The Revisionaries

by A. R. Moxon

  She’s skated on the line two or three yards, slid on it, feet sideways, burying the line between foot and sandal sole, then leapt, and in leaping, she’s spun, she’s tangled the twanging tightrope into her sandal straps, eaten up all the slack it’s been given to accommodate an acrobat’s surprise landing…reaching out her arms to the plummeting bodies like a supplicant mother who doesn’t know which half of her severed baby she should beg Solomon to first return to her, she’s, she’s—oh no she is NOT, she’s going for both of them?…. The bearded lady knows how to make the catch, hand on forearm—success!—but the other one, with the C on the chest…he hadn’t been expecting to fall and has no control—no! she’s missed his grasping hand by an inch…the crowd’s groan goes from defeat to exhilaration as they see it: nnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

  OOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAYEESSSSSsss!! SHE HAS HIM BY HIS CAPE BY HIS CAPE BY HIS GOD-THUMPING CAPE! The momentum swings them all the way looping around, 360°, as they come at last to rest, still swinging, groaning and torn, hanging from the tightrope, sandals and line in an unfixable tangle, the sandaled savior inverted, feet caught in the line, the no-longer-floating man dangling by his cape, bearded lady beside him, and, suspended from the bearded lady’s legs, the chuckling freak show.

  It’s all happened. There’s been no time to process it. All they can do is stand on swaying bleachers, cheeks wet, and stomp, clap, pound, scream: What have we just seen? But they cut their own enthusiasm short—something is amiss. There is a thrum, an edge, a subterranean current, a pre-emetic sense of rushing and ineluctable doom. It settles upon them all, a barometric warning, known if not felt, like the foreboding of dogs before a tornado. A sudden understanding of mortality, usually visited only singly, only at night, now comes to them all collectively. They’re weeping, but they don’t know why. The living hang yet suspended from the ropes, while below, the kneeling man with the opened belly gently falls, almost in portions, onto his side, and lies, still and peaceful, in his pile of guts and blood and straw.

  From granite steps cunningly cut into the black stones ringing the fountain—they hadn’t even noticed the steps before—a figure has risen, holding something small and green and gleaming.

  * * *

  —

  Listen: You are Gordy.

  You stand for a moment, taking it all in.

  There is a man lying unpeacefully on the ground, his unblinking face turned to you.

  I’ve failed you again, old man, you think—haven’t I? At least I finally know you. I can give that much to you, even though you can’t receive it any more. I’m sorry, Daddy. I was given a promise the wicked would perish if they weren’t warned. I did my best to not warn them, but I misunderstood the promise; it was crueler than that. I ran as long as I could. I can’t run anymore. The wave’s coming—can you see it yet? There’s always a final move the losing king must take before the winner can declare his checkmate. A formality, you understand. I see you do—you’ve already fallen onto your side. Time for me to fall onto mine.

  The crowd is full of silent weeping women and men and children. You want to explain to them: It’s not my fault, there was a promise of justice if the wicked weren’t empowered. That’s what I thought, but it’s not that way. There’s only a promise to let the wicked play with all of you, again and again. I’m sorry.

  There are others, men mostly, wearing scarlet, clustered in the area near the cage. They’re holding brooms and mops as if they were guns. Seeing you, they swing them around to cover you—Somebody’s done a switcheroo on you, boys, and you’ve not realized it yet.

  In the corner of the tent, you see two tiny decapitated bodies. A funny thing.

  In the center of the tent, hanging like laundry, you see them: loved ones, hated ones. The one you need is the lowest-hanging fruit. He’s a shambles, a wreck, a chuckling skinless organ bag, a marvel of pain. You’re grateful—At least you made him sing for his supper, Donk. At least you made him suffer.

  There’s no reason to hesitate. Look how large the wave has grown; there can’t be more than a few moments left. You walk the air, rising on invisible steps, until you face him, eye to bloodshot eye. For a moment you daydream one last time about letting it come—the wave and the simple end—but you reject the false promise of oblivion. It wouldn’t be simple, you now know nothing is ever simple. He’s making noises at you, Gooping japes as if he thinks he can talk. His eyes a feast of madness. Beneath this unholy ground is dug his cavern. Hundreds—thousands—of the most cruelly imprisoned beings time and man have yet devised. All at his hand. And this is God’s favored one. So be it.

  It’s is in your hand. Trembling, you thrust it onto Morris’s forehead—Take it, you bastard. Take the full measure. Take it. Let God talk to you for a while and see if you like it. You deal with it now if you can. Run all you want and see where it gets you.

  Divested of power, praying for oblivion, you fall.

  * * *

  —

  Listen: You are Landrude. You’ve been Morris, then Goop-Goop. At last again you are Landrude.

