The Revisionaries Read online

  The Revisionaries

  Copyright © Andrew Moxon, 2019

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House printing: December 2019

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 9781612197982

  Ebook ISBN 9781612197999

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946231

  Book design by archiefergusondesign.com, adapted for ebook

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v5.4

  a

  This one is for Ben, who started it with me, and who is why it is as it is.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: THE ISLAND

  Part II: PIGEON FORGE

  Part III: THE REVISIONARIES

  Part IV: SUBJECT TO INFINITE CHANGE

  Acknowledgments

  the top page

  Once again, there have been changes, and not for the better.

  “This is wrong,” you mutter. As you enter, your eyes leap to the usual place, and there they are, waiting.

  Pages of revisions. The stack seems thicker.

  You confirm the worst—a glance is sufficient—then retreat to the sofa. Thirty minutes pass, or perhaps an hour. You light another cigarette and stare at it. You keep perfectly still.

  This is wrong, you think. Again, the vertiginous feeling of being lost in the fog, a lurching halt at the cliff’s edge, toes adangle, perched on one’s heels at the imperceptible cusp of an endless drop—Wrong? Whenever you come back to it, it’s wrong. But this time, it didn’t seem to have been tampered with, not at first…now, weighing the stack with your eyes, you wonder—are these changes yours? How to be sure? In the end, all you have is your own memory.

  Finally, you lean forward. Keeping to habit, you check chronologically, from the bottom up, an inversion of an archeological dig. Peeking at the bottommost page, you wince—that’s wrong—and you flip a hundred pages up, where it’s worse still, carrying terrifying implications.

  When you reach the top page, you take a breath and begin to read.

  PART I – THE ISLAND

  To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths.

  SCOTT MCCLOUD, Understanding Comics

  The act of encountering art is the only art.

  JORDAN YUNUS, Subject to Infinite Change

  FLICKER

  They cut all the loonies loose. They never told us why.

  And if they told any of the loonies why, no loony ever told me. Which wouldn’t be surprising, I guess. Despite all that time cooped up with them, I never spoke to the loonies much and they never spoke to me. I think once you hear my story you’ll acknowledge that I was never really one of them. I was a moth caught in their butterfly net, pinned for a time to the same page, a stammering yammering mess, looking for my lost lad. It was because I joined with Father Julius right away, see, that I didn’t come to traffic with them on the outside. He was the first person I met on the outside, Julius—a happy accident. Otherwise, I might have run with the loonies just for want of options, and then wound up in the same boat as them later.

  Then again, look at the boat we’re in now.

  I expect the loonies were as confused as I was to get tossed out. I gathered the story later, on the outside. It was in all the papers. Politics. Some lady named Fritz with more clout than sense. At the time, I didn’t care about any of it. All I knew was I was outdoors, looking for a roof over my head and a willing ear—that’s how it was when I lucked into Father Julius.

  * * *

  —

  “Loony Island” isn’t a true island; civic planning composes its borders, not water. Still, as Father Julius sees it, it’s earned the name. A forgotten wedge of a neighborhood, both hidden from the city and hidden by the city: long ago a secluded hill-perched purlieu of the rich overlooking the very center of the city and the interstate highway, now a forgotten place seemingly engineered for quarantine, cut off to the east by a steep bank leading down to the muddy Loony River, and embraced all around by a hard-to-negotiate concrete park of abandoned factories, and by the less permeable element of social indifference. At the north end, a public transport trestle runs (without stopping) west to east until it rolls over the Loony, a wide and turbid river carrying sticks and mud and alleged industrial waste south. At the “island’s” southern point, the river runs beneath an interstate highway, making an acute angle. From this confluence, the highway carries cars (but never any cars from Loony Island, which is afforded no on-ramp) away to the southeast, or up north and west until it dips and runs beneath the transport trestle, completing a triangle—river and highway and trestle—from whose borders most of its denizens rarely if ever depart. Seen from the air by passengers on their way to somewhere else, its shape might briefly suggest an abandoned slice of hastily cut pizza—a slice partitioned into quadrants by two main roads, Apse St. and Transept Ave., and surrounded by a gray donut of shuttered factories. Cross-like, Apse and Transept intersect nearly exactly in the neighborhood’s maudlin middle, escaping it through narrow gaps running beneath highway and rail—though not to the east; in Loony Island, no road reaching the river receives tunnel or bridge. If you have a car, making your way north or west is easy enough at first, but you’ll find that these ways lead only into the rotted industrial ring, tailing off into lots that haven’t seen a truck in years, designed to accommodate warehouse docks that haven’t seen inventory for just as long. Transept’s southbound course carries you out of the neighborhood—it’s the only one that does—but you have to patiently follow a road that needlessly wends switchback down a hill of moderate grade before passing out of the factory district and finally—finally!—to a main thoroughfare connected to the rest of the city. If you don’t have a car, you’ve got to hoof it for the bus stops (no buses’ routes go out of their way for the Island), risking encounters with the bad sorts who lurk in narrow places and the dark parts of shuttered buildings, or who wait around curves—and the skeptical eyes, and the confident hands and elbows and knees, of bluebirds in their squad cars.

