The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

“Sure. And maybe Julius really is ten pairs of sandals or whatever.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Gordy said, with deliberate sincerity. He’d already explained to her about Landrude and the doughnut shop and the alleged Cat’s Crib. None of it made sense to Bailey, but then again, much that made no sense had proved true in recent days. Gordy returned to the schedule. “This says she’s part of the freak show and the circus—Jane. She dances, then she’s on the trapeze.”

  “We’ll go to both.”

  “Are you coming along?”

  “I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “They’ll be watching for me there. For me specifically. It’s going to be dangerous.”

  Bailey nodded, pride of ownership returning. “That’s why I’m

  * * *

  —

  in the corner of the tent waiting for her—God, had it only been yesterday when he first set eyes on her? No. It had not. He’d first set eyes on her years ago, a boy at the circus. And then again, years later, in the cavern of oubliettes, he’d seen her again for the first time. And then later in Färland, he once again had set eyes on her for the first time. Each time, he’d died, caught in amber, pressed against the timeless perfection of instantaneous love. This meeting to come had to him the dramatic feel of a last breathless encounter, as though they were ancient lovers chosen by destiny, doomed by fate to this cycle of near and far, attraction and separation. This notion appealed to Gordy’s romantic nature, and he soon found himself in an elegiac frame of mind. Would this meeting, too, be the first time? Would he still see with new eyes? Would this be another gorgeous and crushing death?

  They’d opted to disguise him, or rather Bailey, cautious and canny, had decided. Nothing fancy—a disguise that calls attention to itself is worse than none—just a scarf, some thick-rimmed glasses with non-prescription lenses, and a quickly administered close-cropped haircut that made Gordy rub his hand absently over the bristles. Posing as a couple, arm-in-arm, just a couple of carefree kids, off to see the see—and what a see! Morris had invested heavily in the freak show since the last visit. Krane is barking the names of the big stars: Wembly, the Card-Playing Gorilla, Eddie the Eyeball, the Chuckleheads, as well as the assortment of other distractions and attractions: the inextricably conjoined, Leatherskin, Potato-Face, Shirley Tattoo, three-leggers, crab-handers, Donny Two-Dick, Hottentots, half-ladies, Germans, baby-grandfathers; there’s a pig-boy, a monkey-girl, a salamander-man, an ostrich-woman—to say nothing of the displays, offshoots within the main tent where long shelves hid, dimly lit, holding deformity and relic most novel: tumors shaped like former presidents, history’s most famous formaldehyded penises, shrunken heads, Sigmund Freud’s cigar, Hitler’s moustache trimmer, Lincoln’s last shit, mummified Aborigines, a stuffed dodo, even an array of the most perfectly preserved pickled punks, packed into beakers and jars and sometimes even nestled jowl to jowl like sardines. And there, at the end of the row, the painted sign:

  JANE THE DANCING BEARDED LADY

  The light dimmed, and the sounds of a sitar snaked the air. The show was going to begin. Gordy and Bailey made their way in, selected seats as near to the front as they could manage. Gordy sat in a welter of anticipation…

  The curtains lifted. Gordy died.

  She danced obscured by a translucent scrim, backlit, only the shape of her form visible. Such lissome movements, the dance flowing from one shape to another, tantalizing, seeming even to shape the parabolic chords of the sitar playing on the speaker, while in turn being shaped by them. She moved, and the sinew of the music supported, supplanted, surprised, she made herself supplicant to it, then suddenly she surpassed it, moved in time until she seemed almost out of time. And then—no warning—the thin barrier lifted and the graceful promise of silhouette lay fulfilled, as they saw in flesh things previously guessed at in shadow.

  The beard; her chosen shield, her chosen armor, her chosen sword.

  Yes, chosen.

  Gordy died, but a different death this time. I haven’t known anything, he thought. I haven’t known anything at all.

