The Revisionaries

  Tennessee, obedient as ever, trotted off.

  Then you popped back to the author’s side, and there they were waiting. The donut stack. Revisions.

  And yes, once again, there had been changes. But not for the better.

  Nothing in the physical realm will ever be as real as its imagined counterpart, for imagination is the realm of the ideal form. Not because imaginary things are singular and immutable, but rather because they are endlessly variable. The ideal form is not one thing; it is many.

  —Unknown

  SANDALS

  Julius stands in his empty cell, holding Gordy’s note and staring at the ticket on his table, deep in thought. The ticket isn’t God, is what you need to keep telling yourself. Remember that if nothing else. It isn’t God and it doesn’t lead there, either. No pathway to the divine. It’s another yellow door at the bottom of another set of stairs. Or it is a pathway to God, but God is no longer to be trusted. As a boy you stood at the top of the basement stairway, reading and unreading and reading again a note in your father’s meticulous handwriting, balling it into your fist flattening it out again to read it once more, wondering what awaited you down there in your father’s laboratory at the bottom of those steps cold and granite and wide leading down to that brightly painted yellow door. And why would steps in a modern domicile be granite? Were the steps granite? It’s how you remember them. When in Landrude’s creation of you did he add those details—door of yellow, granite stairs? Are they the most recent additions, or were they the first things? Were they the first things? Were you in the beginning nothing but a boy atop steps leading to a door, a fiddlestick of creative lint imbued by your creator with enough static charge to accrue other details? Or did the boy come later? The values and beliefs and memories most important to you, the things you’d list to define what makes you into yourself, did he add them as an afterthought? You didn’t want the ticket safe from Morris because you seek God. You seek God because Landrude wanted the ticket safe. And there it is, the ticket itself, left behind specifically for you. You have only to take it. It’s no pathway to God (unless it is) but it’s some sort of answer.

  Don’t take it. Leave it there.*1

  What a joke—acting as if you have a choice. You’ll take it if he decides to make you take it, but maybe he’ll let you choose which hand picks it up. You need to decide quickly. The brothers and sisters will be here soon, and they’ll want to talk before you go.

  No. Decide later. First do what you came here to do.

  Julius leaves his room, moves from cell to cell, bathed in glow of neon and beer sign and pinball machine. A glow of late-fading evening light scatters across the floor from the west windows. From his battered satchel he draws sealed envelopes and places one on each bed; his final divestment, hastily drawn up and notarized by Dave Waverly, witnessed by Nettles. He stops, head down, and then with a disgusted grunt turns, gathers the envelopes again. Sits on his bed and rests his hairy head in his hands.

  —Fool. Continuing with your plan. You’re not leaving with Gordy anymore; he’s gone already. You need to make a new plan. He wasn’t captured, there’s a note. Which could have been forged. But the ticket—nobody who would take him would leave it behind. Once there was a boy who would run from his house into the city each morning to watch the sunrise, running, running, growing powerful legs, huge lungs, and an incidental but useful desire for the divine. It was all for that chase in the tunnel, and only for that. Landrude gave you the physical means to run Morris down, and while doing so stumbled into a motive. He provided you with something you’d want to chase, then burnished it for maximum enticement. You weren’t chasing for Gordy; you were after bigger answers. Did Bernadette die in smoke and fire to increase your yearning? Or was she not even there at first? Was she, like you, added after the fact, inserted as a contrived magnification to your fictional motivations? Imagine it, all this time you made yourself a fraud, posing as a priest. On some level you must have known you’re a pretender, a recent insert into another’s story. Not in the matter of vocation but in the matter of your very existence. Once upon a time there was a boy who ran into the city each day to see the sunrise, but more recently than that, there never was a boy and never had been. Window and sun and sunrise, the priest and the boy and the vagabond, years and years ago, and only yesterday, and never. Focus. Focus. Gordy isn’t captured. He’s out there, wandering. The note says he’s going to find the bearded lady Jane, right the wrongs he’s brought into the world. The note says his confession is there in Father Ex, all the information you’ll need. And what do you do? Stay? Follow him? In what direction? North? West? Färland? Into some other fiction?