  It’s on your forehead, crawling into your mind. You wanted it. Why did you want it? It’s shredding into you, tearing away false contexts and replacing them with true, destroying your I-Am. It’s all rolling at you, cascading through you, every action you’ve taken wearing this wrong self, every sin you’ve committed crashing into you, memories of what you’ve done.

  Crashing through like waves.

  The wave. It’s still coming.

  A voice speaks, soft and persistent.

  —There’s little time now.

  You know what to do. You have the ability now to do it. It’s so easy, in a way. It doesn’t matter what it will do to you. First, there are smaller remedies you can enact. Most of you hanging together on this line are badly injured. Torn connective tissue in shoulder wrist elbow and knee, distended pelvis; poor Jane’s spine has been badly twisted. All this is easily healed; gently, you reknit them, lowering them back, along with yourself, to the level earth, as you go restoring the parts of yourself the Coyote took: skin, hair, teeth, feet, eyes.

  The fountain stairs await. Racing, you feel the rage of the surging wave growing all the closer. All your work, all your dreams, visions, so close to extinction—but never mind your own concerns—think of all of them, those in the spotlight and those on the margins, real to you at last as they’ve never been—it’s them to whom you are everlastingly accountable. They hang in the balance. You are the most important person in this universe, the key, the linchpin. You know what this means now; it means you don’t matter at all. It’s not fair, you want to say, I didn’t know, I was replaced. I called the wave because he wanted me to—the usurper—don’t you see how he orchestrated it all? He wants the blank canvas to draw on, not me. All my grasping was only a blind seeking, casting about for home. I was both wrong and not wrong.

  But who did, or who knew, or why, or even guilt or innocence, are unimportant. I’m sorry, you might want to say, but your sorrow doesn’t matter. There isn’t time. The wave once called cannot be stopped. The only thing to do is to make yourself large enough to meet it. You throw open the door—using your power restored, you throw open all the doors—and there it is, filling everything, no more beach, nothing else, rushing at speeds unseen since the first velocities. You say it anyway, even though it doesn’t matter—I’m sorry—and then you bring it all into yourself, let it finally crest and crash into you and throughout you. You’ve swallowed the wave, and it’s swallowed you. You’ve contained it, you’re lost in it. You’re caught up in and among it now, it’s filled you up until nothing else is left, you’re swimming in it along with all the other everythings, the infinities of possibilities all enmeshed together with one another, the fullness upon which you have drawn, from which you always did draw, without which you never could have begun, without whom you could never now effect this great and needed convergence, drawing all things into yourse
lf, making all things new.

  Oh, you think. That’s right. Everything old is new again. Everything new is old.

  Oh, you think—that’s right. All of you. Readers, all the way down. You’re all at the center, too. You’ve all been here all along.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  Once, long ago, Daniel Coyote found Bailey Ligneclaire and hid her, just in time, from an approaching monster named Ralph, as Yale flew over the side of the building on the way to meet the earth. Bailey thinks: You saved me that day, Daniel. You and me, the ones from the beginning. You saved me that day, and abandoned me on another. This is the room where we settle up and leave the ledger balanced. We’ll never be what we were, but we can bury the old debts here under the tent, and then when they pack the tent away, they can take the debt with them. You were right, Boyd. I had to run. I had to jump, and trust my luck. Even then I almost didn’t make it.

  It all went out of me at once, Daniel thinks. All power, gone. Now how did that happen, how, how. Bailey is saying something to him but he can’t hear. He’s over-aware of his slack superhero pajamas. He feels foolish; this spandex was meant to cover a much more powerful frame. They sit together, Daniel and Bailey, side by side, somehow not dead. Crawling toward each other, they lie together in their customary strange and intimate posture, forehead-to-forehead, uncertain of the needed reckoning of any future, holding only the moment; clutching each other’s ears, sharing a wordless communion. Still there seems to be someone missing. There are two; there should be three.

  My God, Bailey realizes: I can remember Boyd again.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  From far below, rushing up the underground fountain stairs comes the howling sound of a newly freed multitude. Soon the tent is filled with the exonerated, mingling with the erstwhile circus audience. All around the three rings, many long thought missing are being found. The first to reach the top step is a gray cat dressed in denim and leather, a third wheel looking for his tricycle. He’s got a book under one thin arm, and by the way he’s holding it you can tell he regards it with a certain pride of ownership, as if he wrote it himself under significant pressure, a narrative wrested from literature’s broad sky at great personal risk.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  Rupert Paddington stumbles about the tent, caught betwixt and between; there’s himself and there’s Colonel Karl T. Krane. Who has he been? And, whoever that is, why should he stay? He’s seen at least one of his freaks hopping about without deformity, rubbing his suddenly unblemished forehead and grinning—it’s probably happened with the rest, too. There’s been a universal healing. It would be AX-io-MAT-ic to say the circus has run its course. It’s been such a strange dream, but the time has come to wake…and he knows how. He has a compass’s dumb but unerring sense of a door nearby, which he suspects will lead him home…

