by Brian Short
NEW PEOPLE
OF THE
FLAT EARTH
NEW PEOPLE
OF THE
FLAT EARTH
A novel by Brian C Short
BOOK ONE
MOSQUITO
ONE
The World
[2005]
This is the world, and my name is not Proteus. It never was. People in the world don’t get names like that anymore. At least they haven’t for a very long time. But it is what I will call myself, and what the others will call me, should they refer to me as anything at all.
That’s enough for the moment, probably too much, about me. I’d rather talk about Willy, because the situation is this: he sits. Willy sits. He sits to the other side of the desk from me, and this is a typical arrangement. It is of a type. He is on the one side and I am on the other, and it seems to have always been like this. It wasn’t, but it seems so. He is there, this person of Willy, this sea-creature, and he will always be there, I’m sure of it, right there, and me, right across the desk from him; me, right here.
Okay.
Willy: toothless. The man is a stick in a flop hat. The hat sits crooked, always and in every way crooked, and loose and limp and flopped, and that’s because his head is that way. It’s worse if he takes the hat off. His was a head never meant to be uncovered, as if the naked gaps between his few sparse, long, stringy hairs exposed also his brains, and everything that was wrong with them, because yes, his brains were all wrong, and all that was damaged and deranged in his thinking lay open, much too open, and in seeing this it became a part of me also and I could feel it, and I couldn’t help but think in that same, wrong way as he did, and so the damage became contagious and that was unbearable. I was not able to accept Willy’s damage as my own, so if Willy ever took the hat off (which, granted, he seldom did) I promptly asked him to put it back on again.
A rag of a denim jacket drapes, ripped, over his bones, and Willy is only bones. His jeans – the pair he wears every day, every night, all the time – their stains tell the story of the moments of his life as it stands, here, now, today: the moment, in summation. If he has any past, that is what made the stains, and the man’s eyes are hollow and they stare as if stunned, but they are alive. This is important. Willy is a man whose eyes are alive and staring. And he can see the future. He tells me this. It might be the thing that he stares at.
“The future,” Willy says, “I see it.”
•
It may well be argued that prophecy was not Willy’s business, but mine. Point taken. For my money, I thought he was rather good at it. Yes, Willy was onto something. He knew what was what, when it came to these things – that is, the future – and I was happy to let him do the job instead of me. I’ve always been reluctant to get involved in this business. Things can get messy. But it is true that I may know something about it. It’s a skill, one of a few. Beyond that, I’d rather not say anything more about it.
But I will say this: that I can’t lie.
And I will also say this: I came from the sea.
It’s true – I am a sea creature as well, a bit like Willy. It wasn’t so long ago that I myself stepped from the foam-green waters, new and blinking and uncertain, staring around me in wonder at this new world above-surface and all those things and people in it – all so unfamiliar, so transformed by my life below, my eyes in the time away from it all sea-changed. Though I may have remembered the names of things and recognized their functions and forms, all that was not related to the sea had become another world, quite literally. People were another world; people, things, and what they all got up to… and I was ill-prepared to find my place in it again. I, like them, had been born to the flat Earth, but had chosen to leave, or had, I think more accurately, been driven from it. But as those forces that led me to take my refuge in the sea were beyond my will to change or resist, so also were those that led me back out again and into the world above. I was as ever their puppet. I was a sea creature. The tides, slow and gentle, have always proved stronger than me. They have, and I suspect always will.
The truth was that I’d felt ill-prepared to find my way in this world in the first place, and ten years as a Zen monastic, though it had done many good things for me, had not improved this condition one bit – in fact it had made things much worse. And so leaving the monastery and its placid cloister, amidst the high, arid mountains of California, was not a move I’d eagerly taken, perhaps not even willingly so, though no one had compelled me to leave but myself. Myself and the tides, myself and Mosquito – who requires some explanation.
But before I try and explain my friend Mosquito and what it did to me, let me return for a moment to re-imagine Willy, because he’s still right there and still waiting, sitting across the desk from me. And though he’s got nothing but time, nothing at all, I can see he’s feeling a bit impatient.
His cheekbones sit high like knobs above his hollow cheeks, and the man is thin. I think I’ve explained that much already. The man is thin, a bone, a stick, and I don’t know how old he is. With a person like Willy, these things are hard to tell, because chances are he’s a good deal younger than he looks. His ruined mind has for so many years ravaged his body and his face so that he appears already ancient, though he may in fact be younger than me. He’s not had it easy. Nobody has. But Willy’s tried to kill himself twice, as far as anybody here knows, because that’s what his folder says – the one on a shelf just behind and above me, on the wall to my left – though I’ve not myself seen him exhibit such behavior or intent, and it’s part of my job to watch closely for these things.
I have, however, oftentimes found him screaming, at the moment of the morning’s first light, a false-dawn salute of sorts, standing on the lawn in the side-yard and facing toward the apartments next over (where how anyone ever gets a night’s sleep is beyond me), at the top of his wrecked voice, “I told you to get out of here, old man!!!,” for instance, at something or somebody only he can see.
