Super Flat Times

by Matthew Derby

  After a few days, a group of women in white jumpsuits drove up to our campsite in a van and took us to a metal hut at the bottom of a ravine. On the way, they served us long bars of taffy. In the hut they had us sit in a circle and, one by one, tell them what we’d learned. We told them the forest sucked. They nodded and wrote things on a plastic pad. Even the sound of the stylus scratching the hard plastic was a welcome relief from the hysterical silence of the woods; it was the sound of human ingenuity, of survival.

  Late one afternoon after the bus had dropped us off at our campsite, we got drunk on the rationed allergy medicine and began knighting one another. I don’t know where the idea came from. It just suddenly felt like the only thing left in the world we hadn’t yet done. By the delirious light of the fire we got down on bended knee, reciting what we could remember from some of the older fairy tales. We began as the Knight Wrestlers, until it was discovered that both Gawain and the Yellow Knight had been trained in the Greco-Roman style. The idea was to start out with an even playing field.

  After that we began fashioning traps for one another, pitfalls and swinging wooden spikes. Someone dug a pit, for instance, and nearly everyone fell in. This was better than anything else we had come up with. This was the salve we’d been flailing about for desperately. The thin, silent man with the handlebar mustache, the one who would soon become known as the Green Knight, delighted us by fashioning magnificent swords and trick landscapes.

  My wife greeted me in the kitchen with the usual projection of detached irony, clutching her cigarette like a German.

  “The old rules no longer apply,” I said, toweling off with a rag. I had been gone for three weeks, earning my first achievement badge. She only nodded, paging through a meat catalog. “You want me to become a knight, don’t you? You’d like that,” I said.

  “I like knights,” she said.

  “You’re looking at a knight. What does that feel like?”

  She said nothing, folded the catalog in thirds, and slipped it into the slotted napkin holder. Her hands were trembling. “It makes me feel tired,” she said, and went into the bathroom, where she turned on the water full blast.

  After that, she spoke mostly in fragments. We started using signs, thumbnail sketches posted to the door. A duckbill, a happy face, double middle fingers. We saw each other fleetingly, extras in each other’s lives. I continued amassing the necessary tools with which to perfect my armor.

  We were ready for the monthlong stay. The women in the jump-suits took us into the woods in the sleek white bus and left us there. Occasionally we caught glimpses of them through the trees, writing on their hard pads. We started spending all of our time honing our skills. The Green Knight had been through the service, and was far ahead of anybody. We chose him as our instructor.

  “This is what you call your engineer’s knot,” he’d say, suspended from a high tree branch. We learned the essentials of hand-to-hand combat. It was all about turning our aggression into a fine-pointed stone and pressing it into the skin of our hearts, he said. We held hands in a ring while two of the men beat each other with sticks. “No one leaves this ring,” the Green Knight would say, “until I see death’s passion show its face in your eyes.”

  It is true I have made some decisions in my life that were less than palatable, but I do not count my sporadic relationship with Gawain’s fiancée among my transgressions. Chelsea was innocent, a girl really, and in serious need of guidance. I liked the way she asked all the important questions right off the bat. We spent hours alone on an orange couch, sharing cigarettes while she enumerated his faults. “We’ll be shopping,” she’d say, “and he’ll start dancing. ‘We’re lovers,’ he’ll say. ‘What lovers do is put beans in the box. Putting beans in the box.’ All this while he’s filling the shopping cart. What an asshole.”

  I felt the end of day coming. Gawain lay still for the most part, give or take a tremor here and there. There was no sign of the others. They had their own battles to contend with, I suppose.

  “Are you going to leave me here to die?” Gawain asked, clenching his teeth.

  “I have something to say to you, and then I’ll kill you.” “Well,” he said, “let’s get on with it. The pain here is killing me.”

  I sat down on a nearby felled tree. Darkness crowded up around us in degrees. An animal flashed its green reflective eyes in the distance. I felt the weight of this man’s death on my hands.

