The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  When he fled he chose not to bring Jane and her daughter. It surprised you; it still does. What prevented him from doing so? This lesson is clear. Those two are baggage so treacherous even the enemy you created for yourself leaves them behind. They also, in their own way, are you, and so you are loath to destroy them, but seeing the danger they posed you wisely stored them safe away. But you held the woman only a day before you…what? Relented? Reconsidered? Ungrateful in any case. Restored to her rooms but she no longer tended your sheep, not even with a lamb of her own interred. Scribbled gibberish on the wall. Then to Brasschaat for a time, where she served her purpose and was ruined. You’ve kept her here, on the far end of these tunnels, the thief dug them but you have bested them, you travel through them in the CAT as you please. The thief escaped, thanks to the priest.

  The priest Julius must be punish

  must be

  the priest must be

  must

  Never mind the priest. The priest is nothing, a distraction. You must think of the thief, and his ticket, and the lady he seeks, the lady he bearded. She can draw out thief and ticket—so claims the Coyote—but she will need convincing.

  —Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change

  ASK

  Her room has a large picture window overlooking a back street, an offshoot of a secondary tributary, itself an offshoot from Brasschaat’s modest red-light district. Cobbles glisten in streetlight, and across the road Jane can see the houses on the opposite side huddled together, mirrors of the house in which she stands, two stories tall with peaked false fronts. Narrow alleys skulk between these houses, some of them only a few inches…but some you could stand in. You can see right into this window from those alleys, Jane thinks. Which is, of course, why Morris chose this place for you to perform, and for peeping Gordy to see. First Morris sent you to love Gordy. Then Morris sent you to love others. Then he arranged for Gordy to see you. All part of the trap, the plan.

  He is outside now—Morris.

  Her beard is combed and washed and she arranges it like armor against him: broad like a plate of steel, with gold threading through. She wears a golden robe brocaded with brown and red and green. Beneath the robe hides the outfit of her trade, two black strips of lace and silk and velvet, like ribbons on a very expensive gift. He’s out there, waiting for her to go to him. She sits perfectly still and imagines becoming only a picture of herself. Her breathing slows until it is imperceptible. She hasn’t seen him since that day. Years. Who knows how long ago it was for him? Slower time here than there. Or—is it faster? Yes, faster here. No, it’s faster there. She’s not certain on the point, but that seems right. Which means now, in this moment, here, a clock’s hands turn more ponderously than the same clock’s hands would there—yet it all feels the same. This moment, here, the interval between the second hand’s ticking…how much time would it be—over there—for a young girl growing old in a mirrored coffin?

  Finch. A finger on her nose.

  Time no longer seems an ally. She decides she will go out and teach him that his demand is a request. She passes through the series of beaded curtains into the anteroom. He’s arranged himself in the middle of it, clearly pleased he’s won their waiting game. Beyond him, in the windows, the less specialized girls, too new or too unpopular to have built an enduring clientele, pose naked, and he’s positioned between—accidentally, she presumes—creating the illusion of angel and devil perched on his shoulders, but faced away from him, dancing in desultory fashion in hopes of capturing some better soul to guide. Yes, she decides, looking at him: Time moves faster there. He’s aged. Nevertheless, he looks fit despite crutch and crow’s feet. He’s clad in unadorned black, hair cropped close, poised despite the cast encasing his leg from shin to thigh. He knows how to make his face do the things they need to do to appear normal to the unobservant, but if you watch the eyes you’ll know the truth about him; they’ve gone even more distant.

  He grins. “So, it’s true. Oddly, it suits you. I was expecting you to look something like Tolstoy. But this is almost elegant. It’s even pretty, in a way.”

  She says nothing. It is possible to become the picture of yourself rather than yourself. It is possible to become stillness. He continues, blithely, “Färland must agree with you, anyway.” He’s making a show. Picking up various objets d’art from the shelves, examining them with a pretended connoisseur’s eye—a ridiculous attempt at nonchalance. As if he would ever return to collect her out of exile unless his lemonade had gone badly sour back home. “You’re not scribbling on the walls anymore like a loon.”

  “What do you need?”

