Super Flat Times

by Matthew Derby

  In the car Karen said one thing. “Her hand. The way it —” Her lower lip listed and shook, threatening to give way. “I’m already forgetting.”

  “You don’t forget. It’s —,” I said. I gripped her thigh reassuringly. “It’s not a thing you forget.”

  Three

  They dig me out of the snow.

  “Jesus,” Hot Brian says. “This snow sucks.”

  “It’s terrible,” says Penalty. “It’s like a white rubber quilt.”

  “I can’t see,” I tell them. I’ve told them before that I couldn’t see, which is why they don’t respond in any way, but this time I really can’t see. Not even tiny pinpricks of light or patches of color.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” they say. If we don’t get real snow to happen soon, we will all lose our jobs.

  “We should never have told those guys we could make snow,” Penalty says as they lift me onto the bed of what I can only imagine to be a helicoptruck.

  “Yeah, that was really stupid. What were we thinking?” Hot Brian says. I can feel them strapping my body down with nylon cords.

  “Next time, chaps,” I say into an undefined cube of air directly above my head. One of them, I can’t tell which, pats me gently on the head. They are mouthing words to each other, I can tell. Their lips smack noisily, working out the specifics of some plan involving, I am sure, my dismissal from the project. The vehicle lurches. We are in the air, churning upward toward the cloud.

  Four

  Immediately, and without forethought, I started telling lies about where I’d been on the day we lost our daughter. I was surprised at how easily I could modify my life and how readily my parents, my brother, my coworkers accepted the new person I had become. The more people I lied to, in fact, the further away from that Sunday afternoon and everything I did (and, perhaps more important, what I did not do) I became, so that, presumably, one day the whole four years I’d spent as a father might be successfully and completely excised, like raw footage.

  This has not happened yet.

  Karen stayed in the house, slaughtering whole hours huddled in one position. I’d call her up from the summit every few minutes on my speech bead, to hear what she saw through the bedroom window. “There’s a man in a yellow shirt,” she’d say, softly, into the pale blue lozenge, as if I were in the room with her. “Oh, he’s just now turned the corner.”

  Four, Part Two

  “Bedtime” became a misnomer — it was no longer a point one got to in a day but something grueling one put in for, a lengthy trail along which we lumbered, one hand still holding the last light of the previous day while the other reached out for light that had not yet struck.

  Five

  When I am not out on the summit with the machine, I work on the basement floor of a converted warehouse in the revitalized district, sketching out different kinds of snowflakes. The people who are paying us want the snow to be as real as possible, which means that each snowflake should be different from all the rest, but so far I have not even come close. I keep drawing the same snowflake. My waste bin is filled with sketches of identical snowflakes.

  Because of our proximity to the sea, with its erratic tide, the basement often floods, so our desks are balanced carefully on tall stilts. We sway pleasantly as we work, threading our sketches into a wide data cauldron in the center of the room. On the days of flooding, the water laps gently against the cauldron, so that when we close our eyes during naptime, some of us have dreams in which we lie in sand at the edge of a warm, triumphant body of water, resting our heads on a dense patch of ferns.

  Ruth sits at the desk directly ahead of me. She is trying to make the snow fall more gingerly. I keep motion sickness at bay by concentrating on the symmetry of her back, how her shoulder blades really do resemble the graceful wings of a butterfly. I never look for too long, though, because when I look for too long she turns and smiles courteously, her stretchy, made-up face bundled in a burgundy kerchief. She smiles the condescending smile of a woman who is aware that someone’s eyes have been drawing themselves across her entire body, and this is always the worst thing to have to see.

  Six

  By springtime, when the solid clouds came and hung their bold, craterous heads over our sector, snapping plastic satellite dishes from the rooftops down our street and breathing hot, sooty panels of wind into every open corridor, Karen and I had already started to make a habit out of steering clear of the house. The rooms cast an alarmingly bright light at all hours, giving us double vision and trembling fits. The hallway leading to the girl’s bedroom was especially bright — light seemed to spring from the walls and floor in fiery waves. It was exhausting, even, to sit completely still for long periods. Put another, less fidgety way, the house would not allow us to grieve. We stayed away for as long a period of time as we could manage, loitering in multiplex theater lobbies, sneaking from film to film like children — anything to put off the inevitable return to the place where we lived.

  One night, sitting in the third row for a film we had already been to earlier in the day, Karen said, “You know, the thing I’m most ashamed of is that what I really miss about her are the things that everyone misses. The sound of her feet clapping on the linoleum in the morning — I long for that. I die inside every time I think of it. And I die again just knowing that someone else in an office building somewhere deep in the city could predict that I would feel that way, years ago, probably before I was born, and make a commercial about it. I feel like someone has already anticipated my life. I want to feel something new. I want my own feelings.”

  In the sour green light of the trailer advisory, her face appeared translucent, beautiful. I realized the sort of jurisdiction she had over her own emotions, and I felt myself start to sink away from her because of it. My own feelings were as crudely hewn as cave paintings, a child’s tentative stab at the human form — what they called a cephalopod. No matter how hard I tried to fudge the numbers, everything came down to a constant preoccupation with the status of my dick.

