Thread by @JuliusGoat

GOD

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.”*

“Do *what* bad?”

But the flickering man vanishes.

A.R. Moxon, THE REVISIONARIES

Paperback out December 1st. Preorder now.

bookshop.org/books/the-revi…