New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  Upstairs I found Willy exiting his room, pulling the door click-shut behind while he edged himself out, and though I said hello as he passed, he would only look at me sidelong through rolled eyes while he walked around me, slowly descending the stairs in solemn profile.

  At corners, exit signs glowed dull red from the ceiling where they hung block-like and institutional. I checked doors. I sniffed around corners. I put my hand to the wall and felt the stickiness of its cracked white paint. Nothing. Nothing. The two communal bathrooms of the upper floor were both open and empty and clean enough. Nothing nothing nothing. Good.

  Downstairs, the dining room made a humming noise. The fluorescent tubes in the ceiling above flickered and buzzed. Plastic chairs waited at empty, linoleum-topped tables, arranged over a floor of black and white checkerboard squares. The coffeemaker sat ready to one side; glimmering metal and two empty, orb-shaped pots, each with a small amount of stained water at the bottom. The kitchen door was closed and locked, its shuttered service window also locked. I took my keys from my pocket and unlocked it, pulling the spring-taut door aside with difficulty. Its tight space inside contained a flattop grill and four burners, also an oven, sink, and countertop. These were the cleanest surfaces in all the house, though they too were scuffed and worn, the metal scratched, the counters gouged. The shelves above held boxes, cans, packages of various sorts, also a small portable stereo, while those below kept cleaning supplies, pots and pans. In the next room whirred four refrigerators and a freezer, all domestic models, all donated and therefore as mismatched as everything else in the house. Against the far wall rested a washer and a dryer, each badly mangled but running, though for now still and silent, almost pensively so. Another set of stairs out of this cement-floored room led back up and out next to the office. A look to the left and I saw again the TV room: The Late Show was done, now it was The Late Late Show on the set, and a collection of heads and bodies occupied most chairs. Davis was still asleep on the longest couch. To my right was the front door, where outside sat Henry, who had known to turn his tape player down without my having to tell him, though still I could hear its saccharine hymnals across the barrier and wondered, not for the first time, what sort of bastard church produced music as awful as that. Willy turned circles at the edge of the porch. He would do so all night. Cigarette smoke curled and drifted in the yellow porchlight. I rounded the corner in through the office door and met a face, round, wide and brightly painted, turned and staring up at me from a doughy body, sat in the chair just inside.

  Rose waited. She’d been waiting. She’d sat facing the empty desk until I’d arrived.

  •

  “Rose,” I said, “hello.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Is it your roommate?”

  “I keep feeling forces move through me.” Her huge pink face puckered, lavender eyelids flapping like butterfly wings under a loosely wound pile of deep black hair. Once her eyes had stopped flapping, she stared at me with them wide and open, now unblinking. “I think they are the demons.”

  “What is it we normally give you to help you sleep? Let me see.”

  “Diazepam.”

  “Good God, what’s this in your set, here…”

  “It’s the pink one. No, it’s the blue one.”

  “Right, it’s these. Try one, and if that doesn’t work…”

  “Have you seen me dance?”

  “Rose. No. I don’t want to see you dance.”

  “I was a dancer, and then I was in danger. I was a danger-dancer, ha! And now, if I lie still, the forces come and they move through me. They come down from the ceiling. I’m sure they must be demons. They come for my spirit, but I won’t let them have it. But I will dance for you.”

  “Rose. No.”

  “That’s alright, Proteus.” She blinked, finally. I handed her the small, blue pill, whatever it was, the one from the separate box in her mediset marked for sleep. She accepted it as it rolled from the plastic box, fell across a small space, and landed into her palm. She took the pill with water, then tossed her small Dixie cup to the garbage and remained, staring forward, almost, sort of, at me. Something in her face changed, just slightly, but still she wouldn’t leave.

  “Rose, I have –”

  “I can’t go back there.”

  “Rose, you –”

  “You think you know what it’s like but you don’t know.”

  “Rose, I –”

  “When the demons come for me they take my body.”

  “Rose!”

  She looked at me.

  “I have work I need to do. Please, go.”

  She stood, smiled, blinked her purple eyes, revealing cracks in thick-caked eyeshadow, and left.