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  Gordy lies on the straw, looking up. Not dead after all. Something’s broken his fall, or healed him—No matter. Soon it will all be destroyed, and you can stop thinking about it. There’s so much excitement in the world. Nothing to do with you; you’ve discharged your duty. You can hear all the noise, so many people milling around. It’s all happening, but why bother to look? Suddenly he sees something pierce the striped canvas tent roof, producing a glimpse of the starry night sky. Something large has fallen to earth. The sky, Gordy thinks. I could leave here and look at the sky. That would be nice. He rises and stumbles through the crowd, exiting the tent through the hole torn in the canvas by the fleeing gorilla.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  The last fellow to stumble up the fountain steps has a face they all recognize and fear. They know him as Morris, but is he Morris? He holds an uncertainty in his expression they’ve never seen before, which makes him seem oddly unfamiliar. He holds a tiny ticket of green and sits by himself in one corner of the tent. The rest, unsure of him, keep their distance. Suddenly, for no discernable reason, an enormous safe falls like a meteor from the sky, ripping the tent roof, hitting the ground with a massive thump audible even over the din of the gathered crowd; its impact splatters the lonely familiar

  man in spludding mud, leaving a crater whose diameter began only inches from his feet.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  Of all the prisoners, Finch comes first out of the cage, stepping past the kindly dead man who fell on his side. She’s sad about him, but now there’s something else to which she must attend. The main acrobat is over there, the pretty lady with the beard, the one they call Jane. She’s lifting one leg, then another, flexing her newly re-knit spine in wonder. There, among the milling crowd, they face each other. Once there had been a girl, and a woman, and nobody else in all the world.

  Now Finch reaches out, and with her finger gently brushes her mother’s nose.

  “Mama?” she asks.

  As they watch each other, hardly daring to embrace, the fountain’s never-ending supply of dark water springs out, for the first time, clean and clear, and many people discover things once forgotten are now remembered.

  Oh yes, Juanita Neato thinks. I’ll stay. Yes, I’ll stay.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  You should go to the door, Sandals Julius says. They’re waiting out there, afraid to knock.

  “Who’s out there?” Sister Nettles asks.

  They’ve seen you working to make the barbecue for them.

  “They who, Jules?”

  Go and see.

  Muttering, Sister Nettles rises, crosses the empty floor of the Neon Chapel to the door, which she opens, and she’s astounded by the collection of gathered loonies and gangsters, civilians of Checkertown and denizens of Domino City, the lost and the losing, the helpless and the dangerous and the deadly and the hurt. They’re waiting on the porch and spread across the lawn, captured by the sight of a fingerless lady who still somehow intends to try to work the barbecue tongs. They’ve come, hoping some good work might be set before them, waiting expectantly for her to speak.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, says the man in the powder-blue suit, reading the final page. But I

  * * *

  —

  Three days later, it was more of a stupor than a meltdown Gordy finally pulled himself out of.

  oh

  Come, wave, come, you think. It’s the game of the blank. Let’s have it. Then, following three breaths—deep, fast, preparatory—you look, finally, at the new pages.

  “Oh,” you say. “But I

  You disappear. It’s the damnedest thing. There’s a feeling of falling that’s almost like flying; falling not down but into. The page you’d been holding drifts, seesaw, through the air, coming to rest softly on the floor.

  —Jordan Yunus, Subject to Infinite Change

  BLUE

  Gordy sat in a field. The field lay atop a crest of a high foothill; farther on, behind him, the green mountains reached for the sky. Below, he could see the town of Pigeon Forge, still unaccountabl
y undrowned, untouched by fire from above, unpunished. So, Gordy thought, Morris wins after all—everything you tried, everything you did, everything you risked; it really was all for nothing. There truly will be no final accounting.

  It would be better if you were dead.

  * * *

  —

  After his three-day swoon, he’d found himself in a different field than this one, lower down, beside the circus staging area and the fountain. The circus had been packed away but the fountain remained. The morning dew had grown on the grass and soaked his clothes. Gordy kept still, hidden in the deep grass, trying to once again pass out of knowledge of himself, but catatonia, or even sleep, proved elusive. At last, bored, he’d risen in late morning and made his way through the hip-high grass to the treeline on the horizon, his back to the fountain as it receded and dwindled until distance at last claimed it. The treeline was a narrow strip of spruce, demarcating the field he’d crossed from another identical field beyond. If you follow this treeline, Gordy thought, you’ll find a ridge. Follow the ridge, you’ll reach the mountains eventually. He couldn’t think of a single reason not to do so.