  Then the curtain dropped and the crowd, groaning their disapproval at the sudden lacuna, stood, stretched, quickly dispersed. But Gordy crept to the stage and lifted the curtain leading to the

  * * *

  —

  small dressing room. The room, a chamber adjacent to the dance’s stage, itself a chamber within the room that has been set aside for her act within the freak show, which in turn is contained within one section of the outer ring of the larger tent, which is itself a roped-off portion of the fair. Here, in her dressing room, Jane is as “within” as she can be, the smallest matryoshka. She’s alone except for her attendant—the two are weaving her beard. Jane’s attendant is the circus freak show’s other bearded lady, the one who was here first. She’s shy, the poor girl, but that’s for the best, since as a result of shyness she welcomes her displacement. If her temperament were otherwise, she might be inclined to compete to keep her position and rank, and there truly is no competition. Krane had been so delighted to have his rare flying bird returned to him, he’d immediately drawn up a new marketing campaign featuring her, made subtle changes even to the name of the circus itself. She’s found victory, has Jane’s attendant, the first bearded lady, simply in not desiring the fight. Now her hands work through Jane’s beard—shaped for the dance—making it into a less obtrusive shape for the coming acrobatics. She works quickly on the left side, while Jane, already wearing her green spangled body sleeve, attends to the right. It’s faster when they work together, and speed is called for—less than an hour remains before the flying bearded lady needs to appear on the platform…from behind, an unexpected voice makes the attendant squeak and jump.

  “Hello? Excuse me?”

  The globe lights in rows on either side of the mirror obscure their reflection, but she recognizes the voice. Gordy. Abandoner. He’s got someone with him. She lets her fingers work, makes him speak first. It’s possible to become stillness itself.

  “You dance beautifully.” Gordy says, voice thick. He is, as always, an idiot. An idiot as always, and—again, as always—a lucky bastard. Morris’s goons were thick as marmalade for weeks, crawling all over the circus, swinging wooden swords, watching for Gordy to rise to the bearded bait, but a week ago there must have been some emergency back at the home offices; suddenly most of them were called away, leaving only a skeleton crew as rearguard. These men, though watchful and dangerous, haven’t nabbed him, and she understands why: They haven’t recognized him. They’ve never seen his face, have they? They’re looking for flickers and shimmers, but he’s disguised now in full visibility. Morris set the trap but he never considered…then she realizes—he’s counting on you to turn Gordy in. He knows you’ll want to, and you do want to—you’ll tip any canoe, including his, that comes into grappling range. All you have to do is call for the guards, and they’ll have it.

  You may as well do it.

  You may well.

  “It’s dangerous for you here,” she says.

  When Gordy smiles, he looks weary and sad. “We’d worked that out, yes.” A nod toward his companion, a pretty cat with wary eyes, wearing a simple suit of black. Her head, recently shaved, now grows around her head almost in a helmet, lending her a martial aspect that belies her slight size.

  “Morris’s men are here. They’re bound to catch you if you stay long.”

  “We’d better not stay long, then,” the pretty cat says in clipped tones. Jane, suddenly much more interested in this young woman than she is in her unworthy former lover, watches her in the mirror; she stands by the pinned tent-flap entrance on the balls of her feet, calm and very present. Her hands clasped behind her back, likely near some concealed weapon. Jane knows her type from living around Morris’s semblants and trustees: always prepared for a fight, always expecting one. How oddly practical of Gordy to have picked up a b
odyguard.

  “I could call and the guards would be here in a second,” Jane says. “In fact, that’s exactly what I’m instructed to do.”

  Gordy and the bodyguard share a nervous glance.

  “Can you help me think of a reason not to? If they catch you, I’ll be well rewarded.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be the type to be swayed by reward.”

  “But people change all the time, don’t they? You should know—you change them.” He stiffens at this but says nothing, so she continues: “And perhaps I’ve been offered a reward that entices me.”

  She saw it come to him then—the understanding. “Finch. Your reward is Finch.”

  Jane said nothing; her silence would have to be answer enough for him to puzzle it out. Yes, Finch. Always Finch. It’s been Finch guiding me even before she was born. Finch when I tried to warn you under the bleachers. Finch when I tended to you in your oubliette. Finch when I treated with you in the caverns to overthrow Morris. And for Finch I offered myself as sacrifice to you in Färland. And Finch now. I get to see her whenever the circus ends its tour in Pigeon Forge. Morris has not lied in that, at least. They bring her up. We sit by the fountain. She doesn’t know me. I weep. She tries to be kind to this weeping stranger. It’s the most awful thing in the world; it’s all I have. Yes, you Abandoner, you living void, you hole empty even of yourself, yes, it’s Finch, who you left behind, who you never thought to return to save, yes, it’s Finch, and if I deliver you to them then Morris says he’ll give her back to me for good, and of course he’s lying about that, but what else do I have but that?

