The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  “The invisibility,” Gordy said, warming to the topic. “The other drunks were the first to notice it. My first day in Brasschaat I levitated a surly bartender. I’d forgotten. I thought he was ignoring me, but he just couldn’t see me. That’s when I first knew I could do strange things.” He spoke of his friends, his odd jobs, his days given to drink and nights to dissolution, until he met her—her. Jane the lissome beauty, his one true love.

  “It ended badly,” Gordy said, sadly. “I have regrets.”

  “I imagine most abductees regret being abducted.”

  “I don’t mean what Morris did to me after. I mean what I did to her then. God, how much longer until the circus comes? I need to make it right.” This is the other thing: The kid’s obsessed. Until the posters started showing up for the circus, Julius was worried someday he’d wake to find Gordy gone, pulled up stakes and wandering in search of his precious bearded lady Jane. Since he saw the posters over at Ralph’s, Gordy seems content to stay put. For what it’s worth, Donk forbids leaving—it’s far too dangerous, he says. The exits are watched. On the day they’d returned to the Neon, Donk had drawn Julius aside. “They can’t see him,” he said. “At least there’s that. They suspect he’s here but they don’t know it. Remember, I got Morris to order them to leave you alone. If they find him and he’s not with you, it’ll be a lot easier for them to get him. Keep him here, with you, close and safe.”

  Still Gordy persists; he’s got to find her, fix her, redeem himself for unforgivable acts, the nature of which he’s reluctant to disclose, though, unlike demurrals regarding God and the past, he’s not claiming convenient amnesia.

  “It’s just so shameful,” Gordy says, softly, and he’s not doing the partially visible thing, he’s not withdrawn; he simply looks ashamed. “I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know where I’d come from. I just knew I was hiding. There was a friend of a friend, who knew one of the big mucky-mucks over in the red-light district, and he got me a job sweeping up one of the big guy’s establishments—the cathouses, you know. And the big guy was Mo’. That was my life. I’d sweep so I could drink.”

  “Lonely life.”

  “But then she came and saved me. I looked at her eyes and I died. Love at first sight, and love forever. That’s what I thought. Weeks or months of joy, bliss, perfection. But then…I saw her at one of his houses…she was…with somebody else…I saw them…I did bad things then…I wanted to destroy that beautiful face. Do you know what I decided to do? I decided to turn her head into spaghetti.”

  “What?”

  “I was so angry. That’s just what rose to my mind. She was perfect. I wanted her random. At the last moment, I did it to the man she was with instead. I…” Gordy pauses, on the verge of saying something he can’t bring himself to say. “I don’t even know his name. And then I gave her the beard.”

  “You gave her the beard…as a compromise?”

  “I can’t explain it. It seemed right to me then. It seems so stupid now. I spent all my time in the Wales just thinking about it. I’m so ashamed. I could have done anything in that moment. I could have helped her escape. Instead I…did what I did, then I left her there.”

  “That’s another thing. These strange things you sometimes do…why don’t you do them all the time? Is it like a genie? You only get three wishes or something?”

  Gordy starts to flicker. “I don’t know. Sometimes I do it. I don’t like it when I do. It hurts.”

  “Hurts how?”

  “I don’t know,” Gordy says, immediately.

  “And you can’t remember any ticket.”

  “Wish I could,” Gordy says, and rises. Julius follows him out of Bailey’s Donuts, annoyed. Having disclosed his shame, Gordy said this last bit with the same blank and cheerful equanimity he gives all his other statements around his amnesia; perfectly agreeable, but never sounding even a little bit as if he wishes he could remember anything before his time in Färland.

  “Although,” Gordy says more seriously, as they make their way back toward the Neon, “Mo’ certainly was looking for something. It’s clear to me he was behind all of it. He was using poor Jane. He was using us all. He arranged for me to meet her, arranged me to catch her—so he could catch me, you see. Catatonic with what I’d done. After he caught me and brought me to the Wales, he searched every inch of me. Sent me through scanners. Poked every hole, prodded every mole. Drugged me. Questions every day. I think I was due for some surgery right before I gave them the slip.”

