The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  But all that came later.

  Now she says: “You wanted me to hear you. I’ve heard you.”

  If he’d hoped for more out of her, he didn’t reveal himself. He looked at her with what she took for gratitude.

  “I want you to go, now.”

  Quickly Gordy rises. At the door, he pauses.

  “Sometimes even when an idiot does his worst, the result is still beautiful,” he said. “Or maybe that’s taking too much credit. Maybe your beauty is simply stronger than my stupidity. In any case—your beard…it’s beautiful.” Then he leaves. But the bodyguard

  * * *

  —

  Bailey—peeking out the tent flap to ensure Gordy hadn’t strayed—tarried, seemingly on the verge of confession.

  Jane said: “Well? Do you have something you want to ask me?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have something to give you. I think I just found out I have a brother I never knew about.”

  “I see,” Jane said, though she didn’t.

  “It’s not the usual situation for those sorts of things,” Bailey said.

  Jane waited.

  “He’s a writer.”

  Jane waited.

  “I have his book here…” Rummaging through her backpack.

  “I don’t read much these days.”

  “I haven’t read most of it yet, either.”

  “Then keep it.”

  “This is a spare. I think you need to have it.”

  Jane smiled. “And why is that?”

  “Because,” Bailey said, producing it at last. “He dedicated it to you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t, either, until today. But it’s got to be you. See for yourself.”

  She opened the book—really just pages in a binder. On the back of the title page, she found it:

  For the flying bearded lady. The door’s always open

  Studying the title page, she said: “I don’t understand. I don’t know this Boyd Legging-clear.”

  “I don’t know him, either. But still I think he’s…real.”

  “And if I read, what will I find in this book your maybe-brother maybe-dedicated to me?”

  “I don’t know.” Bailey seemed suddenly younger, the bodyguard no longer. Bashful. Embarrassed. Her words came out in a tumble. “The things in this book really happened. Or at least my parts in them did. In any case, I think you should have it.” Jane studied the cover. On her way out, Bailey paused at the portal. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Doing his dirty work. You’re amazing. You could go anywhere else.”

  Jane smiled, terribly weary, terribly sad. “Sweetie, I could give you the same speech. All I know is I’m

  * * *

  —

  going with you.” And so she had. Bailey returns to reading Boyd’s book, but keeps catching herself strayed from the page, drifting, thinking back on their strange circus interview, the singular woman who had given it to them. Bailey thinks—Silly girl. You left the bearded lady’s presence as obsessed with her as Gordy ever was.

  When the scrim had dropped, Jane had seen Gordy immediately. She’d been expecting him—she must have been, she knew she was meant as Gordy bait—but Bailey still marked her shock, caught between the abstraction of expecting something someday and the reality of the expected moment suddenly arrived: a widening of those almond eyes, a visible start, mouth slightly agape. She’d recovered; likely the rest of the crowd presumed the startle on her face was a dramatic flourish, part of the act and nothing more. They’d all been wearing their own various expressions of awe or revulsion or entrancement, and might easily have assumed she’d been making brief satirical commentary on their own flustered faces. Then, afterward, her eyes had been cast first to Gordy, then to her, and then back, and then that beautiful beard had risen and fallen in a gesture too subtle, too enigmatic, for Bailey to discern if it represented true approbation or the parody of it. Yes it matters, and you’d better figure it out, her eyes had seemed to say, dancingly.

  So here you are, Bailey thinks. Exchanged a single Iowa motel room for a series of identical ones across the country. Exchanged as companion a weird old loony for his even weirder son. And yes, there’s Gordy, sitting on the floor on a pallet he’s made of cushions, back against the foot of the motel room’s lone bed, reading the other material Tennessee had brought along: Julius’s memoir. He’s being a gentleman, he never even asked who’d get the bed, just made that pallet and made himself comfortable. He’s even cute…Bailey, curious, peeks a prospective toe out from beneath the coverlet and—the room is small enough to allow it—tickles Gordy’s ear. Gordy barely registers; after a minute he swats at it, without looking over, as if it were no more than a fly—which may be, Bailey realizes, what he thought it was. There’s no further acknowledgment.

  I suppose it’s just another dreamless night, she thinks with resignation. Tragically, the Attic remains absent without leave. She can reassure herself all she wants by way of regained physical control and sensation—wiggling fingers and toes, jogging the streets, lifting food to lips, stretching, standing, sitting, maybe sometimes sex…all these are fantastic, but the loss of the Attic still leaves her emotionally rawboned.

  “This is interesting,” Bailey murmurs, later. Half-serious, but she senses opportunity, too. Gordy hasn’t moved. Bailey toe-nudges him again in the ear. “We’re famous. Boyd wrote about our visit to your bearded friend.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll read it if you like,” Bailey half-teases. She pokes Gordy again with one stockinged toe. “According to Boyd, you found her dance very…stimulating.”

