New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  April. May. The wind.

  “Yes, I understand,” I said, my hand pressed against the rough wood of the gate. “This is the same. The same thing as it was. The thing I’m looking for, what I need, I’ll never find it, will I?” The moonlight answered with the hooting of owls near and distant. Stars glimmered above through the trees. I pressed my face against the gate and felt its dry, roughened grain to my cheek, and was careful not to move one way or another, afraid of splinters. “Not here. You told me that, didn’t you? That I wouldn’t find it here. And so I won’t. I could only thank you, again and again and again. Wasn’t that the way of it?” I rolled my head forward, my lips against the wood, nose bent to one side, and then rolled back. “That I should be seen through, that was why I came here, so I could be… transparent. And we did that. Or did we? It took the dead to show me what hunger really was. They’ve done that much for me. For us. I will thank them also.”

  The gate was eight feet high and difficult to climb, more difficult for wearing robes. There was a latch I could have easily opened it with; it wasn’t locked, and I knew that. But still, I climbed, and fell. Then climbed again, this time hauling myself over the top, then fell to the other side with a thump. It knocked the wind from me and I lay gasping for breath. Nearby something clattered and snapped a small twig, perhaps running off. When I could get to my feet again, I followed.

  •

  Dunsmuir. The train heading north came in early morning, before the sun had risen.

  THREE

  The World

  [2004 – 2005]

  “You take the eyes, I’ll go for the lever behind the eyes, and we’ll lift! We’ll lift!”

  I looked up, looked around; could not identify the source.

  But in July, with the sun, in the Market downtown, and tourist crowds thick on the streets from towering cruise liners moored nearby in the harbor, a small square outside with attached picnic tables, and patches of grass and gray shrub abutting concrete walls where large gray rats scouted fearless along their edges; the orange in my hand shone vivid, too much so – an impossible color, of that I felt certain, and if all I could do was to look at it, that might be enough. And because the city was a small city – big enough, yes, but finally, also small enough – so that everyone always ran into everyone…

  “Is that…” There was another voice not quite behind me. “Protifold? Really? It’s been…”

  I turned, stretched, contorted. “Proteus,” I said, correcting him. A tall man towered at my side, eclipsing the sun and throwing shadow, mustached, his hair slightly graying. But he was not so different from the last that I’d seen him.

  “Joe,” he said, “Reading. You remember me? From the agency. My god, it’s been…”

  “Yes. I was…”

  “Of course. Well, back then. We all were. I remember. But I thought you…”

  “I did.”

  “I thought… you joined a monastery or some such thing.”

  “Yes. Yes. I did. That’s what I did. I just…”

  “Over a woman, if I remember, wasn’t it? Your wife, if I remember. You’d just gotten married, all of a sudden, and then… and then, just as suddenly, you weren’t married anymore, but there was…”

  “It wasn’t, uh, only her, but… I was… Yes.”

  “I remember her. She was really something, now I think of it. Really something. They’ll do it to us all, won’t they? Those women. They don’t mean to, of course.”

  “N-no. No, she meant to do that.”

  “It’s our own weakness, come right down to it. I’m married now, myself! Have been for six years! I’m still at the same firm, too, although obviously I’ve moved up here, LA to Seattle. I’m a creative director now. But it’s a golden cage, if you want the truth, a cage with golden bars. They haven’t fired me… uh, so I just keep going back to work each day. Who’d’ve thought.”

  “Yes. Who.”

  “Are you still in the business?”

  “The business? What, advertising? No. I’ve been…”

  “That’s right. Of course. Not much need for it in the monastery, I suppose, is there? They let you out on leave? For good behavior?”