  “How did you give them the slip?”

  Gordy shrugs. “I do stuff sometimes. Like with you and Morris, down in the tunnels. Or making a bartender float. The restraints they had on me just fell off. I think I did it somehow.”

  “Why the hell did you stay in the Wales?”

  “I didn’t know where to go. And…by then it was the only place they weren’t searching.”

  “Maybe Morris knows about the ticket even though you don’t.”

  “Or maybe this ‘Tennessee’ spun him the same yarn as he spun me,” Gordy replied. “He was a loony, you say?”

  “No more than you were.”

  “That’s not a particular recommendation for his sanity.”

  “I wish he was here,” Julius says. If Jane is Gordy’s constant refrain, this is Julius’s: If only Tennessee were here. Julius missed patches of Tennessee’s tale, much to his regret; laid out on a billiard table burning with fever, caught in the fugue state of exhaustion and injury, he’d drifted in and out. He suspects this is why the narratives won’t join. The first day following their escape both he and Gordy verged on catatonia. By the time they woke, Tennessee had fled already, terrified out of his wits. Donk claims he made such a fuss he’d feared customers would overhear, so he had no choice but to let him split.

  Julius knows Donk was loath to let Gordy out of his sight, though he can’t guess the motive. Protectiveness, caution, concern, it must be that—What else? To even now suspect Donk of unsavory motives feels stubborn and uncharitable. You ought to tell him Tennessee’s story, Julius admonishes himself, or at least the part you know. He stood to advance himself considerably by giving you up, and yet he hid you. Even the fact Donk is now working for Morris testifies to his trustworthiness in a way…it’s not common knowledge, he didn’t have anything to gain in disclosing it, everybody still thinks Ralph is around pulling the strings. Donk’s running a dangerous game, and because of your paranoia (or is it greed?), he’s running it without knowledge of ticket or fountain.

  But Julius has thus far kept quiet. Their regular meetings have attenuated, their interactions reduced to daily wordless status reports at Ralph’s checkout lane, something Donk insists upon as a safety procedure. Donk’s even set him up with the same sort of individualized codification as he gives his gangsters. Every purchase tells a story—though Donk made the rules far simpler for the priest than he does for the criminals. It’s a simple color code, allowing Julius to buy different things but say the same thing. He buys pears, asparagus, broccoli—anything green—to give the green light: Nothing to report. Yellow means something to report, but not pressing or particularly sensitive. Red means a hot tip or a problem; a request for a meeting, today. And then there’s oranges, the worst-case, the particular emergency involving the children’s room.

  There’s a ruthlessness in Donk, something never previously on display. One night, back when Julius and Gordy were still his below-the-floorboards boarders, Donk had let himself become imprudently drunk, and had said with chilling nonchalance: “The thing is to not let it be over too quickly with Morris. That’s a mistake I won’t make. I need to peel him away slowly. One layer at a time. I’ll take it all from him. When I finally have him, at the end, I’ll make him eat his own eyes.”

  “He doesn’t care about anything else now,” Bailey wheezed, not long ago, when Julius and Gordy came calling. “Nothing but getting Morris.”


  “He cares about you, at least. Nettles tells me he visits.”

  “Caring about me makes him keep wanting to hurt him,” Bailey said absently.

  Julius spent some more time doing what he came to do: telling Bailey the news from Loony Island, bringing her some connection to the life she’d left, but as always, before he’d finished, he had the distinct sense she was somewhere else. At least Nettles listens attentively. Nettles feels a keen affinity for Bailey, as she does for all of Loony Island’s damaged and mangled. It’s Nettles who had pointed out to Julius—when he’d complained about the mysterious Deep Man: the meanness of such a deity, the bite of his cruelty, the teeth of the universe—how it was the women who usually got chewed hardest. “This God of yours,” Nettles said. “He must have gone through a divorce. You men may suffer, but we get maimed. That’s my observation.”

