The Revisionaries Page 3

  He’s shit at it.

  This is Donk’s opinion, and as Donk’s one of Loony Island’s few readers, it should be Donk’s opinion Boyd most values; however, in matters literary, Boyd remains unflappable. Donk expounds, but Boyd’s expression alters little, and his confidence not at all. There’s no arguing with Boyd. There’s no not arguing with him, either, at least for Donk.

  “You’ve written three pages in your whole life.”

  “Well.” Boyd, leaning against a wall, striking what he hopes is a devil-may-care pose. “Three pages, yes. But. Three perfect pages.”

  “They’re junk.”

  “You have an imperfect understanding of my intent.”

  “I’d hate to think I had anything approaching understanding of your mind.”

  “Someday, you’ll sing a different tune. I’ll join a writer’s colony and make contacts.” Boyd’s conviction—that his preordained path to life as a famous and renowned author involves joining a writer’s colony to make contacts—comes from well-thumbed copies of Wheatgrass Tea, a writers’ and poets’ periodical Donk gave him once as a gift (though, as Donk has frequently grumbled since, if he’d known it would turn Boyd into a such a goddammed poet, he’d never have done it).

  The whistle sounds, ending the night shift. Boyd hits the locker room, exchanges fish-sloppy dungarees for civvies—aged jeans, white tee, leather jacket—and piles out the back exit with all the other cats, pondering rhyme schemes—Iambic? Iambic is classic; it has its appeal, but iambic is so military in its cadence, so rigid, so daDAdaDAdaDAdaDA-yadda-yadda-yadda. Iambic is railroad tracks, the speed limit, the Farmer’s Almanac, poetry’s good citizen. Iambic pays its bills on time. Iambic turns all the clocks back for Daylight Saving Time. Iambic will make a solid husband, but it ain’t going to get laid on spring break. You may as well go with rhymed couplets while you’re at it. Boyd preens a moment, fires up a smoke. Cutting across shuttered factory yards, ducking through the well-known gaps in fences, working through acrobatic rhyme schemes, trapezoidal metaphors—Come on now, Boyd, let’s grab this poem by the balls, do it in an ABBCBAACBCABDDDDDCDDDDA, something like that. They’ll never see it coming.

  Pulls out a battered notebook, jots: rhyme scheme; grab balls.

  Ahead in the dim of dawn the dingy lights of Domino City twinkle, but for now he’s enshrouded, a counterculture prophet, the Poet Unknown yet to be revealed. He pauses, savoring the romanticism, wondering if any of the lights spread before him glow from a room fated to be the next he’ll break into, and what he’ll take from that place. Things I Have Stolen. That’d be a good title for your memoirs, Boyd thinks, reclining into the comforting habit of imagining his as-yet-nonexistent career in retrospect. Suddenly it strikes him—iambic rhymed couplets, hmm…might they not be…perfect? So jejune, so out-of-fashion, might they not have come back around to be considered avant? The least-expected thing? Sui generis? Yes! Hoe. Lee. Shit. Wheatgrass Tea won’t know what to daDAdaDAdaDAdaDAdaDO with itself! He claps his hands together once, Eureka!—pulls out the notebook, jots: couplets; hoe lee shit—then freezes.

  Someone is standing nearby, staring at him.

  It’s still too dim to perceive features, but the interloper’s tall and thin, and male, wearing a suit that shows up powder blue in the spots where the light reaches. Though his face isn’t visible, Boyd knows the stranger’s looking right at him. Seeing him. A little red coal dot dances up near the stranger’s head. Boyd waits for this figure to move, but the stranger just stands, takes a leisurely drag of his cigarette.

  Professionally stealthy, Boyd is unused to being seen, and certainly unused to being seen first, in the creeping morning dark no less. The stranger makes no movement, no sound, no acknowledgment; he simply stands and watches Boyd and blows smoke. Unnerving as hell; Boyd’s nape hair stands up. How to proceed? Run? Saunter past? Say “Howdy”?

  The stranger speaks, very clearly.

  “Boyd,” he says.