  He jerks his head doorward. “You’re coming back with me.”

  “He’s gotten away from you again, has he?” She doesn’t attempt to hide her smile.

  “He got lucky.”

  “It seems he broke your leg. Poor Morris.”

  “An open manhole! He got lucky!” He throws the thing he happens to be holding—a Swiss singing-bird music box. It strikes the wall with a velvet-dampened thud, leaving a small hole in the wallpaper.

  “Yes, he got lucky. Didn’t he. Won the lottery.”

  That gets him. If you know to watch the eyes you’d see the rage was there already but now that she’s mentioned the ticket, rage has mastery. He’s shouting, but this doesn’t matter in the least. She’s learned the trick every woman learns about men; they can’t choose your presence for you. Become stillness if you must, or if you want to. Let the fool blow a petty little storm—this fool, who thinks he’s got you in hand. But what good is a grip without leverage? What good the handful when you’ve mistaken what it is you hold? This was Gordy’s error, too. Men think they hold the handle of some empty pitcher they can pour themselves into, some unmarred book into which they can write something fine about themselves, some diamond mirror into which they can gaze, which will reflect only excellence, which will tell them they are the fairest of all.

  “Oh God, this is love.” Gordy had gushed this at her in Brasschaat, again and again. “Love at last,” he pronounced, the day after they’d met. Or “met,” rather. It was the same nonsense over again. Them at dinner, him talking to himself at her, amnesiac, unaware, thinking they’d only just met, while she feigned attentiveness and played a game—can I get through the night speaking less than twenty words? Will he notice if I do? Then, later, them in bed as Morris commanded, him nuzzling into her as if she could become his lover and his lost childhood both. Abandoner, walked away from his promises and even the obligation to remember them or be troubled by them. Too deliberately ignorant of his past wrongs to dangle hope anymore of a universe of justice, to tantalize with some story of a mythic cleansing wave. If he’d known the trick of looking at her eyes he’d have seen the truth of her. He’d have seen scorn almost like pity. And, with perfect irony, it was her eyes he complimented the most. “I looked at your eyes and died,” he said. The exact words he’d used before. Her eyes. He looked at them and died, failing to see how they brimmed with his death. He loved to look at them but he couldn’t read them, failed even to understand they were something that could be read, and so in her eyes he saw nothing but what he hoped to see, which was his own illiterate reflection. In the long quiet moments waiting for Morris to activate his plan, during the first early days as Brasschaat bait, she would muse over whether she still pitied Gordy, or if she only wanted to hurt him for how careless he had been with the faith she’d imparted. It made you want to spit on him, the way he’d speak of love between them, as if it were a thing he was at liberty to claim, as if this supposed love were some quality within himself he had developed, or an acquisition he had wisely made.

  And her little bird was caged and gone—she’s caged even now. She’d known even then Morris would never release her, never heal her, not even once he had the ticket. Her first priority had been harming Morris, but he kept his distance, sent his orders mostly by proxy. She pa
tiently waited for the opportunity to harm him as badly as she could manage, but if, in the meanwhile, he wanted to utilize her to harm this feckless, capricious boy…so be it. So she waited, and when Morris turned her out, she did that, and when at last he told her all was ready, she went to Gordy, and held him, and let him have his way, and after, when he would burrow against her, she would stroke his hair lazily and murmur in his ear “Yes, love at last, this is love at last.” Filling himself back up with himself.

  As Morris had been fond of saying, it’s not as if she had a choice.

  He’s still saying it—it’s his line. He’s finished screaming now; he’s moved on to cajoling. “Look, love,” he’s saying. “Be reasonable. It’s not as if you have a choice.”

  She smiles. He’s so wrong. She didn’t know it last time but she knows it now. He still thinks he’s holding her, but he’s broken the pitcher; he’s holding nothing now but the handle.

  “I have several choices.”

  “Oh do you?” He’s amused.

  One finger. “I could help you.”

  “You will help me.”

  “Give me a reason.”

  “You’ve forgotten your daughter?”

  “You’re not so stupid as to believe you can still use our daughter on me. We both know your promises are lies. What do you think is left of her mind by now anyway? After years?”