For which the best thing I’ve found is to hand him a broom and ask him to sweep cigarette butts from off the front porch of our old converted house, because if he’s busy doing something, he tends to forget to act that crazy.
“Oh… Sorry. Of course.”
But most often where, or how, I’ve found him is walking his tight, little circles on the floor, over and over, over and over, all night long, unceasing. This is the thing that he does, more than screaming, more than seeing into the future. I find him usually in the foyer beside the office where we are right now, there or just outside the front door, on the wide porch where everybody smokes, where everybody smokes, where everybody smokes their generic cigarettes bought in great cartons by the month, on the day when the slight remainders of their benefit checks are granted them, cigarettes bought from the Indian reservation up north, where, at the casino where the company van will take them, never to gamble, it doesn’t even occur, but to spend their last forty dollars of the month, tax-free, on tobacco, to keep their lips supplied with things to suck on, to stay hazed within a self-made cloud that will quieten the voices, maybe, so many fingers, yellowed and stuck and twitching, and to keep staring into, to keep staring into some void beyond themselves, however temporarily.
Willy shifts impatiently in the plastic chair, across the desk from me. He’s waiting for his evening medications. Behind him, outside, a line is formed. All are waiting. Everyone wants the same thing.
But there is one small piece of business left before we can get on to this: the future.
“In the future, this, this…” Willy tells me – he holds his hands up, one then the other, palms out, empty – “everyone… goes… away.”
•
The house
was a much bigger house than it appeared from the street. By way of an addition, built twenty years previous, it had quadrupled its occupancy from a claustrophobic dozen to a cramped fifty souls. Its century-plus original craftsman facade fit easily and anonymously within its residential context, though from 17th Avenue, which it fronted, at the peak of Capitol Hill, what the real-estate people would’ve had to say about it would be less than kind. That didn’t matter. No one meant to sell the place. The expansion that had been built in the mid-Eighties, to accommodate this new breed of resident, who up until then would have lived in a state- or county-run hospital, did nothing to help its appearance. No thought was given – perhaps none could be afforded – to architectural sympathy. The result, though practical, was that of a once-grand, old house, worn and scuffed but sturdy in its bones, with a cement bunker grown absurdly out from its back end like a disease of the imagination. Nobody, however delusional, however dissociative, could call the place beautiful, yet compared to where many of the residents had come from, this was a grand resort five-star hotel.
The older ones had spent significant time in the asylum, at least until budget cuts from the federal level down had sent them out into the streets, out to nowhere, out to drift like so many balloons released into the sky. The lucky ones landed here at Inn House Manor, or someplace like it. The younger residents had spent less time in the system, admitted first to the psychiatric ward until their immediate crises were pharmacologically diverted, and then, once processed, sent here. My employer, Republic Mental Health Residential Agency of Seattle, ran six such houses. I’d worked at five of them in my brief career as an on-call “therapist,” usually covering the overnight shift, where replacement staff were always needed, until I’d been settled into a permanent job at this house. Of all them, I liked this one the best, if “like” is the word. It was where I’d started. It was where Vivianne also worked. And it was within walking distance from my apartment.
To call what I did “therapy” however was akin to calling a chain-store cashier a “brand ambassador” – the sort of neurolinguistic mind-garbage somebody far removed from the job had thought up to sell upper management some notion of their own genius. Despite this, I did feel a debt of gratitude to Republic. They’d given me a job when my résumé amounted to less than the paper it was printed on. For ten years I’d polished brass. For ten years, I’d sat quietly and mostly still, and stared for hours each day at a spot on the wall. I’d chopped wood. I’d cleaned dishes, I’d collated papers, I’d performed minor repairs to the great Buddha Hall. I’d gone into town with the others and begged for alms, and I’d performed my role in the many ceremonies, public and private, without egregious fault. I had gotten to know my mind, at least a little. I had not done nothing. But these were not things that looked like much on paper, not without some genius kind of spin, and I knew it. So Republic could call me a “therapist” if it made them happy. They could call me a goddamn firetruck, if they wanted. But the truth was I treated nobody. My therapy amounted to dispensing medications and cooking breakfast, and to keeping the house from burning down in the night. Which was fine, I wasn’t complaining.
It really wasn’t much different from what I’d done at the Abbey all that time.
TWO
Beyond the World
[1994 – 2004]
I’d found my place in the Abbey, where I could exist as a monastic, most importantly where I could face my own mind. I was almost even happy, if the word applies. My first years were the hardest. As a postulant, as anywhere, I suppose, much of the work was to try and fit in, to fit myself to this new way of life: to follow the schedule – the days, all so thoroughly structured, from eyes-open before dawn to eyes-shut in the evening – and we were to learn the doctrines, to memorize the liturgies and ceremonies, to sleep on a mat on the floor, with a drawer and a bowl and a robe, nothing else. Unlike how it had been for our monastery’s founder, back in the day, who’d studied in Japan, there was no one here who made it hard for me. No one felt the need to. They knew the worst of it came from myself; that I was, as I always had been, the greatest source of my greatest difficulty; that my desires and attachments were the basis of my sufferings, and these were what had driven me to seek refuge in the first place. As a young man entering into this life – one better suited perhaps to those older than myself – I was terrifically restless, and I burned inside with anger and bitter disappointment. But at the same time I’d tasted enough of life in the world to understand how the world and I were basically incompatible, and I felt, in time, almost no regret for having left it behind.