  Seven

  It was Karen’s idea to start the garden. I felt it dishonest somehow, as if as a result of our failure to guide a small person through even the most rudimentary social acts — walking, for instance — we should be forbidden the responsibility of ushering on any life at all. But Karen was of the mind-set that we should start small and work our way up — that our real mistake was in starting with such an enormous thing when we had never really taken note of the smaller ones.

  The plants that grew were not the ones on the packages. We could not recognize any of the wild, colorful flowers that shot up from the harsh dirt we’d tilled with a single stolen, rusted hoe. The flowers were long and wispy — they gave off great clouds of orange pollen, which attracted strange yellow insects we’d never seen before, long-legged creatures with dark, knowing eyes. They gathered on the padded surface of the flowers and drank, making a faint whirring sound.

  It was a beautiful garden, but not the one we’d wanted. Not the one we’d envisioned in the store, thumbing through stacks of shiny seed envelopes. Knowing this, we tended the area obsessively and to exhaustion. Then the clouds passed, covering the flowers with dense ash. They looked like gaunt black snowmen. Then they died.

  Eight

  “I suppose you’ve been waiting for this.” It is the Minister, calling me from his office at the other end of the complex. He wants me to visit him. When I visit him, he will tell me to pack my things into boxes and leave.

  “I suppose that is what I have been waiting for,” I say, barely paying attention, just skimming the real content of this discussion. I already know I am off the snow project. I have stopped drawing snowflakes altogether and have been submitting drawings of my own hand instead. I wrote “hand sandwich” on one I submitted to the data cauldron. The next day it appeared on my desk with the word heh written in red pen in the margin. I thought that perhaps they’d gotten the joke.

  “Where are you going?” Ruth asks
as I descend the ladder from my desk.

  “This is it,” I say, trying to sound as small and hurt as possible, even though what I feel is a sort of dull satisfaction.

  “No more snowflakes?”

  “Never were snowflakes, if you really think about it.”

  “I’m never going to see you again.”

  “Nope.”

  She turns back to her work. Then she turns around again. “Wait,” she says. “I’ll walk with you.”

  We don’t go to the office. Instead, I lead her into the network chamber. She holds onto my arm, just above the elbow, with both trembling, fussy hands.

  “I don’t remember being in here before,” she says. “Whenever I think of you for long enough,” I say, “we tend to end up in here.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  It is dark in the chamber, and humid. Periodic gusts of wind burst through the corridor where we stand, rustling her long, wiry hair as if it were a fancy straw hat.

  I tell her I do not want to do the thing that we are about to do.

  “Isn’t it a little too late for that?” she asks, hoisting a leg up onto the steel railing. Her heel gets caught in the grating, so that the whole shoe comes off her foot and tumbles over the edge into the blackness. “Damn,” she says, and then, taking the other one off, “might as well lose them both. No use for a single shoe.” We listen to them ricochet off the sides of the deep cavity.

  She pulls herself close to me, pressing my face into her neck. She smells like a false human — the way another sort of creature would assume a human smells. Her presence is as brutal and unyielding up close as I’ve imagined, but there is also something else I haven’t anticipated, a tender spot, a bruise she lets me finger and press with my whole body. She is not the kind of person I imagined would allow this sort of discourse. As she clings to me I can feel some of myself going away — as if my body were suddenly nothing more than a decanter and I could pour myself out entirely, spoil someone else’s life with my own dank, ruinous indecision.

  Afterward, she returns to her desk, barefoot. I start down toward the office of the Minister. My hands are trembling, so much so that I can barely open the door.

  Nine

  We were at the theater again. The film we were watching was turgid — it shimmied before us like a block of dead flesh, the ruminative characters inside little more than blurred slivers of darkness. A couple sat behind us. The woman said, “I’ve been getting really good at closing my eyes through the whole movie.” Karen did something with her face that might, in another time, have passed for a smile.

  They’d often take trips together, Karen and the girl, and in celebration of their return I’d hide a small toy or some candy somewhere in the house. The child would carefully investigate each room, carefully lifting, nudging, drawing back the fabric of the furniture until she found the tiny wrapped package. Later, though, sometimes days later, I’d find her sitting on the floor right near the place where I had hidden the surprise, waiting for something else to show up. I thought it odd then, but there in the theater, studio logo looming on the screen, I realized that the girl was only training herself for a lifetime of disappointment, the way we huddle close to the people we know best, waiting for something of what we first felt for them to make a new appearance.

  Ten

  The solid clouds have moved on, briefly. Rather, they were carried off, toted at the end of long ropes by the nighttime dirigibles. It may be the way our eyes have adjusted to such things, but it looks very much as though a part of the sky had been removed as well.

  I am looking for work, assuming, each morning, that somewhere there is work waiting to be found.

  Karen has been learning to play the piano ever since the disappearance. “It’s the only thing that will make my fingers quiet enough,” she says, filling the room with the soft, hesitant tones of a consummate beginner, the notes engorged with enthusiasm and shame. Over the months, she’s gotten quite good.

