The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  “I’ve never really believed in God. None of you knew that, at least not from me. I’ve spent my time here, and some time before that, trying to believe, but I don’t. My whole life, it’s been like having puzzle pieces the right color but they never fit. Now I have what I sought so long: proof of God. And yet I still don’t believe. Before, I wanted to believe but I couldn’t for lack of evidence. Now I have evidence, but I don’t believe because I don’t want to give the son of a bitch the satisfaction. I’m moving on into a new hopelessness. I found an even larger hunk of burning wreckage to crawl underneath. God is real, and he’s a monster, apparently, but I’m going to go on believing in a better God anyway, despite a total lack of available evidence—a foolish thing to do. Probably I’ll burn, and so will whatever ‘child’ I crawl in to save. So be it.

  “Some of you know I’m worth a lot of money. I suppose now that I’ve said it, all of you know it. Money’s rough and ugly but it’s useful. I’m going to put it to use; I’ll see to it you can keep on without me. If you choose to stay, the Neon will never be unfunded. If you choose to spread out, you’ll have what you need, as long as you only take what is needed.

  “You can stay, or you can go. I’d recommend most of you go. There are more hopelessnesses out there—more than can be imagined, I’d guess. Perhaps it seems dumb to you, the idea that you should leave when there are people here already who count on you and what you do. Maybe it is dumb. There’s risk in what I’m suggesting. It’s possible that, if most of you go, this place will stop being what it is. It’s possible it’ll all fall apart. But I think it’s equally possible we’ve begun to stagnate. It’s possible there are only so many fools who can cluster together in one place. I think it’s possible there are other fools waiting to start here and continue what we’ve begun, and we’re simply in the way; I think it’s possible there are potential fools out there elsewhere, waiting for another fool to come and join them. But that’s only what I think, and what do I know? Finally, a question I can answer. What do I know? The answer is simple: big fat fucking nothing. So, do as you think is best.

  “I ask only this: Take the day and find a place where you can be alone, a place other than here that holds some meaning to you, and think about what you want to do. I’ll meet you tonight, and whatever you need to do, whatever you want to do, I’ll make sure you have what you need—financially, at least—to do it.

  “That’s it. That’s all. I’ll see you tonight.”

  Father Julius leaves them then, practically fleeing, beckoning to Gordy and Nettles as he passes through the beaded glass curtain to the sanctuary of his cell. Nettles stays where she is. She’s looking after Julius now, but Gordy can’t tell if it’s grief or fury in her eyes. Tennessee follows Gordy uninvited; Julius eyes him for a moment but says nothing. Tennessee looks as if he’s been weeping. “That was beautiful,” he says again and again, but Julius isn’t paying attention. He’s barreling around, pulling documents out of his desk drawer, shoving them into a battered leather satchel. Making the maximum possible effort, knocking things over, bending ostentatiously to pick them up, chasing pens under desks, as if through exertion he might ward off the finality of his decisions. At last he stops, facing Gordy, his whiskers quivering, eyes large and moist. He rests one big mitt on Gordy’s shoulder.

  “Well, buddy,” he says. “It’s the last goddam day.”

  Something is building behind Gordy’s eyes. It feels like his soul quivering in anticipation. The next command has been too long tardy. He hasn’t heard a soft familiar insistent voice speaking his name for hours, but when it arrives, he knows it will impact with momentum accumulated, the power of an earthquake centuries deferred.

  The plan is to lock Gordy into the priest’s cell for safety. Neither Julius nor Tennessee is willing to trust partial visibility anymore to keep him secure. They riffle through the clichés: better safe than sorry, circle the wagons, bird in the hand. A steel shutter rolls down like a garage door over the entrance to Julius’s cell. “Donk may have better hidey-holes than me, but he’s not the only one who has them,” Julius says. “Had this installed back in the days before Ralph listed me as a protected species.” All this precaution seems unnecessary to Gordy—a steel door isn’t going to thwart somebody like Donk or Morris—but Julius is determined. “We’re going to miss our status report with Donk at Ralph’s today,” he muses. “That’s going to ruffle his feathers. We’ll have to be quick after that.”

  All save Gordy have made their way out of the room. “I’ll be back by this afternoon,” Julius says. “No later.”

  “I’ll be here waiting,” Gordy says, “Obviously.”

  “You’d better be, boy,” Tennessee says. “I’m not losing you again.”

  Julius tells Gordy: “You should read what I’ve written. My memoir. You’ll find it in the top right shelf. It’s all about who I am.” He pulls a sick-looking face. “It’s my back story. I think I’d like you to know.” Then he reaches up for the handle of the shutter. Gordy nods as the door comes down. He hears the locks, one and two and three. The rising sun has made its way through the window, transforming each mote into a gem. He’s about to make himself forget when he thinks—Shit! Father Ex’s memory! You never told Julius. Remember it when he gets back.