  “Do you think there’s any way to bring you back?” I asked. “A knight doesn’t ask for his life back. Death, to a knight, is like peeling back the skin of a banana.”

  “What kind of pain are you in?”

  “I feel it mostly in the extremities. It’s like wasps converging.”

  “I’ve taken advantage of your betrothed.”

  Gawain only lay there, mud caking on his face like a primitive mask.

  “I have to tell you that I don’t think she’s particularly fond of you.”

  “She’s not particularly fond of anybody, Black Knight, not even you, though in your heart you may believe it to be so. She doesn’t love. Although I wouldn’t take it personally, I would not suggest becoming too wrapped up in anything.”

  I sat there for some time. “The dead play tricks,” I said to myself, preparing to brandish my club. “The dead play tricks.” Gawain heaved away, his features warped and desiccated.

  I followed the instructions my wife had left on the kitchen counter. She was waiting for me at the beach, where the lighthouse used to be. Long ago, when we were still trying our lives on for size, I would take her there and we would spend all night in the deep cavity the demolition team left when the lighthouse came down, getting out of our heads on pills and brandy.

  I sat down next to her on the concrete foundation, handing over a bottle. “You’re a good knight,” she said. The sea roiled down below, shrieking as it crashed against the jagged white cliff face. It was getting dark — the kind of darkness that crowds over the ocean, where it looks as though the light of the world might suddenly fall down and die.

  “You don’t frighten me with your tactics,” I said. In the distance two kids teased a horseshoe crab with sticks.

  She took a drink, slipping her free hand into a pocket. “My only request, in all of this, is that you stop it with the magazine articles.” Sometimes I would see something that might be of interest to her, something helpful or affirming, which I would clip out and stick to her car door. The last one was called “She Listened with Her Legs.”

  “Oh, that will stop all right. You can bet that will stop. You don’t even know who I am, do you?”

  She looked out at the ocean, where a seagull hung noisily in the ugly purple sky, the unwitting backdrop for our increasingly stupid and irrelevant lives.

  “This is an easy thing, if you are using the right colors. Use the right colors, Derrick. You don’t have to go away forever. Want to be a better person. You make everyone around you sick to their stomach. People hate you. Most of the time, this counts as enough of a sign. But it doesn’t mean you have to end yourself.”

  I took this as my turn not to say anything.

  “Ugh. You’re the movie someone would watch because the one they really wanted to see was sold out. You’re going straight to video, Derrick.”

  I was all bent up inside, but even so, only part of me wanted to leave, only part was sick and tired of this relentless onslaught. Instead, I sat and watched her go at me like a trained dog gnawing at a policeman’s padded arm.

  “What about honor? What about faith?” I asked.

  She looked surprised, aggressively so, knowing that surprise was the last response I was looking for to such ludicrous, inflammatory questions. Her lips were blue; they trembled slightly in the dim, unfashionable light. “No man is a victim who doesn’t think himself one, whether he is king, knight, or knave,” she said, staggering to her feet. She handed me the bottle. “Take the house. Have the house. The house is yours to keep.” Then she was off along t
he path, a white blur flagging in the night.

  “House? I have no use for that. House? I need no house!”

  “Black Knight, Black Knight, please do me the favor.” Gawain was getting blue around the eyes.

  “Be still. I haven’t told you yet the thing I had promised.” We heard the whirring of motors in the distance, the deep clang of armored surveillance robots maneuvering through the woods. The robots would find us and take us back to the laboratory, where we would be hosed down and sent back to the corporation, ignominious fools.

  “Why do you suppose they’d want to end us?” I asked. “What?”

  “The End of Men. It just came to me — that’s what they call this camp. The End of Men. What are they trying to achieve? How will anything, like, happen anymore without men?”

  “Please, kill me.”

  I put my hand to my chin, surprised to touch instead the rough, impenetrable helmet I was wearing. It felt funny, unnecessarily so. “Do you think — could life really be better here once we’re gone? And how will we know? We won’t know. We won’t even be around to see how much better things are once we’re not around.”