  “They don’t do that. No, I…”

  “I was joking! Hey, look, I have to go, but let me give you my card. I… look, if I wanted to be polite, I’d tell you that we’re always looking for freelancers, give us a call if you want to work, all that. And we are, you understand, we are. But honestly, well… many of the crew from those days are up here now. It’s a very small world, after all, and of course word gets around. After that stunt you pulled when you left… It’s one for the history books, really. Truly. You pulled it off with a certain, I don’t know, style. Grace, even. It may have been ten years ago, but, well, memories for that sort of thing are rather long, if you follow me. I don’t blame you. Hell, I admire you. Sometimes I wish that I could’ve done the same. But not everyone is so understanding. Oh, sure they’d maybe give you a meeting, take a look at you just out of curiosity to see what the zoo creature looks like now after he’s gone feral and everything. But nobody’s going to hire you. No, they’ll never do that. Look, I have to get back to the office, but do give me a call. We can go out for lunch or something!”

  “Okay. Yes. Thanks. Good to…” but his form already had retreated into the sun’s even glare and obscured him, and I squinted painfully into the light, bare in his absence, and there was nothing left but the rectangle of stiff paper. Pocketing that, I looked again at the orange, which I still held, which, apart from the skin, its absolute porousness, the impossible color – nourishment perhaps enough in itself, to see it – was, by its shape…

  “We’ll lift!”

  Looking around…

  “Proteus?” Now her shape veiled and eclipsed the sun, and I was again protected. Hers were soft edges, while those of the guitar case at her side were hard.

  “You… you remember me?” I held the orange as if I didn’t know what to do with it, which I did not.

  “Of course I remember you. But what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the only honest answer I could think of.

  “Have you been here for long?”

  “On this bench?”

  “In the city. I mean. Do you…?” She sat down on the bench beside me, leaning her guitar case against it. With Vivianne no longer between myself and the sun, the orange in my hand again shone in that unnatural color and my first impulse was to hide it away, but instead I offered it to her. She shook her head.

  “Yes. Well. About a month, a little longer maybe. I’ve been staying with some friends since I left, you know, left the…”

  “So then you…”

  “Yes, I…”

  She looked down to the pebble-studded cement at her feet. I admired her silence. The sunlight was hot on my neck and head, and it worried me some that my skin would get burnt.

  “I went as far with the training as I could. Any longer, you see, it wouldn’t have helped. At least this is what I tell myself. Really, it doesn’t matter, the reasons why – you understand, I… I think you understand – because when it’s time? When there was nothing else that I could do? The reasons aren’t important now. Anything would have done it. It was just time.”

  “Do you have money?”

  I laughed. “Credit cards. My credit is still good. Don’t touch the accounts and nothing happens to them, I’ve found. The cards were expired, but those I got replaced and they work, at least until I have to pay them back.”

  “That’s no good. You need work. You need real cash money. Look…” She found a pen from her bag and a scrap of yellow paper also, then wrote down an address. “Go here tomorrow.” She handed it to me. “Or today. No, tomorrow, when Wade will be in. Talk to Wade, he runs the house, tell him I sent you. It’s not much, but… We need somebody for the nights. You can work nights. Is that okay? You can work the nights.”

  •

  Nov. 7, 2004

&nb
sp; Dear Reverend Master Eno (and all Sangha of the North Coast Abbey as well),

  You did not teach me to become a thief. To my knowledge, nobody did. It was something that I learned all on my own, a matter of necessity, I suppose – an expedience. Not that this excuses my behavior (not that this excuses anything, for that matter) but now that I am able, I am returning some of the $412 that I that I stole from petty cash, money I took for train fare and meals when I left, which you, no doubt, have realized was the case by now. Enclosed is roughly half of it. The rest will follow as my means allow.