  Hoping to stave off the next command, he searches for Julius’s diary. In the right-hand drawer he finds it: cream-colored paper, heavy grade, stacked an inch thick. Handwritten both sides. At the top of the first page, he reads: My father was a man with too delicate a mind…But reading can’t distract forever. At first, he can fool himself into thinking he’s subsuming both wave and command from his consciousness, but if anything, there is an opposite effect; the focus of his mind upon the page makes the incipient and unavoidable next command ever more present. He sets the pages aside and closes his eyes but it’s no use. It will be here soon. Larger than stars, than galaxies. Filigreed through the infinitesimals—Sorry, Landrude, I can’t do it. I have to be like Father Ex to survive. Receive and release. Remove. My mind is too small, it can only hold on to the days. The nights are too hard, they shake me apart.

  In the desk the center drawer is empty, but the left one holds a flotsam of office supplies, including pens and notepads, hoping to scrawl himself a note to remember but before he has finished it arrives and

  —Gordy

  the pen flies through the air and Gordy falls backward, spine strained and reversing, the claw of his hand crumpling the note, every sinew seized in revolt and pulled to extremities. The command is demanding things of his physicality, his actuality, forcing him through portals of being that cannot be comprehended. His tongue the size of a mattress in his head, his skull expanding and contracting, jaw locked, toes extended, eyes like pie plates, eyes like pinheads, eyes everywhere in between. He is invisible. He is omnivisible. He is insignificant. He is everything. He is spread like hot butter across reality’s toast, stretched across possibilities of possibilities. Everything hurts. Everything tickles. Excruciating to resist the call of every Thing demanding of him only one task. One task and it will be over. One task and it will be ended. It will be so easy. He has it—the ticket. He remembers where he stowed it, tucked away flat beneath the skin on the roof of his mouth, the impossible object maintaining its impossible physical cohesion in an impossible location.

  Gordy reaches into his mouth and feels along its roof until he finds the ridge hiding there. With the sharpness of his fingernail he tears the skin along the ridge. He pulls back one clean flap of skin and begins worrying at the foreign object lying flat against the soft palate beneath. There’s no blood and no pain. He wrestles it out, impossibly whole, green and twinkling—LUCKY 21—the papery gem grappled from his gob, sprung after long secluded years from its mangled mouthy setting. He can use it to find anybody at all. He sees them now: Julius, walking away from the Neon Chapel with Nettles, neither of them daring to look at the other, while Dad trails behind at a d
istance.*3 Julius straining against the urge to look back at the home he intends to abandon; the other Neons at farther distances in various places…

  …and Jane is drifting somewhere between slumber and waking, riding in a sleeper car, the train heading from one performance to the next…

  …and Donk is in the Fridge, suit coat off, reading a book and drinking coffee…he’s trying to distract himself from an inchoate sense of loneliness, and from the fact that he’s due to meet Morris in twelve hours to have a frank discussion about his rapidly impending deadline, and from the fact that right after the unpleasantness of that meeting, he’s either going to have to give himself over to a bad fate, or else finally abduct the only friends he has left…

  …and Bailey is lying in her bed, dreaming of a room tall as a skyscraper with walls of soft grass and a terraced spiral ramp along the inner wall leading up to a glass-domed ceiling. Turning in slow wheels near the top are bright-colored birds, which might be parrots, or might be hummingbirds the size of parrots…

  …and Morris presides in the deposed Wales’ director’s corner office. I could go to him instantly, Gordy thinks. I could immediately bring him here to me. Give him the ticket. Fulfill the command. He’d kill you then, and everyone would briefly suffer, but at least this would be over. There’s such relief in the thought. Stop struggling. Doom the world. Doom the world? It sounds like nonsense. Why concern yourself with the world? The world is already doomed. You can do it, he thinks, again—End it now. As the thought arrives it seems impossible to him he ever would have considered doing otherwise. He will obey; it will be so simple and then it will be over forever, and nobody will accuse him of failure or cowardice or complicity or collaboration, because under the awful will of the ticket’s new master, none will exist to do the blaming, nor will he exist to receive it. I’ll do it, he thinks. I’ll do it now and I’ll do it and I’ll do it now and I’ll do it and I’ll do it now and I’ll do it and I’ll do it now and I will do it…

  The mantra has passed his lips a hundred or a thousand times before he realizes the torment has passed and he, contrary to intention, has not done it. The morning sun still illuminates every mote in the air. There is relief now, but he still feels, deep but rising, the stirrings of yet another call, the next next one coming as sure as the earth spins.

  And you almost did it, he thinks—Oh God, you almost did it that time. You’ll give in next time for sure. That one burned the last of the resistance out of you. You have to make yourself forget. But what about tonight? And the next night? And the next? Running from town to town; each morning Julius explaining to you what it is you’re doing, and why? Burning half your consciousness away at the end of each day, becoming vaguer and vaguer, less and less here, more and more nowhere at all, nowhen, nowhy?

  Gordy places the ticket on the table. The thought comes—You’ve never finished playing the actual game. Five silver unmarked choices left, and the ace alone is a winner. A cool refreshing grand could be yours, one thousand simoleons, if you choose right…Seized by a useless whim, Gordy dowses for coins in Julius’s clutter drawer. He makes only the barest hesitation before selecting the final pod, and scratches, revealing the red ace. There it is, Gordy thinks—it was there all the time. A winning ticket all the way through. Someday, when this is over, you can claim the prize. You’d pay a thousand times the value to be rid of it. Remember the moment’s relief you felt, when you thought you were going to finally give it away. You can’t give it to Morris, but if you could give it to somebody better suited…if only you could give it to Donk. Or…

  Or.

