The Revisionaries Page 2

  “…after that, he just kept on digging to who-knows-where, and here I was left to fend. A veritable stray stranger in a strange land, and friend, let me tell you, this land is strange as they come…”

  Looking past this unwelcome interloper, hopeful for some excuse for extraction, Julius notices emerging onto the block another, then yet another loony, stumbling into sight from around the far end of the Wales, and now it’s a platoon of them, wandering, unhurried and uncertain—How many are there?—and meanwhile Sterling’s still going.

  “…that’s why you’ve got to help me, friend. It’s bad trouble coming. Those that snatched me are rye right behind me. I saw them. They’re the same as snatched us in the fur first place!”

  Julius considers him, unsure if the idea that’s forming is expedience or altruism.

  “Just I need a play place to stay is all I need. Just a place to duck into and lay low in until the heat passes by.”

  “Listen,” Julius announces, and some quality in his voice—kind authority, perhaps—shuts the guy up. He points one big paw to the main intersection. “Make a right at the corner there and hold steady. You’ll have to go about a dozen blocks, but eventually you’ll find my chapel. You’re welcome there.”

  “How will I know it?”

  “It’s covered in neon. You won’t miss it.”

  “Is it open?”

  “Never closed.”

  “I’ll tell them you sent me.”

  “They’ll take you whether you tell them that or not,” Julius says, hoping not to have to accept this rather dubious credit. The brothers and sisters are good folk, and can be depended upon to do what’s right, but they might not want to hear hours of whatever this guy has cooking. God, what if more of these loonies need a place? What if they all do? Down the street he can see maybe two dozen of them already. In the newspapers and on the TV news, the Fritz Act’s sponsors seemed certain that the patients would return safely back to their beds at night of their own accord. The assumption had struck Julius as sensible enough when he read it in black and white, but now, confronted with the reality, it seems heedlessly optimistic. “If you hurry, you can probably get some breakfast,” Julius suggests, and that does the trick; the skitterbug skates, his bathrobe flapping in the breeze like a misrigged sail, stumbling not once, not twice, but thrice, over jutting slabs of sidewalk. Fellow must be hungry, thinks Julius, breaking once again into his customary trot. As he rounds the corner so he can see the Wales’ bank of front doors, what he sees pulls him up short yet again.

  The Wales is leaking. It’s leaking loonies.

  Hundreds of them, and more still pouring out. It’s a sluggish flow; more lava than liquid. This can’t be what Fritz intended, can it? It’s going to be a disaster. These loonies have no mission, no guide, no immediate purpose beyond the wide world itself. Presented with a million possibilities of un-regimented time and space, all with hints of unspoken rules and lacks of boundaries, they fold their hands, cluster together on street corners nearby, unnerved, huddled in the glow of their amalgamated imbalances, their bloodstreams packed with sedation, staring at their fingers and muttering to themselves. Look at them. JAWPI mostly handles longtime commitments, people who really need an institution’s oversight, not short-termers. They’re barely out and already they look as if they’re counting the minutes until at last it’s time to return. Their eyes are too open, too observant. Many look frightened. All appear directionless. Some sway, some rock, some harangue. Some amble to the nearest upright object and then clutch it or lean against it like a daytime drunk, like someone afraid of being pulled up into the sky. If we weren’t Loony Island before, Julius thinks, we certainly are now. Who knew there were this many? Those that wanted a reader must have been the smallest percentage…it’s a human ocean. The whole street’s nothing but toothpaste pastel stripes on a terrycloth sea—but no, wait, not quite nothing. Scattered through the crowd, here comes something strange: a group walking with easy grace and quiet confidence. They’re dressed in bright red tight-fitting clothing, foot to face, which makes them resemble monks or ninja. They carry two swords in sheaths on their backs. Some of them have one drawn—a blade of…wood, it seems—and for reasons unknown they swing their bokken as they walk, slippered feet precise as dancers’, moving between the loons like farmers reaping invisible wheat, while others of them methodically corral the patients into small herds, inspect the face of each, then, apparently satisfied, release them. Father Julius decides to worry about them later—he’s got a job reading to…glancing at the masses all around…to who exactly? Who’s left?