  “It’s only a book,” Gordy mumbles. “Doesn’t mean it happened that way.” Bailey smiles playfully. Something about the book is nagging at her, but it’s ignorable, a slow leak. And…does Gordy at last seem to be coming out of himself? Why, yes he does. Time to try for a bit of fun. “But the shadow part was real,” she says, poking again. “And she was lovely. A girl could get jealous…”

  Gordy finally registers. He glances her way, sidelong, and tosses his pages on the floor. His smile, still mostly quizzical, now has its own playful glint. “Could a girl, now?”

  “A girl might already have.”

  “And what might a girl do about it?”

  “Come on over here,” Bailey says, “And a girl might show you.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, with Gordy asleep on top of the coverlet, Bailey fishes the flashlight out of her duffle and creeps back to the book. There’s a problem. Until now, Boyd’s book had been an accurate account, fictionalized, to be sure, but generally accurate: a Boydish chronicle of all that’s happened—but this passage of beard and shadows has a new and concerning quality, the implications of which have only recently begun to dawn on her. She whispers into the dark. “It’s not just about what happened. It’s about what’s happening. Everything that happened to us after I

  * * *

  —

  took flight on the trapeze, after the leap and catch and roar of the crowd, Jane retires to her sleeper car and begins to read Boyd’s book; obligingly at first, but with growing absorption, until by the end for her there is no sleeper car, no hoot of train, no racket of track, no moon outside, only words and page and page and page and page. The book does indeed describe things that happened, things that the author couldn’t have known. Jane never concerns herself with questions of how. It is; “how” is an irrelevance. She finishes at break of dawn and falls immediately into turbulent sleep. That night, a secretly furious Colonel Krane expresses his regrets to the disappointed crowd on behalf of the flying bearded lady, who has unexpectedly taken ill. Jane keeps to her dressing room, cross-legged, book in lap, making notations, filled at last with something like hope, waiting, anticipatory, for the day the Coyote might begin to perform his g
ood vengeance upon Morris, thinking back on the book’s dedication—Yes, this is why news of the ticket’s destruction didn’t bother you; it was never your target. There’s a leap available with a much better hope of a catch: Boyd’s reminded you, whoever he is. The door’s always open for the flying bearded lady, he claims. You’ll be in Pigeon Forge soon enough, Jane. It’s time to find out if what Boyd

  * * *

  —

  says is even true?” The Sandals Julius said nothing in reply to this for a long time—hours—and Sister Nettles began to wonder if she’d offended him. Or them. Or…oh, balls. Now you’re worried about offending footwear. And you’d promised yourself you wouldn’t even answer when he talks.

  This is no business, Nettles decided, for someone who deals in the tactile. Father Julius used to be a kindred spirit in focusing on the physical over the metaphysical, or so she’d thought. And still there remained the work of the Neon Chapel to do, and only her left behind to do it.

  You haven’t offended me in the least, said the Sandals Julius. I’d be happy to tell you what’s happening with the others. They’re wearing me the same as you are. We’re all still together.

  Nettles wandered the empty cavern of the Neon, futilely straightening, rearranging chairs that needed no rearranging, repeating to herself the advice she gave herself constantly, and which she constantly ignored: Don’t answer your shoes. Do not answer your shoes. Do not.

  The sandals said: Tennessee is back in his home state, for example.

  Sister Nettles couldn’t help herself. “After all the times he said he wouldn’t go? What on earth?”

  I’ll help him, Nettles, the sandals said. Don’t worry. I’ll help.

  —Boyd Ligneclaire, Subject to Infinite Change

  The physical laws of the universe are indifferent to your struggle. Certainly, they make no special dispensation for your desires or needs. Still, it would be an error to presume the indifference of the universe’s laws represent the universe’s indifference. The briefest glance at a great painting belies the notion.

  —Unknown

  He might have returned to Pigeon Forge any number of ways: by car, train, private jet—but after the Coyote’s betrayal, the CAT seems safest. There’s been precious little sense of safety in the weeks since the Coyote revealed himself. They’ve rigged up a system for him, and he lies on his back and submits himself to it as the CAT rumbles uphill, just minutes away from its destination. It’s a simple contraption, really; some clamps to hold his sandpaper lids, a tank of soltion hooked up to a drip. Every ten seconds precisely, another moistening drop obscures his vision. Traversing the tunnel in the CAT’s guts, Morris, enclosed on all sides, feels at last unfindable, unharmable. Finally he’s been left free to consider what he’ll do when he finally puts his hands on the ticket.