  Waiting in line at Ralph’s to purchase a sack of cucumbers, Julius shakes his head, remembering this exchange—That’s the real problem with the Deep Man, his mysterious stranger—“God,” if you like. Not to say he strikes you as an implausible God, exactly, but rather that, if you were to at last decide to believe in a God, he seems so grotesquely plausible. Look at the Island, a community cut off from the main. Look at the weak huddling behind flimsy doors, breaking their backs to earn a starving wage, dependent on an ever-shrinking pittance of public assistance, living in constant fear of the strong. Look at the strong, whose morality considers nothing but the extent to which they can dominate another, and the depraved means by which others might dominate them. And look outside the Island—what of them? The allegedly more enlightened and privileged world outside the walls purposefully demarcating Loony Island from the rest—does this other world, with desperation less immediate, truly differentiate itself in matters of caprice and savagery? The weak owned by the strong, wherever you look. Dog eats dog eats dog eats cat eats cat eats cat eats mouse eats mouse eats mouse, not because dog is hungry for dog, or cat for mouse, but because each is hungry only for the eating. Keep the useful busy, shunt those with lesser or no worth to the margins, where their suffering need not offend you, their sin of existence need not trouble you. Stuff yourself full and then stuff yourself more. Spare a glance as you drive past: Look at it, the filth, the depredation down there, the feculence of rat eating rat eating rat, chuckle ruefully to yourself who would choose to live like that and make it home for dinner, in time for a plateful of dog. If a painting is the reflection, not of the subject, but of the artist, what sort of God, then, would be reflected by such a reality as this? Distant in suffering. Capricious when present. Insouciant in his ownership of power and authority, ruthless in its application. It’s not that you’re anymore afraid God doesn’t exist. Now you’re afraid he does.

  Meanwhile, Julius thinks, you keep playing at belief, at ministry. Keep giving your friends the sense you’ve got some plan for it all. Friends? Followers. You’re not comfortable with the label, but that’s because you know what a rotten faker you truly are. But followers is what they are—and not by accident, either. You led them to it. Can you deny it? Look at the symbolism you surround yourself with. A desire for disciples has to be assumed even by the most casual observer, along with further presumptions. What astute observer—Donk, say—would fail to suspect you of some manufactured Messianic complex, of foolish pantomime and empty pageantry, as if you were a Civil War reenactor who didn’t believe there actually had been a Civil War? Or one of those adults who walk around dressed up like their favorite superhero: God Man here to save the day, braver than a gangster with a handgun, more powerful than institutionalized poverty, able to mime faith in a single prayer.

  Julius returns to the Neon with the cucumbers in hand and Gordy in tow. They can smell the fragrance of barbecue from blocks away, but Julius is still deep in thought, because now the God question has gone and gotten muddy again—That’s the real source of your concern, of this creeping, growing, rapacious need to acquire some sort of divine actualization. You’re using Gordy to acquire it. Before, you were driven only by a desire to prove God’s existence to yourself, to know God beyond question of unknowing; but now there is a need to prove to yourself, not only the existence of God, but of the right kind of God. It’s a clawing, greedy, desperate, terrible need—pushing and constantly grasping after the same ticket Morris pursues, not for its power, but as some sort of divine certification—a justification of the Word you foolishly followed without believing it existed; a conduit to some voice in prayer other than your own, the nagging itching sense of sanctimonious duplicity, a man who knows he is only talking to himself about himself.

  * * *

  —

  Before they could reach the circus, there appeared a man wearing a suit of powder blue. He didn’t step from out of the throng, or from behind a tree or a building. He appeared.

  *Poit*

  He looked behind himself, saw the circus. Then back forward, saw Gordy and Julius having nearly reached it.

  “Nope!” he screamed.

  Poof! went the circus.

  The man folded up in halves, and again, and again and again, until he was gone. It was the damnedest thing. In the view his absence provided, not a sign of the circus remained. Not even a smell of the circus. Julius and Gordy could only stare across the street at a couple hundred confused circusgoers in a totally empty lot, who in turn could only stare at one another.

  It was Julius who finally broke the silence. “That was the guy I was telling you about,” he said, voice quavering. “Says he’s God.”

