote—Donk—he claims to know these things. Claims. Still, his advice moved you to action. Jane proved apt bait once; she may prove apt yet again. The CAT rumbles easily through the
tunnel, the thief carved it for his impossible escape to a far land—but not far enough to escape you. A magnificent invention, the CAT, constructed to your exact specifications. Cone shaped; seen from behind it resembles a vault door. Fast; it can make the trip in a week. It is on the incline—you’re near. They call my people the cardinals—is this an echo of the sign of the bird? Consider it longer, and further meaning will come. These tunnels—you are in them now—were carved in such a moment of meaning. Are they an echo of the sign of the spade? Ponder it. The thief uses your stolen treasure to escape. Later, meeting with engineers, poring over blueprints of prototypes for the CAT, you realize you have no thought remaining for your door in the cavern. That wooden rectangle, subject of long obsession, is replaced by another rectangle, smaller, greener, glimpsed only for a moment in the hands of a wrongful owner, drawn from beyond your door. Why would you care any longer for the door? Who pines after a looted vault? All your thoughts are for the ticket now. It will be yours…but your reaching just pushes it further away.