  Most here don’t have a car. Most stay put.

  And, it must be admitted, some stay put not because of lack of transport, but because they aren’t given any legal choice. Take, for example, the inmates of JAWPI—the Joan A. Wales Psychiatric Institute—“The Wales”—bones of steel, flesh of concrete, skin of brick, clothed in industrial green paint. A hulking rectilinear cracker box, it hugs Transept Ave. for unbroken city blocks in the southeast quadrant, some blocks south of the main intersection. The Wales is the most prominent building in Loony Island, and its presence might lead ruminative souls to question—is the placement of a loony bin here a sly joke by some waggish urban engineer? Was the neighborhood bequeathed its name because of its inmates, or did it gain inmates because of the nearby Loony River?

  The majority of Loony Island’s population lives in Domino City, six neglected high-rise urban housing complexes standing at surly attention west of the Wales on the other side of Transept. Identical gray concrete slabs filling most of the southwest quadrant, visible for uncomfortable minutes to commuters in cars gliding past on the highway. In Domino City, every building has a name and a gang, and each gang its own specialty and jurisdiction. They all used
to war for dominance over one another, but that was years ago, before Ralph Mayor took control. Ralph’s General & Specific is his store; a monopoly made inevitable by isolation. Ralph’s is smaller than the Dominos but no less important to the criminal ecosystem, and you’ll find it situated right at the central intersection. Ralph’s got the goods, and Ralph’s got the organization, and Ralph has managed to put the fear of Ralph into the heart of every other roughneck, so Ralph’s is where business—any business—gets done.

  Everything north of Apse is nothing but Checkertown: a tessellated patchwork grid of streets whose parcels hold century-old houses gone to sag and ruin or over-ambitious partition into apartments by absentee landlords, or burned-out vacant lots, or the occasional liquor store—and also Father Julius’s Neon Chapel. The Neon, a large two-story building, its construction of a more recent vintage than that of its neighbors, is located on the north end of Checkertown, up near the rail. Leave the Neon and cross Transept, and you can bowl at Barney’s Suds & Lanes, if you care to bowl. Few do, but there are still a few working stiffs who’ll groove a ball or two down those flaking aisles—they mostly come up from Slanty’s Cannery after shifts let off. Slanty’s, the only factory inexplicably still open, operates in the southern tip of the “slice,” hard by the river.

  It’s a lot to ponder, if you’re the sort to ponder.

  Father Julius, running in early morning light, passing from one errand to another, cresting the southern Transept switchback at a formidable pace, squinting as morning sun peeks out between buildings on his right, subconsciously avoiding open manholes and uneven sidewalks, can’t help but ponder: What, exactly, are the implications of all this architecture? Settled into a haze of comfortable exertion, he considers a pet theory: the neighborhood as an assembly line, with insanity the product. It’s not so hard to imagine. These brutalist buildings were built for efficiency and utility, after all, much like any factory system. He’s seen too many in the neighborhood lose hope living in the gray slabs of Domino City, get initiated into the gangs—either as member or as customer or as product—and matriculate from there to the Wales or to prison, or from one to the other. Close your eyes, you can see it: the young, sluiced down the chute, sprayed with disinfecting insanity, and then, with factory precision, canned and packed and stacked away, first made systemically unsightly, then warehoused out of sight. Incarceration not an indicator of some breakdown in the system, you understand, but a function of the system working precisely toward intended purposes.

  There’s a lone gangster sitting on the sidewalk, abandoned by his fellows after a night drinking, bleary-eyed, carefully breathing himself sober. Miserable business, to be sure, but even in his headspun misery he turns his head to watch Julius chug by—impossible not to mark a figure like Julius, his beard a magnificent tangle edging without border into the unkempt jungle atop his scalp, the whole thicket framing the smiling white half-moon of his teeth and the brown twinkle of his eyes, his only garments the denim robe shielding his barrel of a body and the dirty sneakers anointing his boatlike feet—he’s buff, vital, a creature swimming in the present, holding reliably to his routine.

  The routine. It’s the same every day. Father Julius has his errands and he runs from one to the next. If you’re the type to rise early, you can watch for him. He’s coming from the first errand—the secret one, the off-Island one. If anyone knows where it takes place, or what business is transacted there, they aren’t talking, and neither is he. Now he’s heading to the Wales, where he’ll minister to the mentally ill—an attempt to fulfill the patients’ innate need for non-clinical interaction. He reads whatever they request, which, when he’s lucky, means romance or spy or mystery novels from the Wales’ modest library, but which in practice almost always means reading the requesting patient’s manifesto. “Recognize the gods offered Magilla the Gorilla for a reason,” Julius might find himself proclaiming in his gravel truck of a voice, the patient listening enraptured by the novelty of hearing their own words marbling the mouth of another. “She freely admitted there were multiples, just as there are multiples of your favorite baseball heroes. Apes in particular may be Planet Earth’s ‘acceptable losses.’ The Magilla model suggests you are many branches from enlightenment.”

  And so forth. Julius hopes for mystery novels.