  Please understand that I feel I owe the sangha so much more than this. While there, in my time at the abbey, I learned that I am a body, and have two arms and two legs. I’ve also learned that I have a head, and that my head is filled with a foamy substance that believes it knows things, and that mistakes its perceptions for the great Golden Buddha. This is not true. The foam-substance in my head is not the Golden Buddha, because it thinks it might be, though the perception it creates may very well be that, and both things share in the nature of the golden body of Avalokitesvara, and in his great compassion, and find their refuge there. I am not the floating eyeball that I once thought I was, nor am I crazy. There are those who might profit in my believing that I was crazy, but I have learned a great deal about not being crazy, both amongst you and in the place where I am now. To be a functioning human being means to be made partly of both the foamy substance of the head and of the solid substance that shares in the many-armed sun-person, in the waving-armed sun-body-person, in the moon-person who falls in the dark each night, who is the night, who is the voice and the wind and the semi-solid substance of the night.

  For this, I am ________ (insert blank-body state here). Thank you.

  I can tell you that when the body hits the ground, having fallen from a height – any height – it makes the sound WHUMP! and the breath leaves it. Everyone involved forgets to inhale, or they forget how to inhale, at least until they remember again, and now, breathing mostly all of the time, I think that I am ________ (insert animated-body state here).

  Thank you. Now that I am here and I am doing the things that people do, most have not caught on yet that I am not a person. But if I am clever, and if I keep on my toes, they need never know. That is not my problem. My PROBLEM is that something left me and it was the only thing that was ever quite there, and I didn’t know about any of this until it was gone. Isn’t it always this way? (I think I’ve read in books that it was always this way.) A small dog outside the room barks. Somebody, I think, is dying. It was always this way. We will witness the sun again, you and I, even if the night never ends, because the sun, you know, is inside us. We are the Golden Body, the absent body, the near-to-being body, the heat- and resemblance-body, and for these reasons, we are so terribly finite, and that is good.

  Out here, I’ve learned all sorts of things about how to mimic a person. I’ve left the ocean almost entirely and have learned to see with these new eyes I’ve found, the kind that work on land. But it is not the same, and I think you know about that. I owe you so much more than the money I stole, because I came to you with even less, and you and the sangha have filled me up with silence and with shadows and with dust. Today I will trade the Golden Body and the silence of Avalokitesvara for dust, and for small amounts of money, and that is good. I want for everyone to understand everything, though that will never happen, and that is also good. Good are the many waving arms of the sun. Good is the gentle, chill breath of the moon. I am a small fragment of all these things, and I live the small life of shadows, and grow fearful of how the earth shakes, and the sun shakes, and the spirit in the body shakes also, because this disturbs the dust, and makes us live, and we are ever broken in the word of the Golden Body and are gone.

  In Gassho, Ever Shifting,

  Shaking Proteus

  •

  And so Willy, present, his palms up, open, hat askew, eyes sad and wide and open, his face sagging, looking loose enough and sad enough to detach from the bones of his head and fall to the floor (it will happen to us all someday, I am sure) because the glue that held him together was bad glue and came apart – Willy said, “The future. Everybody. They’re all gone.” Almost pleading. I worried that he might start crying next, or that maybe I would.

  I tapped the end of my pen against the notebook in front of me. Not the logbook, but my own notebook, where the current page face-up was either full of words that made sense but were not beautiful, or were beautiful but made no sense (I couldn’t tell which). I wanted to scratch the words out, but knew that wouldn’t accomplish anything. Nothing that mattered, in any case, because I felt that somewhere deep inside of me, something had just broken open. There was a crack that had just formed between the place where I was and something… somewhere else. There was also some connection between these words I’d written prior to this interruption and the man who sat before me, interrupting me. I didn’t know what the connection might be, though. I did, however, understand that Willy was a doorway. Never mind that he was a man (if a broken man, if one falling to pieces as I watched); he was also a doorway, a portal through to something, to some other place. The future, yes. But that was not a place. Besides, the future was something that he and I both shared. We had an understanding of it. There was nothing so special about that. But the past – now that was something else. And maybe the past was also a place.

  It just might be.

  The absence in my mind was a sort of portal also, a doorway into something. I understood that. I’d had time to think about that. Maybe it led to the same place as Willy did.