  “Do I know you?” Boyd asks—and oh mama, are his hackles prickly now. Something in this fellow’s voice is…deep. Not low, but deep. It holds more secrets than an ocean trench.

  “Do you know me?” the stranger replies. “Interesting question. No. I’d have to say you don’t. But clearly I know you.”

  “Are you looking for a hire?” Boyd asks. The time to scamper is near. It’s occurring to him—This might be one of the people you’ve burgled recently, Boyd. Somebody with fancy security who caught you on camera and has decided revenge is a dish best served right now. If you don’t scurry, you may find yourself duct-taped to this guy’s basement pipes, listening to the unmistakable sound of a bone saw being sharpened.

  “I’m just checking in.” He puffs, expels a wreath of smoke. “I’ve been ‘checking in’ on all sorts of people. But I haven’t yet stopped by to see you, old friend. I’ve mainly been dealing with Gordy, and believe me, Gordy’s a handful. An armful. It’s kind of odd for me to see you like this—here, now—though I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “I don’t understand anything you’ve said so far, to be honest with you,” Boyd says, edging back, getting ready to run.

  “You’re not going to run,” the stranger remarks.

  “Of course not,” Boyd freezes again, gives what he hopes is a devil-may-care-and-not-at-all-hysterical laugh. “Why would I run?”

  “Because you think I might hurt you. But I won’t.”

  “I’d feel more confident about that if I knew your business.”

  The stranger says nothing for a while, then: “Curiosity. The itch of ages, the prime addiction, the killer of…” He stops and chuckles. “Hm. Probably the wrong idiom. I suppose I’d better tell you some things that might help. First, tell Julius he’s got to make his move soon with the flickering man. He’s got hours, not days. Second, you really ought to come check out what I’m standing on. You won’t be sorry.”

  “Who are you?”

  The stranger says what might be a word, or might be a name, and then, as if from a vertical crease running from the top of his head to his pelvis, the Deep Man folds himself in half, then again, then again, reducing himself by halves until there’s nothing there anymore. It’s the damnedest thing.

  Boyd stands breathing until his pulse reaches normal and his pelt smooths down. Then he gives a low whistle, his brain on-tilt and humming, desperately trying to catalogue the experience—There might be a story in it. Boyd wanders over to where the guy had been, searching for mirrors that might have been used to effect the trick. There was something about that guy. He was…he was…Boyd searches for the word.

  Vivid? Yes. He was vivid. Even in silhouette, he was more present, more particular, more finely attuned somehow, than anything else Boyd’s ever seen. As though he’d been provided an extra measure of reality; as though he’d been sketched with a finer-tipped pen, drawn by a surer hand. Boyd looks down at his own self, which seems real enough. It had been only in comparison with the stranger that he’d felt diminished—Oh yes, there’s a story in this, if there’s opportunity to tell it…tell Julius…hours not days…you know, you should tell Julius…stop over at the Neon in the evening at his barbecue, catch him after he gets back from his rounds…and then he, he folded? God, what a spookshow

  Landrude…That’s a name? Maybe a…title? You’ll have to look it up in the dictionary.

  Shaking himself all over as if to rid his skin of unwelcome pests, Boyd tosses the butt half-smoked and grinds it out with his heel, noticing at last the perfect circle upon which he’s standing. It’s a manhole cover—a remarkable thing in itself. Most of the manhole covers in the Island have long ago been filched and sold for the raw pig iron. Part of the neighborhood’s theft epidemic, the manhole covers. Everything not nailed down. These days, moving around the Island requires a level of attention that recommends sobriety if you want to avoid a lost tire or a bad fall into raw sewage. But this
manhole’s cunningly concealed, painted approximately the same color as the pavement, hidden among the abandoned factories; it seems thieves and vandals have thus far overlooked it—Well, Boyd, are you a thief, or aren’t you? Roll this sucker home.

