New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  I am alive, but I don’t know it. Foot skipped and I nearly tripped over something, couldn’t see what. Crack in the. I am alive, but don’t know that I’m alive, and the sun is missing. There was a something about the sky. A something. I looked up and the sun was blotted out by a vast metal wrecking ball. Who knew? That the sun could be knocked out of the sky like that? No, not that, there was something else. The sky was always there, yes, but it was different. Full of holes, full of potential… what? Something. There were no clouds. There were no clouds but the smallest, barest hints of clouds, more like thoughts about clouds, the things themselves not formed, Neoplatonic, ideal, but unable to take shape in this impossible sky-condition. But for all that potential cloud-shape, there was something – something in the gradient perhaps, a second self, a second sun, a thing unseen. I’ll take a camera to the sky I’ll take a picture –

  There was a game that I had begun to play, I don’t know when it started, in which I ask myself a question and then I answer it, as if I were two people, as if I were me and I were also me.

  – of what I can’t see that’s what I’ll do. I’ll take a picture of the thing that isn’t there.

  I ask myself a question: Hey, Proteus, what is that face? The one staring back at us?

  I answer the question: That is not your face. That is not my face. That is not a face at all. That is No Face. The thing in the mirror is NO FACE. It is the sky where the sun was knocked out. It’s the big hole, the spot at the center, it’s nothing. It is the NOFACE the OFFACE the OFFICE it is OFFICER and I daresay that zero spot seems FRIENDLY, don’t you think? It smiles. Smiling back at us, blank, simple, undefined. These are the real people, these are the soul police; here is an OFFICER of the mind. Let’s just say. A FRIENDLY if pensive man, the surest means of defense against stupidity, timidity, turgidity, fluidity, a strong reminder to floss daily, and to keep your fingers clean. Listen, small man, you will keep your nose shiny, your head square, your hands by your sides and visible at all times. Hold still. Don’t let him see us. There will be trouble if he sees us.

  He sees us!

  FIVE

  The Ultraworld!

  [1994] (Hollywood, CA)

  Was it not the same between the one place and the other, the inside and the outer? For instance: Dirty D’s Donut Hole was brightly lit inside, though you wouldn’t recognize this for all the natural sunlight that bounced off the chrome and stainless steel and bright, vivid color, rendering the fluorescents for all practical purposes useless, or at least unnecessary. Sunlight rebounded everywhere, in every direction and all at once. For this reason the Donut Hole was a hole without shadows. So much light found its way inside because the outer walls were made entirely of glass (which gave the impression, while inside, of living in a fishbowl) and every inner surface that was not shiny metal was covered instead in linoleum, bright, bright orange. Dirty D’s was a high-albedo Hole, a retro-styled space-age hole like a spot in the sky, like a rocket held in orbit around the sun, only full of doughnuts – and these were, almost uncontestedly, by any scale that mattered, the best doughnuts in the entirety of greater Los Angeles.

  Though architectural irony was not much to OFFICER FRIENDLY’s liking, he was more than willing to endure any aesthetic embarrassment (and the danger of sunburn) for the sake of what was inside it. Jun-suh, the owner of Dirty D’s (though not its first) was a recognized artist of the form. Everyone knew this, if they knew anything, though even if they didn’t it would hardly matter. OFFICER FRIENDLY was not one to let either fashion or public opinion guide his taste. Moreover, he knew when something was good; he knew it for himself, when he found it. He needed no one to tell him these things.

  “Jun-suh,” he said, calling across the floor from where he sat waiting at his table, a little pensive, more than a little impatient.

  “OFFICER FRIENDLY.” The man was in the kitchen. His back was to the store. His back was in his work. He worked over the boiling oil.

  “I’m afraid to ask, Jun-suh. But I have to. I need to know.”

  “You will know, OFFICER FRIENDLY, when you know. You will know this no sooner.”