  “Fine, goddammit,” Julius growls to nobody in particular, pushing his way toward the door against the outbound flow. “If there’s even one person left in there, that’s who I’m reading to, and if there’s nobody, then I’ll talk to the air.”

  Which is, he realizes later, pretty much what wound up happening.

  Julius finds himself in the nearly deserted common room, a day-space almost passive-aggressive in its blandness. The long room is filled with an oppressive fluorescent light that refracts the tapioca sameness of the room back onto itself. On one end stands an orderlies’ station and two heavy locked doors. One door leads to the bedrooms, the other outside to the visitor’s lobby—though visitors have always been rare; a patient who still has potential visitors most likely wouldn’t have been left here in the first place. At the far end, two shallow alcoves wing out, each containing a low wooden table and a pair of empty chairs. Nobody wants reading. Nobody wants anything. Nobody’s here. They’re out there. At a loss for what else to do, Julius leans against the counter of the orderlies’ station, trying to start a chat with its only remaining inhabitant, though he’s only half-successful; this orderly’s attention is for her screen.

  “Hell of a day.”

  “Day of hell. They didn’t even do it the way they said they was doing it; they just did it.”

  “They…?”

  “Management. They spent weeks training us. This whole routine. Five phases of release. Then we come to the day of the thing, and boom—first thing in the morning, they just throw the doors wide open. Right at shift change. Everybody out. No phases, no sense, and no patients.”

  Julius thinks of the languishing loons pooling all over the streets, uncertain and vulnerable. He’s got an even stronger premonition now that something about the whole business is wrong. “Maybe we can get them back inside. I’ll help. Where are the other orderlies?”

  She gives him a mordant look. “Gone. They can read the writing on the wall. Loony bin with no loonies is a loony bin with no workers, either.” She rubs her temples, staring out to the alcoves at the end of the room. Julius, naturally empathic, joins her gaze out into emptiness. In that moment, in one of the chairs in one of the alcoves, Julius sees something—a blink, like an apparition. A flicker.

  “What the hell was that?” Julius demands.

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “No? Watch. Watch right there.”

  The orderly follows the line of his finger, pointed at nothing at all. Sure enough, it blinks back. No—Julius can see it’s not something. It’s someone. A guy. He’s flickering like a failing bulb. Huddled in his seat.

  One knee hugged to his chest.

  There. Gone.

  Julius approaches the alcove slowly, as one might a deer in the woods. The man flickers in again and Julius shouts, points, looks back to the orderly, who only shrugs.

  “You don’t see that?”

  “I see a chair. I see a wall.”

  Julius looks. The man is clearly visible now, right there. He’s young, wide-eyed, his face hollow, his wrists thin. A skinny neck pokes from his misbuttoned light-blue pajamas. His thick short hair, unwashed, launches at odd angles from his head, as if attempting escape. “You really don’t see that guy? Sitting right—” but no, dammit! he’s disappeared again. She regards
him warily, like he might be one of her chickens who’s yet to fly the coop.

  “You…seeing things over there?” she asks.

  “I did. He’s not there now.” Knowing how it sounds. He waits, but the man doesn’t return. In the place he’d been sitting, Julius canvasses, waving his arms and finding nothing at all.

  “You know what?” the orderly says. “I’ve had enough of this Fritz bullshit today to deal with your bullshit. You go ahead and have fun. I’m getting off this ‘Island’ for good. Maybe I’ll go downtown, to the library, where at least they make the crazy people stay quiet.”

  “No, wait! He might come back!”

  But she’s out the door.

  Even more cautiously, the priest takes the seat opposite the one occupied by the flickering man, and waits. You’re not crazy, Julius tells himself, and you’re not seeing things. Wait for him to come back and then you’ll know for sure. One appearance could be nothing but something caught in your eye, maybe an odd refraction of light. The second could be nothing more than some sort of trick you unwittingly played on yourself; your mind furnishing you with an established expectation of the original illusion. A third time, up close, with your mind settled, will serve to prove it.