  “He really did it to her, didn’t he?” Gordy’s face undergoes a fascinating sequence of realizations; no less painful than he deserves: Yes, since you abandoned us in the Vault; yes, that moment in Färland; yes, in your righteous rage you hid knowledge from yourself of your unintended consequences; yes, and as you enacted your righteous punishment too; yes, you drowned yourself to escape the storm you brought and then gave no thought of who else might have been washed overboard to be swallowed by the sea. Gordy sits heavily and puts his head in his hands. She observes him in the mirror, her first clear look at him since Färland. He’s aged—how strange to think he would age, nothing left of the boy in him. Nothing dramatic to the shift: a slight tracery of lines on the forehead, prominence of nose, a slight diminishment of the density of his new-cropped hair. She’s always thought him such a boy, even though he was full-grown back in the cavern days. Even later, in Färland, being with him always carried with it a suggestion of the perverse. Now there’s a care about him, a wariness, a weariness, as if something essential and destructive has at great price been drawn out of him and expunged. Look at him. At last he’s coming to terms with what he’s done, and what’s been done because of him, but still he’s making it—realization, grief, supplication—all just another part of his story. He’s here to save you from whatever it is he imagines you need saving from. He’ll patch it up, put things to rights, be the champion, the protector. He’ll recede the beard he bestowed upon you, he’ll erase that long-ago-deemed punishment without considering how you’ve reshaped yourself to fit it, without a thought to the underlying suppositions made when he furnished you with it. He’ll take it in the same way he gave it, without asking, and as a part of his great hero’s journey. His redemption. His reconciliation. He thinks he’s come to set things back to rights. He doesn’t understand he’s just asking you to be compliant with him as he restores you back to a more comfortable place within his narrative. And then he’ll expect thanks and praise—yes, that will be your role. To thank him for smoothing your face once again, for restoring and putting right, never considering that for you to accept such a gift would be to accept his framing of it as punishment, which is something you’ve never done. No, you’ve never accepted a punishment—he sprouted shame on you and you bearded yourself with a shield of beauty and power. And now that he knows about Finch, he’d do the same with her. Bring her up out of the oubliettes, yes—but only as one of his great heroic works. Gordy the powerful, the wise. Gordy the good. But Gordy the abandoner? No, never that. It couldn’t be that. No, here’s what he’ll do: bring her back up, restore her mind if he can, wind the string back onto the spool into the exact original shape—machine-precise, factory new—re-encase it in its packaging and set it back on its shelf. He’d erase his own part in it, blot out his own original sin so he can go on being his own protagonist. But first, Gordy, be sure to spend a little time on your cross, make sure to pierce your own side—but not too deep—and then you’ll forgive us, all of us you’ve harmed, for we knew not what we did in doubting your innate goodness. Put on the hair shirt. Blubber before the bearded lady, so when you enact your gallantry, she’ll be sure to thank you properly. Jane watches him, his head in his hands weeping, and imagines what he might do if he let himself see, as clearly as she does, how he plays his own part for himself.

  “No,” Gordy said, looking up, at last. “I can’t think of a single reason you shouldn’t call. Go ahead. Call them. I won’t fight it.”

  She turns to face him. For a long time, she stares.

  “You’re not going to call them.” Gordy’s bodyguard says; not as threat, merely as observation. And of course—damn it—this is correct. There’s no hope in trusting to Morris for reward, any more than in trusting Gordy to put things back as they were. Disruption is the only remaining hope. Disruption and destruction, and Gordy may someday yet create some of that—who better to do so?

  “Why are you here?” she asks, thinking—You’d better not say it. If you say those words, I really will call the guards. What good is “sorry”? What is “sorry” but another burden you’re asking me to hold for you?

  He sags. Everything about his aspect indicates surrender. “No idea. Not anymore. I’m just here.”

  She makes a slight ironic sound. “You know why.”

  “I used to know. I suppose now I’m here to tell you some things.”

  “No. You’re here to decide what I want, and then to do it. Use that ticket of yours. Take something else away.”

  Gordy turns his palms up. “There is no ticket. I gave it to somebody I trusted. Now it seems it may be completely gone.”

  “I can’t believe it.” But even saying it, she understands: This solves the mystery of his diminishment. He gave it up. She supposes this news should bring something like despair—Hadn’t getting it been your whole plan? Apparently not; apparently, on deeper levels, you’d never believed in its existence, or at least you’d never believed it would be your path.