  He feels at his belt for the tiny zippered pouch—lockpicks, screwdrivers, glass-cutter, safe-cracking tools—and from this he draws a thin aluminum rod, folded up in thirds, which opens on locking hinges to form a tiny but sturdy crowbar. Inspecting closely, Boyd whistles appreciation: this lid appears to be a commissioned job, some art deco thing probably ordered by a local robber baron back in the industrial-boom times. An imprint Boyd’s never seen before bears the legend:

  LOVE FORGEWORKS, LLC

  (Pigeon Forge Division)

  There’s a striking spiral pattern of corrugation around the edge, and upon the center the craftsman’s etched a triptych of images: a blacksmith at his forge, a fountain, a pigeon by a stream. Damn, Boyd thinks, I bet I could hock this to an uptown collector for a thousand. He slides the sharp end of his bar into the pick hole and pushes hard, expecting the weight of iron, but to his amazement the lid lifts smoothly on hydraulic hinges. Wide brackets set into the wall at two-foot intervals down the hole form a ladder, leading to a complete lack of gloom.

  Taking the first few rungs, Boyd blinks, snow-blind. He descends into a tunnel that stretches horizontally to indistinct dots in both directions. It’s endless. There are no doors or branches, just this one artery. But it also looks new and well kept, as if the damn thing is recently built and modestly used.

  What. The. Fuck.

  As if today wasn’t weird enough. And what had the vivid folding man said? You’ll really want to check out what I’m standing on.

  Why am I obeying a folding man, Boyd asks himself, climbing downward. Why, why.

  GOD

  Father Julius? You know him now—as much as you can know…but that’s different. What can I tell you about what he was like then?

  A priest, most said. A holy man, no doubt.

  Was he a priest? He prayed a lot, but prayer isn’t ordination. On Loony Island, it was a sort of open question. He didn’t talk about his past with anybody, they said. I guess I know more than most, even if I only got to observe him for a short time.

  Trying to think of something priestly he did…he didn’t like the traditional duties of the frock, I’ll say that much. Refused to take confessions, or hold mass, things like that. He was the kind of priest who ran everywhere he went. The kind of priest who wore a patchwork denim robe. He was the kind of priest you might find at the fights down by the dead factories, bobbing around in the middle of a screaming ring of drunken gangsters and factory workers, boxing for bets and knocking younger dudes into the dirt.

  Wait. None of that’s priestly.

  Here’s the sort of holy man Father Julius was: blessed. Someone drawn to lost causes. Someone who would risk his life for a stranger. He was the sort who’d make dangerous folk scared by placing himself bodily between the weapons they held and the targets they were aiming at. This, more than anything else, made the neighborhood gangsters come to love him. On Loony Island, a man who refuses to fear guns becomes, after a time, a kind of a threat, but a beloved threat. You need to shoot him, see, to maintain credibility—you point your gun, barrel right at his eye. But Julius isn’t interested in your gun. He’s interested in you. He’s looking at you. Spooky shit. These gangsters posed tough, but most of them were kids. Nine times out of ten, they’d tuck the weapon and run.

  Of course, that does mean one time out of ten, or whatever, they pulled the trigger. Naturally. It’s impossible to disrespect guns and go unscathed. I heard the stories. He got it once in the shoulder. Twice in the thigh. One bullet grazed his ribs. One clipped the tippy-top of his right ear. And even still, he seemed blessed by some higher power, whatever his denomination might have been. No arteries severed, no organs pierced. Not even a limp. He kept coming back, and the shooters, not understanding the reasons for their failure, faded away. Nobody remembers their names, they’re nothing but shadows in the tales of Julius’s survival. Skeptical? Plenty were. But you’d hear stories about this on the street, or at Ralph’s. There was shame in backing away from a fight, but there was no shame in backing away from Julius. For them, it got so when the pistols came out, they’d hope for him.

  So, yes, I guess you’d have to say Julius was a priest, or a holy man, or a guardian angel. Doubtless he served in those capacities right up to the so-called Loony Riot, and even a bit beyond. The night he first arrived on Loony Island he performed a miracle, they say—saved a whole mess of people dying in a fire—and then introduced himself as “Father Julius,” no last name, so Father Julius is what he became. I can’t speak to the miracle of the fire, but I can confirm one miracle.

  He cured me of my stutter.

  * * *

  —

  Father Julius has learned that the most important thing about the flickering man is, don’t reach for him—that makes him flicker right out.