  And what do you do with the ticket? Do you pick it up? Leave it? It’s too dangerous to leave, too dangerous to take. He gave it to me but I really don’t want it. I want it more than anything.*2 After the sunrise each morning Bernadette would take us to breakfast around the corner, you and Wavy Dave, the vagabond, a man of filth and rags running from something nameless and unspeakable, his pores suffused with filth. Over eggs and ketchup one morning, she explained to us the meaning of the Sin of Moses. The prophet commanded to speak to the rock and thus bring forth water, but instead he disobeyed, broke the letter of the law, opted instead to strike it with his staff. The miracle still transpired, but old Moses found himself dinged with divine demerits, cursed, punished for his insubordination, forced at the end of his obedient life to stand outside looking in, slowly dying while his people lurched into their Promised Land, pots on their heads and swords in their hands. It seemed like nonsense then and it still seems like nonsense. A technicality, a game of “Simon Says.” Each time previously, whenever poor Moses had been told to do the God-magic, he’d been told to use his magic God-staff; it strikes you as unfair to gig him for succumbing to habit. Moses above all must have been a tactile man, said Bernadette—just like you, Jules. And even more, it had worked! The water had come! One way or another, the water still came busting forth from the stone, the long thirst of his people still quenched. You wanted to argue the point with God, but he was absent, so you argued with Bernadette. Now look. Here, on the table, lies your chance to face off with the deity and demand explanation for his rough desert justice, the desertion of his prophet, of poor Moses, the only man who would speak to him back in the early days when he was nothing but a bush on fire.

  Oh yes, by all means seek answers. Because the last time you sought answers, it worked so well, didn’t it? A note on the table from your father, then, wavering for hours at the top of the steps, then creeping down them for the first time in years. You could see as you descended farther into the gloom the yellow paint hanging from the door in tatters. Drawn slowly downward, as if pulled beyond any will of your own you went, brought to remembrance of the guillotine, compelled to prevent rash and suicidal action if possible, but beyond that motivated by a compulsion only to see, to bear witness to your father’s folly if nothing else could be done. In your mind your father was both things—still alive and already dead. The old conundrum posed by that smart cat Schrödinger, Schrödinger and his half-alive (or was it half-dead?) little bunny rabbit, huddled unobserved in his lockbox, Schrödinger was a sharp one, sharp blade, hot flame, the forehead aquiline, never trust those goddam rabbits, oh Jesus, please help. Focus. Bernadette’s occasional refrain over the years, someday you’ll need to reckon with your father, you’ll decide or he will, but someday you will have to reckon with him. And she was right. Right about you, about your father, about what Dave Waverly could become if he were given the opportunity. Unquestionably wrong about the structural integrity of a collapsed flaming wall, wrong on the question “Will I burn?” Wrong about that last decision. So seldom are last decisions good ones. Once upon a time there was a boy who ran. But before he was a boy, he was a man. The boy got added in later, maybe, and what does it matter, anyway? Time digs a tunnel backward and forward. You’d see it yourself, were the tunnel wide enough t
o allow you a backward glance, but you’re constrained in a three-dimensional rabbit-hutch, face held at all times mercilessly forward. This was Landrude’s lesson, yes, one of many, along with: “You don’t matter,” and “None of it matters,” and “Maybe in another moment you won’t exist and never will have.” Here on the table before you lies the power that can (if the stories about it are true) free you from all such constraint. Just the ticket. It’s there, wrapped up in two dimensions, ink and paper. You’ve done it to me, Gordy. You’ve caught me. They’ll chase you, but you’ve left it to me. A wiser man than I would use it to find you, Gordy-Gord, drag you back to your duty. But I won’t do that, no, not me. The best thing Gordy ever did was to use it sparingly, almost never. Never would have been better than almost never.*3 There’s enough cooks stirring this soup, enough fools eager to make decisions, to try to name things into the shapes they deem proper. Enough. Focus. The thing to do is to decide what the thing to do is.

  Julius takes Gordy’s letter and places it in an empty steel wastebasket. With a wooden match he lights it—They’ll be looking for you, buddy. I reckon if you’re off to do what you say you are, you’ll find them before they find you, but let’s not make it any easier for them. Whatever I decide to do, there doesn’t need to be any evidence of where you’ve gone or why.

  Here’s a thought: You could keep it, unused. Your safe-deposit box is only a train ride away. Yes. Row after row of tiny silver steel shelves, how apropos. Or you could stash it after you’d used it, only one time, you could use it to demand of God…

  No. The ticket isn’t God. There’s no hope of that. No path.