  Behind Willy, just outside the door to the office where he and I both sat, the others had formed up into a line and waited impatiently because it was time, and Willy took too long. Very tall Davis waited next at the door frame. He filled it with himself, looking as though in some sort of crisis, in pain. Mary, abstractly terrified, stood directly behind him, blank and pale, followed by about twenty others in a loose but orderly cue, each in their own states of distress or acceptance. The cabinet below and to my left held several plastic medisets, each with a particular resident’s name Sharpied onto it. There were close to fifty in all, one for everybody. Each set contained that resident’s pills for the day, morning, midday and night, for each day of the week. I was not qualified to fill these containers, but it was my job to empty them and to give each handful of pills to its designated resident. The resident’s job was to then eat the pills, either all at once or one at a time, however they liked to do it. This is what Willy did. And instead of crying, he stood up and summarily left the room without another word, making room for the next in line.

  “Davis,” I said, “hello. Please.” I waved him inside. I did not like Davis. I tried not to let this show. I did not know what it was about Davis that made me so dislike him, but I didn’t.

  Davis was a very tall man. He loomed. He bent. He sort of angled his way into the office as Willy left it, flowing around him like a fish, and dropped himself into the plastic chair across from me inelegantly and in slow motion. The short-cut hair at the top of his head stood in dark, soft spikes and his eyes were dull fish-eyes and also dark. He stared up at me – or rather, down at me – with those dull, dumb fish-eyes like he was waiting for me to feed him.

  “How are you, Davis?”

  “Good.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  I gave him his plastic case full of pills and he swallowed them one at a time, each with a separate drink of water to help it down, each tossed languidly into his fish-pursed lips and gulped with a great undulation of his throat and bulging Adam’s apple. As I put his mediset back to its place in the cabinet, he asked me, “Can I get a cigarette?”

  “Sure, Davis, sure.” I took three from the pack of generic king full-flavor cigarettes, one of several marked with his name in pen. If we didn’t dole his cigarettes out to him this way, his whole week’s supply disappeared within an hour. “There you go,” I
said.

  “Thangyew.” Exit Davis.

  “Hello, Mary.”

  She sat herself down, eyes forward, watching me the whole while, face ashen and blank with mute, numb horror. “How are you?”

  “Bio means brains.”

  “What’s that?” I leaned forward. She handed me a scrap of torn paper. On it was written, in shaky cursive pencil, Bio means brains.

  “Let’s see, here…” I bent into the open cabinet beside me and found her medications. In the murky light of the office, everything looked to be saturated in smoke, the colors pulled off, made dun, everything moving slowly and submerged. Mary sat bolt still and staring. She did not move at all. She smelled of nicotine. I handed her the container and she did not blink, not once, but rolled her dry eyes down to watch what her own hands did as they pried the plastic lid apart and fumbled out her pills. There were seven of them, some large, others small, most white, one pallid yellow. She tossed the whole lot of them into her mouth at once and they were gone.

  “Thank you, Mary.”

  “Thank you, Tom.”

  When Eugene entered, he blustered the bulk of his gut into the chair. “I had Pepsi I had three Diet Pepsis and hotcakes and sausage and eggs at IHOP I went to IHOP and had hotcakes with eggs and syrup the waiter was an asshole I told him FUCK YOU YOU ASSHOLE and he told me to leave he was an asshole so I told him FUCK YOU FUCK YOU they said I have to leave I had hotcakes and a Pepsi three Pepsis Diet Pepsi am I a bad person do you think I’m a bad person is that what you…?” His eyes flashed up at me.

  “I think you drink too many sodas, Eugene. It’s not good for you to have so much soda.”

  “It is not I do not are you calling me an asshole fuck you fuck you you shouldn’t say that I am not a bad person that waiter was an asshole fuck you asshole are you calling me a Nazi?”

  “It’s okay, Eugene.”

  “Okay bye.”