  “He’s not lying to you,” the bodyguard says, in a way that amuses Jane. Some interest, some protectiveness, extending beyond the professional. Ah, yes—you’re the new one, or you’re about to be. And how is he with you? Has he started trying yet to absorb you? Does he cling to you like he clung to me, like you’re the life raft, like you’re the last unbroken rope? What will it be like for you, honey, when you don’t meet those hopes? What happens when you don’t make yourself porous enough to draw as much of him into you as he expects, when you’re insufficiently buoyant and he sinks, when you’re not tied to an anchor stable enough to hold his weight, when he falls? What will he do then? Blame physics for its properties, or himself for his position? No—when you fail to hold him, he’ll expect you to hold the blame. But now it’s become confused—he’s given it up; he can’t do to you what he did to me. He’ll need to find other tools now. How did he give it up? Why?

  Gordy climbs down from his chair and sits on his heels. Eyes on the sawdust. “I know my danger, and I’m here anyway. That’s all the proof I’ve got. I came as soon as I found out where you were. Once I thought I’d come to heal you, but that’s done.” He speaks as someone realizing the truth even in the midst of saying it. “Now…I think…I’ve just come to give you the power to decide what to do with me, and the chance to decide what that is.”

  So
, Jane realizes, he can still surprise you after all. She turns back to the mirror, returns her attention to the braiding. “If you have things to tell me, you have five minutes. I can’t be late for the trapeze.”

  “I want you to know that I’ve wronged you.”

  “Oh really? Thank you. Thank you for that information.”

  “I mean I want you to know that I know it. I intended some of what I did to you. I never intended for…for Finch, but my intentions don’t matter. I had my reasons for some of it, and some of them were even good, but my reasons don’t matter. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it differently, and that doesn’t matter, either. It’s happened, and it’s happened to you and your little girl, and that’s what matters.”

  “And you just…needed me…to know that.”

  “I had this thought, that you needed me to tell you I knew. That’s probably all wrong, I don’t know. I’m an idiot, just like you said. That’s all I should have said: I’m an idiot. I did my best, except—” he looks meaningfully at her beard “—except when I did my worst. I’ve learned how terrible the result can be when an idiot does his best.”

  “And yet here you are. Still trying your very best.”

  “I gave up my power, but I haven’t given up trying. I don’t know how to do that.”

  “So you run away. Again.”

  “I suppose so. I’ve been running since I was a boy. It’s all I know to do.”

  They sat in the silence of spoken truths. Later, as the implications of what he’d told her seeped into her histories and recolored them, she would hate him for taking away simpler perspectives and replacing them with swampwater. Now she would have to understand his actions; not to condone—never that—but to see the whys and wherefores, to remember the complexities, to know why a scared man would act without regard for the fate of those he’d led to believe in him. And even the atrocity of Färland. This is what he thrust back upon her: the first memory of him. A boy hiding, spying on the Assizement, peeking between the slats, taking in spade and bird and fountain, the sight of which can make you crazy with fear. That had been him, not yet Abandoner, only a teenaged boy gone tharn from the wonder of the darkwater white fountain, a day later trapped in an oubliette, staring for a decade at nothing but his own simultaneous growth and desiccation in relentless light and mirror. And even after all that, he’d had compassion in him. He’d tried—hadn’t he?—in his failed way, to heal. Yes, later he’d given himself over to corruption, run away from responsibility, pumped himself full of the pustulent lessons of the red light in Brasschaat, stuffed himself like a tick with a boy’s sense of romance and a pimp’s sense of ass. He’d given himself a licentious license, but even in his self-degradation there was still much of that boy left in him. She hates him so much more now that he’s forced one charitable memory of himself past her armor. Oh, he did an evil thing to her in Raccoon River, eviler by far than the scorn and the beard in Färland: He’d made himself understandable. Now, when she thinks of him, she still sees what she’d seen before—Abandoner, blamer of the innocent, punisher of the scapegoat, shirker of duties, fool of the world—but now when she thinks of him, she sees—can’t help but see—Finch herself. The night after Raccoon River, sleepless on the sleeper car as it plunged through darkness to the next show, she thought—If only you had said something terrible like “I’m sorry.” Then I could keep despising you.