  He’s trying not to seethe. “I can put you in an oubliette.”

  Two fingers. “If those are the only choices, I choose that one.”

  “You’ve seen what it does to people.”

  “I’m good at being alone.”

  “I could just kill you.”

  Three. “Your best offer yet.”

  “You’re bluffing.” And now he’s looking at her like she’s the crazy one—how rich. Him, the man who buys and sells people, warehouses them when they annoy, moves them around like commodities, who abandons his own daughter to torture, who pimps out his own wife and leaves her behind in a far land, who believes the universe emitted from his brain.

  “I could kill Finch.”

  Four fingers. The thumb left over to shove into his eye if he gives her a chance. “A mercy, not a threat. Poor Morris. You’ve already done the worst. Now all you have is second worst. But at least you’ve said your daughter’s name.”

  So now he sees she has choices. He’s shifting subtly, a slight transfer of weight; the leg is troubling him. The crutch pad is probably kindling fire in his armpit at this point. He doesn’t want to sit, she knows—it would acknowledge weakness—but the discomfort might grow too much. He may sit yet. A small thing, but a victory nonetheless. These are the stakes now—I’m going to wear you down. I’m going to make you take a seat. I’m going to make you acknowledge your stinking flesh in front of me. She goes away into her mind, and waits.

  “You don’t even know what I’m asking you to do,” he sulks.

  “You want me to be the bait again. I’m the only carrot he’ll bite on.”

  “Yes, but you don’t know how. I’m sending you back to the show.”

  “The circus?”

  “Think about it, Janey. You could fly again.”

  Despite herself, she does think about it. The trapeze. The leap, the catch. The moment between rising and falling, alone among multitudes, so close to the striped canvas tent top you can see the weft, all alone for a split second before gravity calls you back home. The implosion of breath from the crowd as you miss the bar, the pantomimed horror of the clowns. The single organism they all become in their relief as your feet find the hidden line of the tightrope. Chuffing along in a train compartment on the way to the next show, watching the world create itself for you outside your window. She catches him catching her considering it.

  “I always loved to watch you fly.”

  Yes. To fly again…the leap, the catch. The catch? Of course—there’s always a catch. “Nobody wants to see a bearded lady on the trapeze.”

  “You’re kidding,” he says. “Everybody would want to see it. It’s never been seen before. The freak show melded with the big show. You’d dance as a freak, then you’d fly like a dream. A double-show. Think of the pitch. Think of the posters.”

  When the beard first sprouted it grew in all at once, Jane still straddling the man Morris had chosen, whose head had, moments before, exploded into spaghetti, Gordy seething at the door, saying things at her. She never once responded; it didn’t matter. This was part of Morris’s plan, too. He didn’t want to hear her and she no longer cared to be heard. The hour had come, the moment for which she had been brought here, the fisherman preparing the net even as the fish closed its jaws around the bait. Who considers the bait, already impaled? Why should even the worm concern itself with the worm? Gordy whispered at her, Gordy screamed. In between he cried and raged, paced, threw furniture. The man still beneath her dead and she sat frozen waiting for her own end. Morris hoped the shock of this event would revert Gordy to something more manageable, safer to grab. He’d told her, outright—he hoped to make Gordy do something with it, something terrible enough Gordy would never want to use it again, not against anybody. Something to make him afraid to say words that come true, think thoughts that unfold into reality before him, too frightened of his power to use it, no matter what Morris might next do to him. And Gordy had killed a man, the man Morris had arranged for him to catch her with, he’d spaghettied his head into literal spaghetti, and she sat astraddle, waiting for him to do the same or worse, yes soon Gordy would do the terrible whatever-it-might-be to her, his own true love. This had been her leap, a leap to save her little bird, but the “catch” required her destruction, and this catch, like so many previous catches, depended on the whim of a clown. Jane hoped after she had been destroyed, Morris would honor their agreement—free their daughter, heal her body, mend her mind…but she knew well that if, after she was gone, Morris chose to betray, he would forgive himself the treachery and credit his forgiveness of himself as forgiveness from her. In the room Gordy had raged and wept like a child. But she had already learned the trick of not being there; she went away as he said things at her, I thought you loved me, he said, and I thought you were different, and you were the best thing in my life, and I looked in your eyes and I died, and why did you never tell me.