  “The thing is…”

  “You see the case is half-full, OFFICER FRIENDLY. You do not need to wait. If you choose to wait, this is what you have chosen. Besides, you know how this works. You know.”

  “But this thing…”

  “You want perfection? There is no perfection. There is only the striving, the effort, the inevitable failure. What we arrive at is something in between. We arrive at a place in the mind. You, you, are a place in the mind. You know this, of all things. A letter that is written, but never sent. Also something that you know, you have to wait. To do this, the waiting is necessary. This is about space, OFFICER FRIENDLY, and space is at least in part about time. ‘Space is the place,’ is what immortal Sun Ra tells us. Space is a place in the mind, as are you. Space is therefore in the past, where is our place. In the mind. So, you wait. Things take their form. I make the doughnuts. Things take their form. This also happens in the mind.”

  The policeman pouted. It would have been an ugly thing to see, had anyone seen it, but he was for the moment alone in the store’s dining area, his body wedged into the bright orange bench, the orange, orange table before him supporting his elbows, his head in his hands. His eyes roved, looking for something to distract his mind from the waiting. Outside, cars rolled up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. They stopped at the traffic lights and they waited also, like him, flat in the sunlight, bleeding with exhaust. It was rare to see anyone on foot out here actually walking anywhere, not simply crossing a parking lot from their car to the building, from their car to the doughnut shop itself maybe, so this stick figure who walked up the empty sidewalk stood out, his flop hat drooping colorless over the bone of his head like something wax and melting in the sun, as did also the man’s rag of denim jacket, like a sad sort of flag, flappy and wind-dragged, draped over his body of bones, and his baggy, hole-worn and spot-stained jeans, bone-leg jutting forward, one and then the other, knobs of knees white spots showing through the holes, his feet all but tripping over their own toes with each shuffling slow and effortful shamble-step. His progress was, one might say, unhurried. He emerged from the haze-distance into the near field a little at a time, as if slowly pulled into focus through OFFICER FRIENDLY’s long eyeball lens.

  As the stickman passed just outside the window, the policeman rapped the glass from inside with his knuckles. The sound was hollow and dull, but reverberant, and the stickman stopped; he turned his head and looked toward the noise, incurious and hollow-eyed, jowls sagging toward the pavement. OFFICER FRIENDLY waved the man inside – come on! come on! – and though at first he only stared, as if uncomprehending, after a moment he turned and stepped through the swinging door (its bell went ding!) and approached the table resignedly, where he stood, gape-jawed.

  “Hello, Willy,” the policeman said.

  “Officer,” the raggedy stick-man replied hoarsely.

  “Please, have a seat.” OFFICER FRIENDLY indicated a seat for Willy to have, and once he’d sat himself in it (which took some doing, as the bending and lowering of himself into the empty chair, attached immovably at the base of the table, was a stiff and evidently painful process) he said, “I would like to have a word with you, Willy.”

  “Trouble? Officer?”

  “You’re not in any trouble, Willy. Not at all. I just want to ask you about something.”

  “Thing.”

  “I want for you to tell me about the future.”

  Willy blinked his bloodshot eyes, his wet and bloodshot eyes.

  “I’m hoping that you can tell me what you see. In the future.”

  Willy blinked. It seemed at first that he may not have understood. He looked first to the right, and then he looked to the left. Then he looked inside himself. He understood. He closed his eyes and lowered his head and he thought. OFFICER FRIENDLY could see the stickman thinking. When again he looked up, his h
ands held up and open before him, skinny forearms hovering all atremble, he said, with conviction and with weight, so unlike the Willy-normal, he said, “Doughnuts.”

  •

  It was OFFICER FRIENDLY’s turn now to blink. “Doughnuts, Willy?”

  Willy said nothing more, but held OFFICER FRIENDLY in his wet and unfocused gaze, his hands still held out, palms up, trembling.