  Only…prove it to whom, Julius? Yourself? You just failed the corroboration game, and you failed it cold. The orderly—she was looking right where you were pointing and saw nothing—isn’t that your proof? If he shows up again, isn’t that actually proof, not that you aren’t crazy, but that you are? Sitting in a psych ward, alone, looking at air and waiting to see something that isn’t there, insisting to yourself you aren’t crazy…what about that behavior strikes you as sanity?

  But what if he’s a vision?

  What if he speaks?

  Here on the Island, they know you as a man of faith. They’ve called you a man of miracles. Wouldn’t it be nice if for once—just for once—those qualities were actually real? Wouldn’t be nice if you actually felt you were what they all assume you are? Isn’t it possible, Julius, that the reason only you can see this man is because only you are meant to see him? It seems possible, even likely, that this fellow may have some message for you, some answer to your unanswered questions, some secret method to impart that might loosen spiritual knots you’ve lived with so long you’ve given up trying to untie them.

  Or—this new thought leaves Julius chilled—he might be nothing more than one of those visions your daddy chased to his bad end. Your father—didn’t he think his visions were offering answers? Do you want your story to wind up like his? What if he had just ignored them? Wouldn’t that have obviously been better for everyone? You should just go. Leave. It’s not anything meant for you, there’s no answer here, no message. It’s not anything at all, any more than anything else is. You’re a man of routine for a reason; hold to the routine. Think of those who count on you. They’ll soon enough be waiting: Domino City shut-ins, agoraphobics, the Checkertown elderly and infirm, the single parents, the friends waiting for ministration from a friend. They won’t mind if you come early but they’ll worry if you’re late, even more if you don’t show at all.

  Yes. You should go.

  Eyes fixed upon the place he first saw the flickering man, Julius stays.

  DEEP

  The Fritz Act rollout went wrong from the start. Doubtless some part of it was mismanagement by the Joan A. Wales Psychiatric Institute. JAWPI was meant to cut the loonies loose, yes, and it must be admitted, there was a practiced lack of interest in the regulations for what might happen to them after, in favor of bottom-line savings. What did happen though…well, that was never planned for, even if in hindsight the ensuing madness seems inevitable.

  There was no way the criminal element wasn’t going to get involved, see. The Island was largely a criminal operation—still is—and on the Island, crime meant Ralph Mayor. Ralph himself I never saw, but I heard plenty. A kingpin in hiding, so powerful his name was enough to keep the gangsters in line. Everywhere you looked, you saw the shape he’d left behind. By my time, the “Mayor” of Loony Island had, like so many other officials, moved away from his constituency—although most of those others were elected. Mayor Mayor? He elected himself.

  Julius’s buddy Daniel “Donk” Donkmien ran it for him by proxy: the “deputy mayor,” Ralph’s indispensable appointed right hand—a sentimental appointment, some said, given what had happened in bygone days with Ralph’s old partner Yale. Yale was Donk’s big brother, long dead, and his death was ruled an accident—officially. All I know is, sentimental appointment or not, Donk ran it frighteningly well, and reported it all back to the boss.

  All? Not quite.

  Donk claimed he reported everything, sure, but Donk had eyes and ears that were also “off the books,” so to speak. Just two eyes and two ears, just one informant, someone Donk knew from old times. But this wasn’t just some paid mole or nosy neighbor tattling on disgruntled workers or power-hungry gangsters—he was Donk’s man all the way. And skillful. It’s no accident Donk’s sneak was the first to discover that the Fritz Act was being used to front a larger plot, and it may be he sniffed it out even sooner than Donk wanted him to.

  Because sure, Fritz may have gotten the ball rolling, and JAWPI may have been willing to implement—but the way it actually happened? That was all Donk, acting off the books and behind the scenes. He did it so secretly, most people never guessed it—and even though he told me about it direct, I still have to guess as to why.

  Ralph may still be guessing for all I know.