  “Please don’t tell me this is what you’ve been waiting to tell me,” Gawain sputtered, his mouth full of blood. With each word it came bubbling up, staining his teeth a deep red-brown before draining out down his cheeks.

  “No.”

  “Well? Quickly then, quickly.”

  “Gawain,” I said, shifting my weight toward him, “one night, while you were asleep with Chelsea, I climbed in through the window and slipped under the covers right beside her, just to feel her life boiling away. While you lolled heavily in the far corner of the bed I fit my hands into the crescent groove of her clavicles, where her body was most real. ‘Take my life, please,’ I whispered, pressing my face to hers. Some transfer occurred then, I am sure of it. I got some of myself out — I exhausted myself into her skin. She started to get hot, whereas I was shivering there under the covers. There was a mole by her ear, and by morning it resembled my face.”

  For what felt like a good minute he made no noise at all. “She does not love, Black Knight. However you felt. It’s a load of crap, the whole thing.”

  “That’s no way for a knight to talk, Gawain.”

  “Oh, get it over with. Can’t you see I’m in complete misery?”

  I raised the club high into the air. Lancelot appeared at the crest of a hill in the distance with the Green Knight. Red lights from the transmission towers flickered in the heavy evening air; smoke unfurled from the stacks of The Factories. For a moment, all of us were completely still. The night was tacky, sticking to us like old tape.

  “In the name of Saint Paul, I hereby condemn you to death.” I brought the club whooshing down on Gawain’s chest. A sound came from inside, small and hollow like the metal ball in a can of spray paint. In Gawain’s last heaving breath, a high, warbling chortle, he declared, “O, I am slain.”

  Lancelot and the Green Knight approached silently, wordlessly. I had had enough of words at that point. They were something you couldn’t get off your body, no matter the amount of scrubbing. Together we lifted Gawain, carrying him to a clearing, where we built up a makeshift funeral pyre.

  “Anybody got a match?” I looked at the scared faces of the others. None of us had ever been this close to death, not even the Green Knight, who had only flown over the endless deserts of the Eastern Properties in an officer’s skiff. Tears rolled valiantly down Lancelot’s cheeks. In the moonlight he looked like a walking woodcut. There was the impulse to say a prayer, but we were at a disadvantage, all of us having been brought up in different faiths. Silence began to feel more appropriate as we went along, so we knelt around the pyre, removing our wildly ill-fitting helmets. “Such a thing, such a thing,” whispered the Green Knight, bowing. The lights on the observation towers changed color — a soothing woman’s voice issued from the mounted megaphones, beckoning us back to the Styrofoam huts. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to be the next day. Lancelot struck a match, and soon the whole night caved in around us, swallowed by the towering flames.

  Instructions

  Thank you for your interest in applying for the ——— position in Gate 4 of Chamber Complex D. All of our prospective employees are given a rigorous series of tests, from which we decide a candidate’s ability to perform in a high-stress, high-sound environment. The Factories are a difficult, often hazardous place to work. It is necessary, sometimes, to maintain a degree of concentration that exceeds the expectations of “the normal.” Below is a list of problems and complaints that people sometimes have. Read each one carefully, and in the space below describe HOW MUCH DISCOMFORT THAT PROBLEM HAS CAUSED YOU DURING THE PAST ————, INCLUDING TODAY. Do not skip any items, and print clearly and legibly. If you change your mind, erase your first answer completely. Read the example below before beginning, and if you have any questions, please ask the technician.

  Example: HOW MUCH WERE YOU DISTRESSED BY

  Q: Body aches?

  A: Often, particularly after gardening.

  Headaches?

  Sometimes I can feel the inside of my head, right along the temples. Certain objects resonate there — a metal fork, for instance, makes a sound that is like a squealing tire. I played with marbles as a child, and one of them was clear and lit from the inside with crimson and yellow. Had I not lost it in a gutter outside of Golf City when I was eleven, I would have for you a perfect visual representation of this phenomenon. You might claim it was better this way. I, for one, do not take the loss of possessions lightly.