  •

  The portable stereo on the shelf emitted a blue glow from its diodes as evidence that it was still on, and as the absence of Rose settled in the room, some moments after she’d left it, I could hear again those noises that it made, the low voices, professionally attuned.

  “…in our last hour, we hear from investigative reporter Sandra Song, today reporting from the United Kingdom, following up on this season’s spate of crop-circle developments. Many of these have occurred and are even now occurring in the immediate area. Is that not right, Sandra?”

  “That is absolutely right, William,” came a woman’s voice, warbled and insistent, distressed by the telephone connection. “This summer has been an especially busy one for the circle-makers here in England, whatever or whoever they may actually be. As I believe you and many of your listeners are aware, the farmlands of Wiltshire have had, since the early 1980s, the highest concentration in the world of these enigmatic designs. Usually these circles are focused around the ancient megalithic sites of Stonehenge, Avebury, and nearby Silbury Hill. This year, the fields near this small, rural village of Devizes, where I am today, seventeen miles north and west from Stonehenge, is for some reason the locus of circle-making activity in England.

  “I’d come to the English countryside, as I do each year, to do on-the-ground research, both of the designs themselves – and I’ll have more on that in a moment – and to report on the efforts of investigators who also come to this region each year, who take samples for analysis, who take photographs, and who observe, if possible, the appearance of these designs in the fields.

  “William, let me tell you, this year has been a stunner! Certainly, in the –”

  “I HAD A… I HAD DR. PEPPER. DIET PEPSI. I HAD TWO DIET PEPSIS.”

  “Eugene, hello. Sit down, if you like.”

  He did. He lowered his gut and himself slowly into the plastic chair, eyes wide and staring and fixed on my own, as if in challenge.

  The voice on the radio crept back into the momentary quiet: “– able to witness myself several of the ‘balls of light’ phenomenon which are often reported –”

  “PANCAKES. PANCAKES. PANCAKES and sausage and eggs and waffles and Pepsi Diet Pepsi Diet Dr. Pepper. I like waffles better than pancakes I like soda I like sausage WAFFLES AND PANCAKES WAFFLES AND SAUSAGE MAPLE SYRUP AND BLUEBERRY SYRUP RASPBERRY SYRUP –”

  “I need for you to calm down, Eugene. Quiet your voice. People are trying to sleep… Because it’s night.”

  Eugene sat staring forward and said nothing. His head, and his bulging eyes with it, spasmed a little to one side, then back, toward me. Then something loomed behind him, appearing into the doorframe, around its edge, bent and dark. “Can I get a cigarette?” the shape asked – Davis, awakened, needing this.

  “– of the English research and publishing group Circlespotters, who’d been camping in this particular field –”

  “Sure, Davis, just a… hold on just a…” I folded myself over to reach into the low cabinet, found Davis’s slot with his three packs of cigarettes, tipped and shook from the opened and half-empty one three of those, and then knocked the back of my head against the underside of the table straightening back up. “Oof!”

  And I would reach my hand forward
to touch it, to touch the object, and I would remember why I’m here, except that I won’t find it. It’s gone. It’s just a shape now, hung in the air, a shape inside, not even that. It’s too long gone. I can’t even imagine the thing anymore, what it looks like, what it… what it means. What could anything like that mean? I know it’s the wrong word, but I haven’t got any other. Shake it off, I tell myself, this space it’s left inside me, the ache, the gnawing ache of what’s missing, shake it away…

  I dropped three cigarettes into the palm stretched smudged and open toward me from across the desk. “Thangew,” said Davis and he slouched off toward the porch, its screen door banging shut behind him. The back of my head revealed its soreness by degrees, an aperture opening toward pain, so I felt at it with my hand, looking for a new bump or possibly blood. This, the skull-shape, the thing I recognized, it was close to what I needed, but not the same. A similar shape, but different, not the same.