In February, soft snow covers the Abbey grounds, and in the morning darkness it is so quiet that I could hear each flake ping the trees and touch the ground. I would, on a morning like this, shuffle outside into the cold, find my shoes on the rack near the door, and slip them on with difficulty, as they were cold and frozen. The corrugated metal roof that covered the pathways of the cloister kept the falling snow off the walk, and my sneakers treaded softly over the cold cement. If I met another member of the sangha on my way to the kitchen, we would bow to one another quickly and in silence (and so often a robed figure, in darkness and in shadow, would look much the same as any other, and I could not tell who it was) and then each carry on our separate ways. Since I was the one who assisted the head cook with the baking, it was my job to pull the dough for the breakfast rolls, mixed the day before, from the walk-in refrigerator, and quickly divide and shape them into fist-sized balls, then cover these and leave them to proof before scuttling across to the Buddha Hall for morning meditation. Every morning began this same way, but in wintertime I would also need to kindle the fire of the kitchen heater and make sure it was burning before I left, setting the sheet-trays of dough near enough to benefit from its heat. Otherwise the rolls would never warm and proof up properly before baking.
Outside the Buddha Hall, I again removed my shoes and set them into a box near the door. Inside, it was dark and silent, but with my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see the shapes of the others now gathering – monks, as well as some laity who were staying as guests, or had come to share in meditation. They settled themselves down to their small benches or pillows or, for the older ones, proper chairs, facing toward the walls. If crowded, square screens in standing frames were arranged over the center of the large room, and people could sit facing those. I usually found my own place near a wall, arranged myself onto a small bench, and sat.
It was on such a morning, following upon early meditation and breakfast – and when talking was again allowed – that I finally thought to ask, in my third February spent this way, the Reverend Master Eno, whom I ran across along the path back to the guesthouse, why he had never given me a koan to worry over, one of those unsolvable and logic-defeating puzzles of mental jiujitsu meant to break my small mind wide open. I’d expected that should be, well, what one did.
He smiled gently, a frequent response to such questions. Everything about him was gentle. Everything utterly unthreatening. I was quietly terrified of him. After a moment with his head downturned, while he searched inside himself, he looked up again at me and finally said, “Why would I do that? There’s no need. The koan arises from your daily life. It comes from inside, do you see?” He then added, by way of an afterthought, “…And from outside.”
Sensing that he had answered my question as much as he was ever going to, I put my hands together over my heart and bowed respectfully in gassho, as he did also to me, and then I scurried on to my next work assignment, ghost-pale, shivering inside.
•
Mosquito, as I’ve said, is a thing that requires explaining. Mosquito, whom I’d come to think of as a friend, was the thing that sent me packing, that drove me from the cloister and put me out on the streets, like the Reagan administration did for my fellow sea-creatures. It is not a person, not quite. It is not really a mosquito either. Rather, it is these things, but so much more – it might in fact be everything, or at least look a good de
al like it, if it wants – but it is also all the while only itself, singular, absolute, so absolutely distant, and silent as only it can be silent. At the same time, it is no more distant nor silent than the sky, and no more so than my own mind, where I found it, although these things – which may also be the same things, and which also may be the same as Mosquito – are as silent and as distant as anything, and just as immediate, and as intimate too. But they are as loud and alien and as impossible as people are to one another, and as they are, most directly, to themselves.
I speak from experience. Listen:
I found Mosquito inside my mind.
This is what happens when you spend ten years facing a wall, for hours each day, just sitting. Or wait, no, I can’t say that. It is the sort of thing, exactly the sort of thing, that happens to me, that I find. I don’t know what anybody else may get as a result. They might get presents. They might get candy. I don’t know. Mosquito is what I got.
It takes a while to become properly acquainted with your own mind. It has for me, and I can’t say that I’ve really done so yet. I feel as if I’ve only gotten started. But with practice there comes a certain familiarity with the terrain and with the objects that dot its horizon. Its features become familiar, as does the atmosphere, and there is, after a time, a certain time when one says to oneself, “This is my mind and I know it.” There is a flavor and a color of the self, and the dots and features and winds and troubles that blow through are all things that one recognizes. And though I am only a beginner at this, facing the soft substance of my mind, when something enters that is not my mind, I know it. I can be pretty certain. I know that there is something distinctly different about this other thing – in character or in contour, and that its voice, if it has one, is not one of my own, and when it speaks, if it speaks, it is not in my words.
Mosquito was like that: a thing, there, that was not-me.