  Feeling lonely?

  Before I lost my wife I had only ever hit one other person, and that was in junior high. His face is like a cotton swab in my memory now — he floats there in slow motion, holding a black book bag over his groin outside the locker room. It’s the Sesquicentennial and we’re getting out early to see the tall robots. I remember the scent of a person, the way it changes the air in a room. Louis Burney smelled like hair and lighter fluid — he came from the developments, where kids pissed out their territory and traveled in herds. I hit him in the gut — the reason isn’t so important anymore. The sound, though, is the thing. Like two sounds at once — and one of them is like the whole world just lifting up and folding over.

  Feeling fearful?

  When I tell people that my wife and I terminated our relationship, what I really mean is that one day I came home from work and she was gone. It was not so much the things she took with her that made me fearful, but what she left behind: two sweaters, yellow and brown (which I had given her — coincidence?), the remote control for a VCR that she took, a set of fine German knives, subscription bills for Solder & Wire and Bulletin of the People of the Living Phone magazines, three large plants whose lives I am now wholly responsible for, and a journal, blank but for the upper right margin of each even page, where the phrase “had fun” is marked in her telltale cursive. When I knew she wasn’t coming back I gathered the items in the living room. Humped there on the floor, they seemed to twitch and breathe, like real animals. I slept for two and a half days.

  Having ideas or beliefs that others do not share?

  Breathing into a plastic bag changes the humidity in a room. A carpet knife can be useful in the removal of ingrown toenails. Not all bad people are French, but all French people are bad. Select meats, when buried for six months or longer in fertile soil, can be used as a medicinal poultice. My brother’s arms are kept in a jar at the county medical examiner’s office downtown. Two nails in a board will weaken its integrity, but not three or seven. The earth is bulging over Canada. When the light hit him just right, my father looked like an outboard motor — pull the cord and off he’d go. People’s breath is almost always more important than what they say. Lifting weights will get you nowhere. When rain falls, something else is always going up. Shoes are for the weak.

  Blaming yourself for things?

  There were holes in
our basement walls where the enemy soldiers were shot during War H. We dug around the foundation of the house, but our search for their remains was fruitless. We had more luck with the arrowheads. Scott earned a merit badge with his collection. The rest of us couldn’t make it further than Tenderfoot. I learned to masturbate in a tent with two other boys and when I came, the lights went out. I saw visions — what I thought then to be the devil’s palm pressing my face into the sleeping bag. The other two had done it before, and only nodded when I recounted what had happened. Later my dick grew to twice its normal size. I panicked but the others reassured me. “Rest it up awhile,” they said, kneeling by the fire.

  Hearing voices that other people do not hear?

  My mother would break things — I heard it through the wall. Later in life, the same sound would crop up unexpectedly — at an important business meeting, say. Once I heard a whole flotilla of saucers hit the floor while boarding a bus for New Livonia. As for voices, I can’t say for sure, especially on condition that they’re not mine. Part of me talks in another language, which is like having an itch you can’t scratch, or when you’re holding a screaming child. I’d hit the kid, which is why my tubes are tied. You won’t see any more of me once I’ve left this earth. That’s one thing I’ve always had a corner on, so to speak.

  Repeated unpleasant thoughts that won’t leave your mind?

  I play the trumpet, and I do most of my unpleasant thinking when I am practicing. If the image of someone smashing my face into the curb, teeth first, rushes into my mind while I’m playing, for instance, my lips will tend to purse instantly. Other things I think about are the sound of two hollow metal tubes colliding end on end, catching a nail with my eyelid, silverware that has not been cleaned, how much a snakebite would hurt, climbing somewhere and not being able to get down, getting a paper cut on my eyeball, the lottery, having my knees bent the wrong way, swimming headlong into the propeller blades of a ship, having my teeth sanded down to sharp points, genital self-examinations, competitive sports, who will be wearing my organs when I die, and the fear that I am slowly bleeding to death from the inside.