  Eugene, bug-eyed, burst out from temporary stillness, “I WENT I WENT TO IHOP…” then settled back into fragility. I had nothing to offer, nothing to add, no further questions, nothing. He was a body without a ghost, and I was looking at him. Or was it a ghost with no body? Either way. The pieces were separated. His nostrils flared. Eugene did not smoke.

  “– the group had situated themselves to be facing in the wrong direction at the very moment the circle appeared –”

  •

  “Is there coffee yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you making some?”

  “No.”

  “Will you be making some?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? Soon?”

  “Soon.”

  “When?”

  Through the yellow door and shuttered counter window, I ignored the voice, cracking eggs, one after another, thirty altogether, a whole flat. I piled the shell-halves back on themselves into a nook on the cardboard flat. The egg-liquid and yellow-eye yolks dropped into a bowl and floated, staring up.

  “When?”

  “Go away.”

  Bits of shell in the fluid. Goddammit.

  I found a butter knife to be a more effective means of scrambling this many eggs than a wire whisk, although I knew that it was wrong. A professional cook would look at what I was doing and tell me, that’s wrong, that’s what the whisk is for. The problem I found was with the yolks, which could evade a whisk through being slippery. They would see it coming and slide out of the way, some of them, but a dull knife simply sliced right through them before they knew what happened. In the bowl, the ruptured yolkstu? blurred and bled through both the clear and clouded white.

  “When will you make the coffee?”

  “Later. Go away.”

  The kitchen’s small space was a better sanctuary than the office. Its doors were kept closed and locked. My time here was holy time, breakfast-making time. It was mine. I started early.

  If I could put my face up against the edge of it… I tried to remember, was it cold? Was that how I remember, that it was cold? My face against it. Or do I just imagine, because I don’t know?

  And every empty man and woman will stand awake and staring, and they will face into the rising sun, and they will sing the morning music of the sun, the hollow music, the music made of wood and numbers, sung in hollow numbers, melded into harmonies, of seconds and of semitones, facing toward the blackness, acknowledging the blackness, acknowledging space, the darkness of the empty form, and they will know this, they will know about this, they will understand they are alive and knowing now about this.

  I stood back and looked at everything, the arrangement, the mise en place. Pancake batter, mixed and waiting in a jug. Eggs broken and scrambled. The oven now was hot and ready for two sheet trays of bacon already set into even rows; I’d put the hotel pan of eggs to cook in a bath of water, a double boiler, a trick the guy who trained me had shown me for making large amounts of scrambled egg. I used margarine to grease the edges because we didn’t keep any butter – too much saturated fat, they said. What about the partially-hydrogenated blah-blah, I could’ve told them, but who would listen? I’d start the oatmeal soon, but not too soon, because it turns to gelid mush if it’s on the heat too long.

  Vivianne was a shape in the darkness of my imagination, and I could picture her: her body turned, slightly twisting at the hips, her dark hair, straight down and hanging past her shoulders, down her back. I could picture her, but I couldn’t talk to her, not here. She was facing away. Here, she was silent and unmoving. She faced away.

  There was a splotch of egg spilled onto the linoleum counter. I would make the coffee now. If I made the coffee sooner, they would only drink it sooner. They would drink it all day long, and all night, and this was a bad idea. But the coffee people, for now at least, would be happy.

  •

  Passing Willy in the foyer as he turned his circles (all night and all day, did the man never sleep?) and as too-bright morning sunlight pushed through the speckled window from the porch, I found Wade in the office when I returned from making breakfast. He sat behind the desk in a daylight muted red through the thick curtains, checking the entries that I and Vivianne before me had written into the logbook. Wade kept his hair short, like mine, shorn and close to the skull. His head was an egg-shape, also like mine. We could have been brothers. When I entered, he looked up, glasses perched at the end of his nose, bookishly effective.

  “Good morning, Proteus.”

  “Wade. Hello.”

  “Much of a night?”

  “No, not much, nothing to speak of.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.” I sat down into the facing chair. There was something I was going to ask him, something I was supposed to ask him, but I couldn’t think of what. “Oh, right…” I said aloud, surprising myself, “there was that matter between Davis and Henry. The fork.”

  “The fork. I saw this here.” He wiggled the notebook in the air.