  But dammit it’s a path to something. Give me the answers, you omniscient bastard you, you won’t fool me. I’m expert at seeing the laboratories of madmen for what they are. Your father was insane, you knew it, you told yourself that with each step down. The man is insane, loony, nutso; whatever he does or did or will do, there’s no stopping it, no reasoning with it. It isn’t your fault. What could you do?*4

  But what did you do? is what Father Bernadette’s voice is always insisting, and you wanted to hurry but you couldn’t. Remember? Each step weighed with the burden of your years-long grudge, each step gravid with the knowledge that it is too late, that there is no help, that the deed is done, consummated for the worst, each step propelled by the knowledge that you might yet save him, if you hurry. Wavering between competing disbeliefs.

  Once there was a boy who breathed. The boy breathed. He breathed in and then out and then he breathed quite deeply indeed and then all at once, as if on a dare, he opened the door wide and in that moment, in the room’s center, he saw his father’s head affixed directly into the guillotine’s padded opening, fitted perfectly, to the micron, after years of calculation, to the exacting angle required to remove his hated aquiline protrusion and nothing else besides, and his hand white-gloved holding the rope, the release of which was to have been the office of the son, his hand shaking with the strain, poised in the moment immediately before the deed, before the dropping of it, before accepting the weight of it, the acetylene torch nearby to crackle-sizzle cauterize, you can see all at once: You have not come too late, but almost too late, so close, and you can tell from the shaking he’s been standing there a long time, accumulating his will, the self-discipline to accept the blow, and that he can’t hold on too much longer. Hand, rope, father, forehead, son, torch, and gleaming heavy blade all refracted again and again and again into an illusion of infinity by the mirrors covering the laboratory walls—but infinity itself is an illusion of infinity. Mirrors reflect space, but they don’t reflect time, they don’t reflect possibility. What possibility? A possibility in which his father’s arm was not shaking, or in which his father’s brain’s chemistry had not behaved like a bad drunk, vomiting madness into itself. A possibility in which the boy had been more decisive, less begrudging, more imaginative, and had arrived sooner. You could have chosen any of those for me, you bastard Landrude. You’re listening or reading along even if God isn’t and what’s the difference anyway? You could have chosen them for me if they all exist, but that wouldn’t have assisted you in the work you needed me to do. That wouldn’t have made me into the shape you needed. Did you orchestrate this? Is that why this ticket is here, because you want me to have it? If not, how else and by whom? What am I meant to become, if not your guillotine slicing off unruly and unwanted portions from your story for you? Fix everything broken? That would be my intent. The cathedral unburnt, Bernadette alive, loonies healed of the chemical morass contorting their perceptions, prisoners in Pigeon Forge (and elsewhere? certainly elsewhere by now) by the hundreds or thousands restored, never interred, never damaged. That’s what you expect of me. Hope of me. And then what? Do you imagine I’m foolish enough to believe that would be the end of it? To believe I’d find no more pain to solve? No, after that the temptation would be too much; I’d break into time’s pocket-watch and start meddling with the gears. As if I could fix anything. What have I ever done that didn’t turn to muddle? What goodness has happened around me that hasn’t been a pure accident, falling ass-backward for a few minutes into pockets of grace? It all depends on absolute stillness, your father said—perhaps he was right about that. A different game, one of total surrender. Only when you, unresisting, let the wind carry you, only when you take no notice where it will place you, can you fly. Once there was a man who dared believe he could take all the pain and brokenness and madness and wrongness and filth, take it all into himself and pass it through himself and in so doing distill it into something more purposeful, ordered, sensible, a purer potion, but the truth you’ve learned, you poor dumb old fart, is that all you can hope to do is let it pass through you, like light through a window, a joining with reality’s muddle, with effects you’ll never see, a beautiful hopeful mess and a foolish squander, to do that and nothing else, and then to let that be enough. Once there was a man who dared believe, but years earlier, the boy had been a man, and an author decided to create the boy that made sense of the man. Yes, it all depends on absolute stillness. But the rope, which is frictionless, absolutely frictionless, which is not even connected to the guillotine’s body because even the slightest tiny movement at the crucial moment will…that’s why I need you to hold the rope, and once upon a time there was a boy who breathed and then breathed and then breathed deeply like a diver preparing to grasp pearls and then opened the door and No no no nonononohnonono thousands of copies of the boy Julius lunge forward in endless reflection, but too late, too late, the hand of the father has already lost its grip, the head of the father already shifted to view this newcomer to see his last sight, the long-awaited son and the blade is hot and sharp and it is very heavy as it glides down without hitch or hangnail ponderously but falling so fast and the rich arterial blood jettisons, and before the boy has even entered the room the old man’s face, sliced clean and entire, has splucked onto the flagstones while the body falls backward, heavily, thunt, and does the boy see (before he retreats), there, in the corners of the mirrors, within the periphery, reflected here and there and everywhere, does he, or does he not, see the large white rabbits huddled, smiling two-toothed smiles, staring with devouring pink eyes?