  So ridiculous to take the best man in Loony Island away from the place he’s needed most. The look on their faces when he told them he was going—and think of all those folks in Domino City, people he helps every day. You don’t want it; more important, you shouldn’t have it. Unworthy of the responsibility. Unworthy of the devotion. Unworthy of the sacrifice—Julius leaving all this…for what, for you? It all works. It all fits together. Donk and Morris can send out the hounds, send them seeking you, send them away from Julius and the ticket. You’ll be visible again, but let them find you—let them waste their time at the chase. Let them even waste their time in the catching. Let them waste their time torturing you to discover you don’t have it, if that’s what it comes to. The cleansing wave will arrive as sure as the next command, if not as soon. And, while you run, you can still look for Jane. You still have the circus’s schedule. It’ll be a risk, but only a risk for you now. You won’t be able to fix her, but you can point her to the priest, who can restore her. Better him than you. You’ve lost the right to be her hero. Take her to a man worthy of the title, a man who can tell God “No” and mean it. Sitting, Gordy reads the last of the diary of Father Julius. When he’s finished, Gordy thinks—Yes, he’s the one. If you weren’t sure before, you can be now. He’s the one. There is something stuck to the back of the diary’s last page. Turning it, he sees a note, once crumpled, smoothed back and taped flat, written in tiny meticulous letters, the sort of obsessively precise handwriting that might be found on hidden scrolls of toilet paper.

  Julius–

  I’m trying it today; with you or without. I don’t care. I don’t care. I can’t stand the rabbits anymore.

  I’m downstairs. Help me.

  —Dad

  A note. You had been writing a note; you ought to finish it. The ticket is still on the table. Gordy rearranges Julius’s memoir, moves the ticket atop it. He writes for a while, contemplating, stopping, starting, striking. When he’s done, he writes it again, a clean copy. It’s important this be done properly, this momentous transference.

  It will be necessary to use it one last time. He could go out the door—it unlocks from inside—but leaving the ticket in a locked room seems wisest, and traipsing visible through Loony Island seems risky. Better the locked-room mystery. Better to spirit yourself out of town in a single jaunt, leaving it where only the man with the key can find it.

  Last trick I’ll ever play with you, you bastard, Gordy thinks. Too bad I can’t get the thousand bucks out of you before I leave.

  Then he touches the ticket and he is gone.

  *1 You didn’t dare risk sifting through a newly revised stack for the answers—those evil revisions had betrayed your best intentions enough times already. Though reality remained a nearly unbearable interpretive stew, you stayed in the world after leaving the donut shop, rather than return through the door for the relative calm of the author’s side. Moving hours forward in time, you materialized yourself inside the ever-empty father-confessor side of the bifurcated confessional, the so-called Father Ex-Position (hadn’t it once been called Monseigneur Ex-Position? When was it demoted? In which revision did that occur? You’d missed it.) Horribly cramped, you waited, soft and still, for Gordy, yet even in your discomfort you enjoyed the relative interpretive quiescence of the dark space you’d chosen to unnaturally inhabit. Your patience paid extravagant dividends. Once Gordy faced what he thought was nothing but empty space, he told it all. What he’d seen behind the door, what he’d been commanded, why he’d run, the ticket, the wave, the Voice, the command…you learned so much, and all of it pointed to just one course of action for you to take. Now that you’ve returned and read the donut stack, you’re more resolved toward that end than ever.

  *2 You were wisely unwilling to leave it to chance that Gordy and Julius would escape Loony Island. They’d clearly mistrusted you to some extent; no reason to suppose your exhortations would be sufficient. Time to enlist Tennessee to your cause, have him provide extra impetus to get out and away. You’d allowed yourself some fun freeing the old fellow. Jumped to the Domino City hallway where Donk was keeping him, asked the hinges and the lock mechanisms to please stop being iron and steel, to become butter instead, and they agreed to do so, and the reinforced steel door fell into the hallway with a mighty CLUD. Tennessee had been most impressed by t
hat; and even more impressed by your warnings of the dangers Donk posed, the extents to which he would go to capture the ticket, the things he would do once he had it.

  It had been effective as hell, as the truth frequently is. Apparently, Donk had already been scaring Tennessee plenty with recent pronouncements and threats; the loony had gone tearing ass, bumble-stumbling down the hallway, looking for his lad lost forever. You’d had to call him back to tell him exactly where to find Gordy, so he didn’t waste time looking. Why leave anything to chance?

  *3 You were about to finally return to the artist’s side then, when it occurred to you: Donk might decide to grab them before they can leave the Island. Better to leave him a distraction, keep him occupied during these crucial hours. A final stroke of genius: appearing to Tennessee one last time as he lagged behind the priest; handing him a sack of oranges. Go, you know where the Fridge is. Leave them there; put a terror in Donk’s heart. Send him in a rush to the children’s room instead of to the Neon. Buy yourselves a few hours more.