  “I wasn’t here when it happened. I didn’t see it.”

  Wade squinted at me over his glasses.

  “So I don’t really know,” I continued, “but I did check Henry’s bandages. The wound isn’t bad. It didn’t look infected or… or anything. Just like a wound. A wound you’d get with a fork.”

  “If somebody stabbed you with it.”

  “Right. He seemed alright. They kept apart the whole night. I didn’t keep them apart, but they kept apart and didn’t fight. All night. When he wasn’t smoking, Davis was on the couch.” I didn’t want to admit how normal that part of it was.

  “Not smoking.”

  “Right, when he wasn’t out smoking.” None of this was what I’d meant to ask him about, but I couldn’t think of what that was. “Henry listened to his music, his weird-as-shit gospel music, and then he went to bed, or he just disappeared, I don’t know, and then nothing happened.”

  “All night?”

  “All night, nothing happened.”

  “So there was a lot of that.”

  “Of nothing happening, yes. And I can’t help but wonder, what sort of church is that?”

  “What church?”

  “Of Henry’s,” I said, “that has gospel music that horrible. I mean, that’s really horrible, that stuff. It’s like dried-out marshmallows, the kind you’ve dropped behind something, behind the refrigerator, and then find six years later. Really horrible, like nothing at all.”

  “Nothing is that horrible.”

  “Nothing is worse than that.”

  “How was…” He hesitated. “How did Vivianne seem to you?”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Right. How was she?”

  I had to think about this. “She seemed… she seemed like Vivianne. She seemed okay.”

  “She wasn’t…”

  “No,” I said, “she wasn’t.”

  Wade looked off to the side, as if searching for something. He was a little older than myself. He could’ve been my older brother. Someday, I thought, I could be like t
his too, looking off to one side, searching for things.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good.”

  “Yes. Good. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought she… Never mind. It’s nothing.”

  I looked into his squinting eyes, which flicked between me and the logbook. “Wade, you’re not…”

  “Of course not. You are, that’s obvious. But I’m not. Besides, I’m…”

  “Yeah, I know. I knew that. I know. It’s just that, I mean, you seem…”

  “It’s not that. It’s something else.”

  “Something. What?”

  “Something…” Wade mumbled, burrowing into a stack of binders piled up beside him on the desk.

  I picked up a pencil. Its eraser was a blunted, blackened nub. I tried to balance it on its tip at the edge of the desk and was unsuccessful. It dropped with a wooden clattering, so I stared at it for a moment as if I couldn’t understand what it was – which in fact, for a moment, I really couldn’t. “Okay then,” I announced and stood. I gathered up my backpack, shouldered it, and faced toward Wade as he peered up at me past his glasses, eyebrows upraised.

  “…”

  “…”

  “Okay, bye.”

  •

  Out on the street, I took one last look behind me at Inn House Manor, which stood in the sun a faded red, a red-painted block of brick and stone and wood that crawled with people. Willy’d moved out to the porch, to his satellite spot at the corner where he turned. Mary’s face peered through the ragged, weedy shrubs, wrapped in lingering smoke. Aside from these two, the others out now were all day people, and I didn’t recognize many of them. The night people had gone away and these were a different crew.

  I stepped along the sidewalk and crossed Madison, a street more hectic and unlikeable by day than in the dark. It was nearly a two-mile walk back to my apartment, and the fug of the morning hung on me. It was under my skin and stuck to my eyes. I felt less tired than an all-over hurt. The small and eager chirrupings of birds in lonesome daybreak had been lost by now to the full-on morning rev and tumble and racket and summer heat, the unmitigated sunshine, cars with their drivers pulled up at the light, pedestrians and bus people with cardboard cups of lidded coffee, waiting, moving forward, waiting again, sucking at the coffee. Past Madison the air thinned out. Trees overhung city blocks of small houses, a leafy density that speckled the pavement in shadows and splotches of light. It was quiet here, more or less, and green, and I liked it better. I wove a zig-zag pattern through the neighborhood, block by block, avoiding the main streets.