  “Fresh doughnuts!” said Jun-suh, making the policeman jump, who had not seen the owner approach. But when the man set a paper plate with one fresh and still-hot, if unglazed, cake doughnut in front of him, OFFICER FRIENDLY’s mouth started to water immediately. His eyes were fixed to the thing. Fine sprinkles of sugar stuck and dissolved in the heat of its lightly browned, yeastrisen skin.

  Jun-suh then, considerately, set a second plate with a similar doughnut in front of Willy, who didn’t seem to know what to do with the thing. He stared through it as though it were invisible.

  “What is perfect is imperfect. What is imperfect is true.” Jun-suh bowed slightly and stepped away, returning to the kitchen.

  OFFICER FRIENDLY poked his doughnut with a finger, pushing it and the plate a little with the attack. Willy only stared through his. “Okay,” the policeman said at last, “What else?”

  Willy’s eyes flicked up at him and down again, and then once more. And then, again, he disappeared inside of himself. When he spoke, he seemed resigned to something, saddened in a way that the officer would not have expected of him. He leaned far forward, bent all but double over the table, all but crushing his own fresh doughnut, and he said –

  •

  (What Willy said:)

  “In the future, you make me make the world. I don’t want to do this, but you don’t care. And then, after that, after you’ve made me make the world, and once everyone has gone away, even after you have gone away, there will be nothing left, and you will be inside-out. You… you will see a thing. This thing will see you. So you will be inside-out. It brings the person to you. You will know the person when you see the person, because by then everyone else will be a ghost. There will be no one real near you. The person also won’t be near you. The person will be a person, and not a ghost. The person will be you. The person will not be a person. He will still be you. He is an inside-out person, the same as you. He is you. No one will come near him. Nobody comes near you. The people who surround you will have to keep their distance, because you will make them go away, and they know this. But the people who surround you will already be half-lost. That’s what maybe they don’t know, that they’re half-lost, and what maybe they do know. It depends. These people look the same as you. They look like you, they act like you. But they’re not you. Not the way that the person who is not a person, who is you, is you. This person doesn’t look like you at all. No. Not at all. He will try to look a little bit like you, but it doesn’t work. But this isn’t the question, should the person look like you. He should not look like you. The question is, where do the people all go when they go away? I’ll tell you. They go here. Here is where they go. This is the place. They go from you, to you, from there to here. That’s one reason, after everything that’s happened, why the city is so full. You’ve noticed how full the city is, how full it’s getting, even now, after everything that’s happened. You’d think that people would all go away. It’s in their own interests to go away. But they don’t. People keep coming, they keep filling the city. This city is full of people who went from there to here, and the people who are not there will all be here. They will fill the sky. Even some of the people who are there will also be here. But this city, this place, it is not a place. This is no place. This is a place. And that’s why.”

  •

  OFFICER FRIENDLY sat back and looked at the man bent so severely before him, whose upper body was contorted across the table. Willy looked like a man who’d been hit, who’d been beaten with a stick or maybe run over by a car, though neither of these things had happened, and everything he’d said, he’d spoken into the table, spoken so softly, directed at the table itself and not at him, not at OFFICER FRIENDLY. It made him feel a little sick.

  “I’ve never known you, Willy,” he said, “to be so… well-spoken. Although I can’t say I’ve understood anything of what you’ve just told me. Except maybe that part about making the world – because I think I get that. Because the world… it doesn’t exist yet, does it? So yes, someone would have to make it.”

  Willy unbent himself and sat up, looking wetly at the policeman, not quite into his eyes but maybe just ahead of them.

  OFFICER FRIENDLY said, “When we had the riots, you were living in the streets. Weren’t you, Willy?”

  Willy said nothing.

  “Something happened to you then, didn’t it? Something that hadn’t happened to you already.”