  * * *

  —

  Sardines are naturally social animals, which fortunately makes the can less of a horror. In the sea they require large numbers of their fellows close about, the better to dash around confused predators; spheroid masses of silver darts piercing the blue, slipping past the poor flummoxed barracuda, who catches one of them just often enough that the toothy sap keeps trying. It’s well known underwater that the barracuda is a big joke to the sardine—barracuda jokes are scrawled on the Great Barrier Reef from Sydney to Tasmania in slight silvery letters—yet the illiterate barracuda gets the last laugh, for when the fine-meshed net, that predator undodgeable, finally comes trolling, those little silver wiseacres are hoisted up into the dry choking void of upper space, where they die uncomplaining collective deaths, and where they shortly find themselves packed into mass graves, crammed closer to one another than barracuda teeth, billeted together by the thirties in low rectilinear tins, stacks of ten, three deep, eyes unblinking in the dark with only foul-smelling oil and their fellows as company.

  A sardine who makes it to Slanty’s conveyer belt has had it rough already. First, you’ve got the whole drowning thing. Add to that the horror of disorientation—the sky is absolutely terrifying to a fish. Then you’re brought into the hold and frozen solid. Your eyeballs will never be the same. Once you’re thawed, you get chuted onto the belt at Slanty’s Cannery, and there your real troubles begin. Tiny knives remove your entrails. All of these knives used to be hand-operated, but now, depending on which belt you’re shunted to, you may get machine-knifed, like Sister Nettles did. An ingenious suction device removes any remaining viscera, and you and the rest of your little silverdart chums are flumed down the line to your stamped, numbered, and bar-coded cell, stuffed alongside whomever is nearest until the tin is full. You’re squirted with noxious oil serving as food coloring and preservative, and then the lid goes on. And then you wait, perfectly preserved. You might wait forever, subject to the vagaries of a capricious and cruelly ironic fate. For example: One can only assume thousands of sardine cans have been purchased through the years by sailors, and brought aboard merchant ships. It only stands to reason, then, that a few, a very few, of these tins must have slipped accidentally overboard, or their ship sunk beneath the waves, thirty sardines returned to their natural home without ever knowing it, all hoping through long preserved centuries, all waiting for the tu
rn of the key, blinding light, mastication, oblivion.

  All this goes through Boyd Ligneclaire’s head as he slices the fish at the conveyor and sluices them down the chute, then uses a plastic suction snoot to whisk the entrails to parts unseen. His fingers work brainlessly, while his mind roams the deep sea. He’s decided his work will begin with an epic tour-de-force written from the point of view of a sardine—from egg to can and then (herein lies the genius) beyond the can, into the great deceased with twenty-nine of his closest friends. They’ll be one of those unlucky overboard cans on the ocean floor, and, as they wait, each tells their own tale. A piscine Canterbury! Not a novel but a poem! Which our main sardine records, Dante to a whole school of Virgils. The sea entire, encapsulated in that very can. Sardine Descends, the title poem in your collection, which will be nothing more or less than the entire Island mapped in poetry, told in ink on the page, captured between covers.

  Think of the titles, then think of the poems. “Apse Street Blues.” “Neon Chapel in Daylight.” “Self-Portrait in the Blade of a Cannery Knife.”

  Boyd slices and suctions Boyd slices and suctions Boyd slices and suctions.

  He rarely misses a fish. Nimble.

  Those dexterous digits have kept him employed at Slanty’s through grim layoffs, and this same dextrosity landed him his other paid gig—part-time, by far more lucrative, and brokered by Donk: information-gathering, spying, even the occasional burglary. Boyd prefers the burglary. High-end merchandise, highly technical thefts, no tracks left, no evidence created. In quick, out quick. The occasional picking of a particular prosperous pocket. The job at the cannery keeps the authorities from sniffing out the secret job, while the secret job keeps him flush. But his third occupation keeps him sane, sets him apart. Occupation number three is writer. Yes, the litterateur of Loony Island, the keeper of its flame, the immortalizer of its story, air father, the artistic sheen of the word made real in the flesh of the cranium, ah! It’s occupation number three he lives for. It’s his inner glory. It’s his secret strength.