  “Sometimes when I say things they happen,” he cried. “One time I turned a dog into a cat. One time I made a surly bartender float inches over the ground. He was ignoring me, but not after I made him float. I’m a dangerous man. You should have been more careful with my heart.”

  “Do you know how to make a bartender float?” he screamed. “It’s easy. Vanilla ice cream, seventeen pounds of it. Add four gallons of Duvel. Garnish with a single bartender.” He laughed and screamed and cried.

  “Oh God,” he said. “Oh God oh God oh God now I’ve killed a man because of you.”

  Because of you. She knows this line; it’s the mantra of men—Have you ever known a man who worshipped at a different altar? Morris blames you for his failing with the door, and for the female offspring you produced, the end of his great continuance. He blames your treachery for his failing with the ticket. Holds your baby hostage to make a whore of you, and your reward is to be given the blame for the whoring as well, to be condemned as a slattern by a man who has the power of a god but lacks the fortitude even to allow himself to remember how he had been the engine of your compromise. You’re forced by men into the shapes chosen by them and then, once you’re contorted to their specifications, they demand you defend your unnatural position to them.

  The stray thought came as she, present but not present, observed Gordy’s rage: They fall in love with us so they can blame us; they sense instinctively they will be disappointed in life, know they will fail, but can’t bear the thought they may have to locate the source and cause of failure within themselves—their weakness, their errors, their choices—and s
o they find another and imagine her as a beautiful crystal container. In their minds they make it perfect, flawless—not because it truly is flawless, but because secretly they know it is not. They prepare it for disappointment, for failure, so when the time comes they will in their rage have something other than themselves to smash. They store their blame in us like they store their seed, draw fault from us like offspring. Here was this boy, this forgetful boy, glaring at her with hatred for the sake of the faceless man he had murdered, prepared to enact revenge on her for his lack of control over himself.

  And then he did it. He didn’t kill her. Didn’t even harm her. Instead he attacked the portion of her he thought was most important. The beard was full grown to her navel even before he’d left the room.

  Lately it’s strange, to think Gordy would have considered what he had done to her such a terrible thing, such a punishment. More proof—if she had needed any—that to him she had only ever been a body. He’d thought to kill the female in her, mock her beauty, but after a week in the darkness, thinking, she opted to zig against his zag. So this is what I am, she thought. This has been given me. Then I will be it, and I will be wonderful. The moustache curled unmanageably, so she waxed it. The beard she tended and nurtured, shampooed and combed. Likewise she looked at the place she’d been abandoned to and decided this intended fate would be something she took rather than something he gave. Men stopped wanting her, at least for a time, and then she loved the beard as her protection from unwanted attentions. Then the fetishists found out about her, and she was never alone again, but even so she found she loved the thing: her shield, her blade, her power, her completion, her familiar, her follicular apotheosis. The fetishists were johns as before, still buying clean trim with filthy lucre, but now there came into the equation a new factor, changing the outcome. She was a quantity so unknown, so rare, that when they paid for her, she found she owned them. They obeyed. Before, she had kept alone, venturing only when and where Morris commanded, whether to “happen” across Gordy’s path, or to “meet” him, or to give him all the attention he thought love had purchased for him. But after the beard, she strode the streets in a red dress and sunglasses, full-figured, long-legged, beard sometimes braided, sometimes unfettered, sometimes brocaded with beads, fanned out like a peacock’s tail. She bought art for her rooms, and fresh bread from the open market, which she ate each day with cheese, sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean. She fed the crumbs to the little birds, and then the grief would arrive in brief stabs, but her own bird was too far gone now, past her reach. Rather than attempting to heal the wound she accepted its inability to heal, allowed the pain, let tears send black runnels down her cheeks, and when the tears had passed, she wiped them, checked herself in her mirror and walked on. The wound, like the beard, was a part of her now, so she determined to be magnificently wounded, and let men fear the wound and magnificence both.