  He’s running alongside the Wales now, coming up on it from the rear. As he rounds the corner, he pulls up startled, his way suddenly blocked by a fellow standing, skinny arms pointed to the sky, legs planted wide, taking up ample sidewalk. Julius avoids collision only through an admirable display of reflexes. They both scream shortly, once. Thus introduced, the two of them stare at each other, breathing heavily. Julius—nearly late for his appointed time at the Wales—is trying to manage a polite way around this blockade when the man, who’s clearly working himself up to something, at last manages to speak.

  “I’m!” he proclaims, emphatically.

  “You’re…?”

  “I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m…”

  Julius, who’s now expecting to have to negotiate a panhandle, finds himself unsure if he’s dealing with a stutter or some kind of crazy. The longer this recursion continues, the more it strikes his ears not as a word, but as something without meaning, the purposeless squawking of a giant flightless bird.

  “I’m not ever going bah bah back to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee,” he declares at last.

  “That’s all right with me,” Julius says, keeping wary. It’s a strange way for a panhandle to begin. This fellow is a skeletal jitterbug, large glasses askew on an angular face that hasn’t seen a razor in days, and he looks frightened enough to be unpredictable, but there’s also something categorically familiar about him…

  “You don’t have enough money to pay me to go back there, no captain, no sir.” He salutes, bathrobe sleeve flapping, and Julius makes the connection. Of course—the bathrobe. White terrycloth tainted by the dinge of a thousand rides through an industrial laundry, pinstriped with pastels, the bathrobe is the standard-issue uniform of a resident of the Wales: a mental patient. A “loony,” as they say on the street. It’s the context that’s thrown Julius—Why are you meeting a loony outside the Wales? On the heels of the question comes the probable answer: the Fritz Act. That’s today?

  The Fritz Act—so named for its sponsor, Regina Fritz, the district’s representative, a one-time lobbyist and all-time socially connected mover and/or shaker, possessed of an iron will and given to what her critics call “butterfly philanthropy”—land quickly, drink shallowly, flit away. Fritz recently abandoned her previous bugbear (childhood obesity) to focus her considerable energies and resources wholly upon her new conviction: the notion that the mentally ill would be much better off roaming free—this after attending a screening of a recent popular film in which a cadre of escaped mental patients, therapist in tow, circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon. FREE BODIES, HEALTHY MINDS read the movement’s T-shirts and bumper stickers; still initially Fritz found her fuss came to a fizzle, for while folks can be compelled to feel temporary sympathy for the incarcerated, it’s a back-of-the-milk-carton concern, barely felt, easily expunged, evaporated by the third bite of cereal. People, it seems, generally view imprisonment as proof that the imprisoned deserve imprisonment. Fritz, frustrated, fulminated, but finally flip-flopped. Discreetly coached by political adjuncts, she tacked hard to starboard, making a successful appeal to pocketbooks, pulling the spotlight onto the scandalous burden placed upon the taxpaying public for unprofitable lunatic upkeep, millions (a metric she frequently pronounced with a distinct leading “b”) in funds drawn from hardworking citizens—and for what? Do they ever get better? (This question was asked with enough rhetorical scorn that none ever thought to investigate the answer.) This time, the public outcry proved massive and enduring. As Father Julius learned, the cause of misappropriated funds proved trenchant enough to capture even the imaginations of apolitical beasts such as his criminal bu
ddy, Daniel “Donk” Donkmien, who only yesterday snorted: “Fritz has it right, dipshit. My taxes should go where I choose, not to housing a bunch of potted plants scared of reality,” et cetera. As if Donk had ever in his life paid taxes. Julius, wishing he’d thought to say this at the time, files it away for later use.

  But now here’s one of them, a freed loony, the first fruits of an idea so bad they just had to try it—and a talkative banana he is, too. He’s starting in again.

  “Na…na…na…na…”

  Julius waits, fighting the urge to make impatient motions with his hands.

  “Now I’m ow out they’ll be on my tail again, no way they won’t be. I know them. They’ve taken so much from me. They even took my boy. They’ll pack me up in their boxes and never let me out, not ever.”

  “Sounds bad,” Julius says, deliberately noncommittal.

  “It’s worse than bad,” the loony insists. He clutches at Julius’s sleeve, and the priest sees as the robe opens a dirty T-shirt underneath, a sticker attached to the right breast: HELLO, MY NAME IS, with Sterling scrawled beneath. “It’s nigh unbearable. They took my boy and now he’s run off and I know not where. After putting us in those boxes, I don’t blame him for running. The thing you wouldn’t guess about those boxes is the terrible lie light…”

  Oh dear. This is something worse than a panhandler’s needlessly complex hustle, for those at least build to some sort of termination point: the ask. No, this is the cousin to the panhandler pitch: the endless harangue, a self-fueled nightmare of pretzel logic whose only point is itself. A longtime city dweller, Julius has learned to recognize and move past this sort of thing instinctively, but this morning, startled by circumstance, his usual instincts ebbing after miles of exertion, he’s made the fatal error of listening, and now he’s trapped by social contract and his own well-honed posture of personal responsibility toward the lost.