  —Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change

  * * *

  —

  As the day of the circus grows close—it’s only days away—Julius starts to feel increasingly nervous—and not just about the event being a potential trap. Donk says he can handle security, and Julius has decided to trust Donk on that matter. No, it’s more a question of what happens after. Once Gordy’s met with his precious lady Jane, will he stay in the Island, or will he move on with her? And—be honest, Julius—when he moves on, he’ll take it with him. A conduit to God, whether a ticket or something else. And what will you do then?

  Julius has no desire to let Gordy out of his sight; the prize was hard fought for and dearly won, and Julius didn’t want to lose it (him, not it, him, him, him)—and, happily, Gordy, meanwhile, is, for now, equally reluctant to separate himself from his protector, though (Julius smiles) small separations are difficult to avoid, as long as the priest insists (and he does) on running everywhere he goes. Gordy inevitably begins to redface and hufflepuff only a few minutes into the morning jog, compelling Julius to slow his pace in accommodation of his less-conditioned wingman, and even—a desecration—to take occasional rests. He kneels in posture of prayer during these as a sort of penance, as he waits for Gordy to catch back up. On the first day, during one of these interruptions, Gordy, between heaves, observed: “There are these inventions called ‘cars.’ There are taxis, limousines, subway trains, trolleys, busses…”

  “First month running’s a bitch. You’ll toughen up.”

  “You’ve had years of practice, though,” Gordy whined. “My God, you run in denim. You’ve gotta have inner thighs like an armadillo’s ass.”

  Julius rolled his eyes. The entire trip is only a whisker over twelve miles. “Every cat in this city is such a fucking baby.”

  “Isn’t your toe broken?”

  “It was only sprained. And it healed.” In truth a considerable twinge yet remains, but Julius believes firmly in the restorative properties of heavy use. “Come on. Break’s over. Day’s wasting.” And Julius had been right; the first month was the hardest. The second month was merely terrible, and now, in the third, Gordy isn’t convinced anymore he’s about to die.

  The idea is to run all the way out to the farthest point and then run back, catching each appointment as you go. Julius, still a man of routine, has seven stops. Sto
p one is a meeting at the home of Dave Waverly, who rode out the Loony Riot inside his locked car. “I’ve still got controlling interest,” Julius told Gordy, “But Dave’s got power of attorney.” Of all of Julius’s friends, the Slantworthy proxy had, understandably, been most concerned by the priest’s temporary disappearance following the riot, and most relieved by his return. Gordy, Julius noted without surprise, warmed to him immediately—visibility has never been a problem between Gordy and Dave. This is actually annoying; Dave still won’t believe that Gordy ever flickered, and still considers Julius’s claims that he did as a topic best never breached. But the two have become friendly—maybe even friends. Once, Dave surprised the hell out of Julius, said to Gordy: “I used to watch the sunrise with your priestly buddy, you know. We had the best view in the city. Ask him about it sometime.” To Julius’s knowledge, this was the first time Dave Waverly has spoken about the days of the cathedral. When Gordy asked, Julius demurred. “That story isn’t too sad for Dave, I guess, but it’s too sad for me,” he said, consciously echoing Gordy. “I wrote it down. Maybe I’ll let you read it someday.” Gordy, who may have been thinking of his own sad story involving the bearded lady, had mercifully not questioned further.

  Their second stop is the hospital. Julius feels overwhelmed each day with guilt and helplessness. “I don’t know what to do or say,” he usually says, to which Nettles replies, almost as liturgy, “There’s nothing to do or say, Jules. Let it be.” The usual procession of doctors and nurses and orderlies ghost their way through the room. Whoever else is keeping company, whatever they do or say, Bailey stares and blinks but doesn’t quite watch, propped in her bed or—with greater frequency as the weeks go on—propped up in her chair. “The doctor says she’ll be able to leave for home soon,” Nettles proudly reports. Some days Bailey responds, but before each utterance there’s always a long pause, as if her words are being conveyed from a vast distance, using ancient technology. Julius prays over her, and they move on.