  Willy still said nothing, so OFFICER FRIENDLY took a bite of his doughnut. Eating it was just like eating a doughnut, but it was also not like eating a doughnut, as if the act were somehow removed from itself. Once he’d swallowed it, he thought about this, about how something was missing from the act, as if that something were missing from the doughnut itself, although he knew that was not where the problem really lay. After a moment, he said, “You’re not a person to go places, are you, Willy? You’re a person to stay where you are. I look at you and this is something I understand about you, because I’ve known you for how long now? For two years? Yes? Since the riots, since then, I’ve seen you walking up and down the streets, like you came out of nowhere. But the riots changed things, Willy. They might look the same now as they were before, more or less, but they’re not. We know this much about things, you and I. Something happened to me then, too, Willy. I’ve never talked about this to anyone, so I hope you can understand, even just a little. I was just a rookie cop at the time. It was my first year, barely even that. I was barely out of the academy, and I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t even know why I’d become a cop. You’d think that might be something a person ought to know, why they choose to become something, but really, I didn’t. I was just a person, I was just there, and now suddenly I was a cop. But when the riots started…” He got a faraway look, and went a little slack-jawed.

  Willy said nothing.

  “And when they kept happening, for days and days… and glass was breaking everywhere – a place like this, had it been standing then, it would’ve looked like candy to that mob – and then fires, and the looting, everyone shooting at everyone, and people just dying for nothing, for raw and naked anger, for rage, and nothing… and you fire teargas into a crowd, or you fire your gun into a crowd, and somebody, you don’t know who, crumples up onto the pavement and dies, and none of it makes any difference, and then… Look, you live with the fact of what you’ve done, or of what you haven’t done, and it’s the same, and I still can’t sleep at night. It was my job. I couldn’t do my job, I couldn’t do anything. But what I did… It’s been two years, and I still can’t sleep. I couldn’t then, and I still don’t. That’s absolutely the fact – I haven’t slept in nearly two years. And whatever I might have been before that happened, I’m not that now. That person went somewhere far away. Now it’s me here instead, you understand, and I’m no better than that other guy, except that I will never again think, not even for a minute, that something like that can’t happen, or that I can’t react to it the way that I did. Can you appreciate even a little of what I’m telling you, Willy?”

  Willy didn’t look at him – almost he did, but not quite – and he stood slowly from the table, twisting his lank and bone-severe frame of a body to remove himself a piece at a time from the chair, and then, without once looking back, as if the policeman were a thing out of sight and mind now both, or were never there, he shuffled out of the store and back onto the street, the glass door swinging shut behind him, and he continued ahead slowly, moving on, passing along by the window where OFFICER FRIENDLY sat and watched, just as he had before OFFICER FRIENDLY’d stopped him, no different now for stopping, no dif
ferent for anything, leaving behind his doughnut, a thing of no consideration whatever, a circle on a paper plate, closed and perfect, a thing beyond itself, closing in on itself, infinite.

  SIX

  The World

  [2005]

  When I got back to the studio apartment I flopped facedown onto the futon mattress that I used for a bed. The heat was stupid, the light was stupid, nothing moved. I was thankful for that, the lack of movement, the lack of sound. Within fifteen seconds the telephone rang.

  “I’m sorry, Wade,” I said into the handset. “What did I forget?”

  “Who is Wade?” said the voice at the other end, blurring the words together. WhoisWade?

  “What did I forget?”

  “I’m calling for Proteus.” The voice talked fast. Really fast. I’mcallingforProteus.

  “My name is n-nuh…” I started, but couldn’t finish. All the words had abandoned me, and the will to speak. “This… is…” I tried. Again, emptiness. I faced into a void. “Yes,” I finally managed.

  “I’m sorry is this a bad time I don’t know who Wade is.” I could hear the lack of punctuation. I’msorryisthisabadtimeIdon’tknowwhoWadeis.

  “Yes. No. It’s fine. This is good. Who are…?”

  “My name is [something unintelligible – the voice skipping too quickly over familiar syllables] and I got your number from Joe Reading.”

  “Joe Reading,” I said.

  “Not me,” said the voice, “but he gave me your number I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling you like this I’m not sure if I’m getting through do you understand?”