  When I told her about Ruth, she went straight to the piano. Now Ruth is gone, too, off somewhere in another city, taking on someone else’s slippery desperation. Karen and I sit together on the hard piano bench in the afternoon. I have learned the high parts, and she has learned the low parts. Most of the time, what we are playing is only barely discernible as music. When we know what we are doing, though, we smile quietly and briefly at the resultant song, stuffing the expression back down into our chests before it has exposed us for the people we always had a feeling we’d turn out to be.

  Night Watchmen

  Down along the river, cars were houses. It was a beautiful thing to see, especially at night, with all the headlights like jewels in the darkness — some cars even had tin chimneys, which glowed red in counterpoint. It was the area I’d grown up in, although it might be more appropriate to say simply that I grew there, as no aspirant motion was possible. I simply took up more and more space with each passing year, until my body had enough.

  Some cops were standing by the window of Donna’s car, shining their Bucha lights at her. They were looking for someone, a black male who was selling illegal eggs. He’d been seen in this area, they said, driving a car much like the one Donna owned. “That black guy in that car — I don’t know even who this black guy was. I ain’t out to do that,” she said, trembling in the passenger seat, nauseated by the light, her face converging at odd, unpredictable angles, like complex origami. Even without the sickening lights shining on her, Donna had problems. She had lost some of the front of her head in the last war, but could afford to replace only one tooth, and even this the head salesmen messed up when they fit it into her mouth. She had to talk sideways and rest her face a lot, so often that the cops usually left out of frustration and boredom before getting what they wanted. Sometimes she’d have to give her whole head a slight nap after a long sentence.

  “What the hell?” one of the officers said.

  The lead cop, an Orange Jacket whose head was thick and oily like a brick of meatloaf, leaned in closer to the window. “Could you please repeat what you just said, ma’am. In English, please?” The other officers snickered faintly, cupping their mouths.

  “That black type in that car — I do, does not know, still, who was that black type.” Donna had a drool cup around her neck, and the drool cup was full. Mr. Sensible tried to tip the cup out onto the road in order to empty it, but when the Orange Jacket saw the skinny hand creep out around Donna’s neck from the pitch-black backseat he backed away, brandishing a Very Pistol. The cops also got nervous and put their hands on their holsters.

  Wes carefully took hold of my arm. Wes and I were stuck to the wall of The Factories, wearing our giraffe suits, dangling just over the cops’ heads. We were supposed to alert Mr. Sensible whenever cops came around. That was half of our job. The other half was bringing illegal eggs around to expecting families. We were supposed to be in stork costumes, but those were hard to come by. Anyway, Mr. Sensible was not going to be happy with our performance.

  “What the hell is that hand doing in there, lady?” the Orange Jacket said, backing slowly away, aiming the pistol directly at Sensible.

  “I can’t barely say.”

  Mr. Sensible stuck his head out of the window. He was wearing the silver helmet of a Family Getter, and it shone like a mirror ball in the light the police made.

  “This woman here,” he said. “Why are you bothering her?” “You should know why. Now get out of the car.”

  “Listen, you gentlemen are looking for someone black?” The police nodded.

  “A genuine black, no tints, no masks?”

  They nodded again.

  “You’re in the wrong part of the neighborhood, sirs,” said Mr. Sensible. “We’ve sprayed for blacks here. The blacks are at the river, performing a baptism.”

  The police bought it.

  “The police bought it,” Wes whispered.

  Sensible stuck us to walls, different walls each night, and told us to watch over things, and in return he gav
e us fish eggs and fish tarts, bags of tiny fish fins. We were thick in the waist from rich fish oil.

  The police went down to the river, and everything got quiet. Donna fell asleep, slumped at the open window. Mr. Sensible sat in the backseat, smoking a long, slow-burning cigarette. It started to rain so hard that when the police attacked, we saw only the flash of the guns in the distance. Mr. Sensible put the seat back so Donna could rest. He rolled up the window, rain pelting his shiny helmet as he did so.

  The next morning Sensible took us down from the wall, unhooking us with a long metal pole.

  “Are you going to kill us?” Wes asked.

  “I should kill you,” Sensible said, sighing. “I should bury you both alive in hot sand.” He handed us each a brick-sized parcel of freeze-dried eel. The scent of the package was so overwhelming that I took a tiny, dime-sized crap in the giraffe suit.

  I forgot to mention the worst part of our job, which was to carry Mr. Sensible and Donna around from family to family in a rickshaw he’d found behind the corporate park. He’d fetch the eggs from a distributor or sometimes from his own sources and seal them in the egg basket, and then Wes and I would drag the rickshaw around the neighborhoods until we found the right house. We would show up at the family’s door, lugging the unwieldy, temperature-controlled container behind us. The hardest part was that we had to keep the suits on at all times. If we left them somewhere or lost them, or if they were stolen, we would be fired on the spot. Keeping a job here is like clinging to a thread on a rapidly unraveling garment. The more you look at it, the less there is to see. So we always wore the suits. Even during naps.

  “Hey, Sensible,” Wes said, trudging next to me, draped in shabby, clotted fur. “Weren’t those cops looking for you last night?”