  Oh, yes. He is sure he does.

  It all depends on absolute stillness. To hold it but do nothing with it. To hell with you, you bastard. I’ll take it, but I’m not playing your game. I’ll choose a different one.

  Swiftly, without further thought, Julius takes hold of the ticket. He stands wearing a faraway look, and then he is no longer there, nor is the ticket, nor is the ticket, nor is the ticket, no nor is the ticket the ticket ticket ticket.

  If anyone had been there to see it, they’d have seen the priest standing holding something small and paper, shiny and green, and then the priest would have vanished, and in the place the ticket had been, hanging for only a fraction of an instant, an equal quantity of water, no more than a tablespoon’s worth, which, obedient to gr
avity, fell, very briefly dampening the floor between a pair of blond leather sandals, one pair among nine exactly like it; ten pairs of sandals, lined in a row. The water seeps through cracks and fissures and, after a brief passage of time, evaporates. The sandals remain. The sandals are not happy, nor are they sad. It goes beyond that. The sandals rest in the wholeness of a form both chosen by him and chosen for him. They are Julius and they are not. So much more has been transmuted; the alchemy goes so deep, much deeper then flesh and bone to leather and Velcro and rubber. There is peace now and completeness, a sense, not of selecting, but of continually being selected. He keeps thinking to move his arms, but he cannot. This makes him want to giggle. What do you call a priest with no arms and no legs lying on the floor? His thoughts drift as he waits for the next thing to happen. Bailey…I saw you. Before I went, I saw. I hope I gave you what you need. And Boyd…oh yes. I saw you, Boyd, and I saw where you are; saw what you’d written; I adjusted Father Ex for your position. Not just a receiver anymore but a transmitter. Adding sixth-dimensional laser printers to a confessional is the simplest thing when you can see all the threads. And Gordy…I saw you, too. I saw you everywhere you are. You’ll have to return to yourself now, you’ll have no choice now that I took the ticket off the table. I did what Landrude wanted and swallowed that ticket right out of the world…not that he’ll like the way I did it, in the end. No, I don’t think he’ll like it at all…You poor bastard, Landrude. Ah yes, Landrude. I see you now.*5 Do you have even less of an idea than the rest of us? I think so. And you weren’t expecting this one, were you? For a moment I moved through all possibility, and I bet you weren’t expecting me to choose this doughnut. Sandals, of all things. Nothing can stay the same now. All those competing narratives, the one below from Boyd and the one above the one Landrude knows about, the one he’s in now and even all the ones he hasn’t guessed; all will inevitably split then inevitably converge into something new. You did say you wanted something unexpectable, Landrude. Sandals. To see your face…You think I’d change back if I could. You’ll spend the rest of your life chasing my tail if only I had a tail still to chase. You don’t realize, I can change back any time I choose. I am as I always was. Once there was a very young boy who watched with amazement the pictures in silhouette, at the lady who turned into the crone, at the crone who turned back into the lady, at the vase that became the face that became the vase that became the face. All done without movement, without changing. Crone and lady and face and vase. Again, and back again. Both and neither. Have you always been sandals? Are you even still a priest? Were you ever a priest? Are you even now ten pairs of sandals? Yes and yes and yes and yes. No and no, no and no. It had not been a new voice you’d heard, when you took hold of it. No, and it had not been old, either. Bernadette tried to explain it to you. It’s more complete than ever it was before, but still no clearer. Such a beautiful confusion to rest in, such confusing beauty. You had it all along. The doubt was the faith, and the faith was the doubt. You wouldn’t extract the one from the other even if you could. That was the temptation the ticket set to you—yes, and to Gordy, too. You would worry about Gordy but worry is gone. Gordy will be all right, or if not, Gordy will be Gordy, and if that will not be enough, it will, at least, be.