  There’s no doubt anymore that something is happening; Father Julius has made himself sure on that count. Whether it’s real or just something in his mind, it’s repeating itself. He’s tried timing the flickering man’s appearances but there’s no rhythm to it; this fellow, it seems, is no man of routine.

  Julius no longer gives any thought to leaving.

  He thinks about nothing else.

  It’s been the same psychological process each time over the last hour; the man flickers in, holds, flickers back out. Julius finds himself gripped by the certainty—yes, this is important. Yes, this is the revelation you’ve hoped for. Yes, this is, at last, something of faith that seems actual, physical, real. And then, just as regularly, the certainty—It’s nothing, you fool. You’re as crazy as they say, as crazy as your father was, as pathetic in your thirst for belief as you tell yourself you are in the dark each sleepless night. Then he stands, turns to leave, stops, caught teetering between fear and hope, turns, sits, and waits again. He’s yet to get as far away from the flickering man’s alcove as the abandoned orderly’s station.

  It’s the partial invisibility that’s hooked him. Total invisibility is nothing new, of course. Within the city, for example, Loony Island has become, in its way, totally invisible. The third world quarantined within the first is something that with enough practice you can choose not to see: a commuter’s planned fascination with the skyline opposite or a preoccupation with the radio dial as you drive past, an undesirable but unavoidable diminishment of the available infrastructure budget buried on an inner page of the city newspaper’s website. And the neighborhood, invisible already, is itself seemingly populated by people nobody can see. Crimes here go unreported and uninvestigated, deaths pass as unnoticed as the lives that preceded them, scavengers climb out of the neighborhood to stand beside off-ramps holding cardboard signs with overly detailed stories of need, which go studiously unseen by drivers and passengers until the green light frees them from their premeditated blindness, or until the bluebirds arrive in squad cars to chase the mendicants back within their prescribed boundaries.

  But this occasional visibility holds a taste of the miraculous. He’s either visible to you or he isn’t. You can’t see him, Father Julius is beginning to suspect, unless both of you truly want him to be seen. Slowly, collaboratively. Sometimes you see him, and it doesn’t occur to you until after: “Hey now, wasn’t there somebody just sitting right over there?” But he’s gone already; a brief shiver-flash of movement evaporated into memory, and almost evaporated from memory. Julius is discovering it still takes effort to believe he’s seen the fellow at all. Yes, that’s it; when he flickers out, he forsakes perception retroactively, leaving ghosts of memory, much like a desired word or phrase perversely deleting itself from consciousness in the moment preceding utterance, leaving nothing behind except, first, the knowledge that a thing exists and was
until the previous moment in one’s possession, but now can only be apprehended conceptually; and, second, the unscratchable itch for the thing, the need to speak it aloud, if only to finalize a sentence left purgatorially half-constructed by its absence. Perhaps it isn’t some physical property that he has, Julius theorizes, but rather something he does to you: a physiological matter—manipulation of the eye, of reflected light, retinas, rods, cones, vitreous humor—or else a distortion of the less accessible, the more liminal consciousness, a chemical rearrangement in the hidden folds of cerebellum, a microscopic fiddling in the density of the medulla’s core.

  In short, thinks Julius, it’s a mindfuck.

  But this effect lessens over time. Doesn’t it? It’s getting easier to see him now. Isn’t it?

  Julius waits.

  When the man blinks in again, Julius doesn’t even breathe. The man’s hunched over the low table, making a bright green rectangle on a newspaper with a fat crayon, seemingly more concerned with texture than illustration.

  The man looks up. He hands the newspaper to the priest. Other than the crayon scrawl, it’s unremarkable. Julius underarms it.

  The man’s eyes are terrified. Terrified.

  He says something that makes Julius feel as if all the air has gone out of him.

  “God talks to me,” he says.

  “God talks to me.” Again. More insistent than before.

  And then a third time, a horrified whisper: “God talks to me.’

  “What does God say?” Julius’s mouth has gone dry.

  “To do something bad,” the man—almost a boy—mourns. “Something bad.”