  What shall we do with the Coyote? Your trust was falsely placed, but now that you know him to be dishonest, he is more knowable and you trust him more, you’ve learned the handle by which to grip him. He will come, drawn to you, and you will have prepared for him…something. He thinks himself greater than you, but he’s drawn to you just like anything else. All things are drawn to you: The signs of your Allness are so clear. And the thing behind you is still behind you. In much the same way, the circus will soon return to Pigeon Forge to join you. Soon you will see Jane again, still beautiful, ruined as she may be. A greater attraction now she’s been bearded than ever before, so Krane claims.

  The CAT halts; you’ve arrived.

  Look, the Andrews have been made alert to your approach. Sent ahead to prepare the ceremony on the Pigeon Forge side, they attend you as you emerge from the CAT’s vaultlike back hatch, but you wave them off and make your way with the cane. You’ve practiced and are quicker with it now. They share a sour look, which they imagine you didn’t see. They still doubt you, the Andrews; sensitive they are, able to detect disloyalty in the quiver of a whisker—oversensitive to it, and without doubt jealous. Closely, closely, they watch status and position. There are rumors about them and there are truths. You remember when they were three—triplets standing before you beneath the circus tent, child-sized but fierce, caught up by Krane’s freak show for the Assizement, the troika exuding unnerving calm in the pen amidst the rest of the chattel, who rattled the bars begging and fearful or else stood catatonic staring at the sawdust. Throughout the ceremony you had a growing awareness of them, watching and waiting, listening to the liturgy, the presentation of bird and spade, of water and box. When they were called forward the middle one interrupted you, strong-voiced: There is no need to remake us; and you: There is, you must be made perfect, and he: We are perfect already, we will prove it to you, and then without hesitation the two behind him twisted with impossible quickness, loosed the grips of the guards and snatched the guards’ weapons—not the swords but the quick long knives hidden deeper in the folds of ceremonial red—spun about and without hesitation plunged the lovely blades deep into their brother, their third, their spokesman, who smiled and said: Now you see, and fell, quietly dying, as his brothers threw the pilfered bloody knives with expert precision juddering into faraway beams, then bowed to you their obeisance. The puzzle of the Andrews, the one who died and the two who lived. You ponder it frequently; every day you sift the memory, searching for clues. When did they decide? How did they choose among them the sacrifice? The one who died went willingly. There was no sense of betrayal when he saw the handles sprouting from his body. Yet still, alone among all the thousands to ever pass through the Assizement, only the Andrews never saw spade nor bird. They alone selected their own baptism. The unnerving intensity of their devotion, the sacrificial nature of their arrival, unexpected and unexpectable. As a result you are never entirely comfortable in their presence. These tiny pieces of yourself, lessons you gave yourself about the power of will, about the unpredictable nature of what you choose to bring forth into the world. Reflections of your own fierceness. Reflections of your own ruthlessness. Most others among the trustees avoid the Andrews, fearful of offending them by failing to tell one from the other. Any fool can detect the difference merely by noticing behavior. In truth they couldn’t be less alike. Andrew is typically taciturn, watchful, waiting, offering nothing not directly asked of him, while Andrew, on the other hand, speaks without cease when given cause. He is at it now, brisk and assiduous: updates on the circus; how many runaways collected according to Krane’s report; when the circus is expected to arrive; preparations for the ceremony; dossier of the unworthy, blue tickets already delivered; quarterly earnings from the prisons, revenues down overall though the new facilities in Missouri are a bright spot and lobbying efforts for stiffer mandatory penalties are sprouting results, new bills coming to the floor after the recess to help drive future revenues, less inmate turnover and more opportunities for resident extensions, requiring gaudy government contracts to build new facilities necessary to hold new inmates, whose habits are not yet being punished with requisite severity…also the sex trade: New infusions to the red-light districts in EU are showing a fast uptick, expansion to ASEAN is on track with Thailand set to open in quarter two next year…You feign attentiveness—if your interest flags, Andrew will take offense and then of course Andrew will also be offended on his brother’s behalf—but your leg aches from long hours in the CAT, and your eyes yearn for the comfort of the drops. You seek and in short order find home and bed, the skylight directly above, and you gaze out into a clear night sky, stars and constellations wheeling high above, unreachable for now, their cold light traveling for aeons before the birth of civilization or even species to meet you here, now, the stars a bleak stark lesson to yourself of the distances you have yet to attain. All of this you call your own. You will soon have Gordy in hand, you’ll take back the power he stole, and then you will know each star through each moment of its existence, balls of gas forty thousand times the size of this planet, each particle, each photon, for hundreds of millions of years, a
ll of it you will call your own. All of it is yours it springs from you and yet you have distanced yourself from it locked it hidden it behind a door, spirited it away in the hands of a thief, but you will have it, you will possess it control it understand it break free of this so-called matter and this so-called time, restore all things to the rightful ways and the rightful places, unmake all who resist. The thing behind you is still behind you. All things you call your own and you own all things, all things you call your own, you own all things you see and all you see you call your