New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  The young woman seemed to gather herself together again. She stood and went to the closet, where she rooted around for something behind the plastic stack of drawers, and in a moment I saw what it was: a tall waterpipe. I watched as she sniffed the contraption, then pulled her face away in disgust. It was made of a blue glass and stood about two feet tall. Nothing terribly fancy about, just a simple, functional bong. She carried it to the kitchen sink and dumped out the contents of murky, brown water, ran the tap to flush it down. Then she filled it again with fresh water, checking the level through the glass. Satisfied with the results, she carried it back to the papasan chair – Finch nimbly jumped out of the way before she could sit on him – where she took a small packet from her pants pocket and fished out a scrap of green substance, then put it into the bowl of her pipe. She didn’t seem to think anything of finding her lighter on the floor near her feet, which was where Finch had left it, not her. Perhaps in her world lighters had a way of just being where she needed them. But with it, she lit the pipe and sucked hard through the burbling water. She held it. She held it. She held it for a very long time in her lungs, and then let it escape as the muscles in her face relaxed by degrees.

  As the cloud settled through the still air of the room, finding buoyancy at the level of slight currents it contained, she said, quietly, in all but a whisper, yet loud enough that we could hear, “I can’t see you.”

  I gave Finch a look, and he gave me one as well.

  She said it again, and more slowly this time, lingering on the pauses between words. “I. Can’t. See. You.”

  How could you, I thought. Your eyes are closed.

  But then she opened them and stared forward, not at me, not at Finch, her eyes fixed on nothing but the space ahead of her. “I can’t see you,” she said once more, “but I know that you’re here. I want for you to go away now.”

  EIGHT

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  Once the Ignatius! coffee! Co! was closed for the evening, in those moments just after the autumn sun’s sudden diminution behind those western peaks that framed, distantly, the valley beneath, Proteus, walking in the crepuscular sudden chill, made his way up one block vertical and two more over, all the way to the other end of town, to the Infinite Eye, the upscale art gallery owned and run by Mary Margaret, which served de facto as set dressing to her real-estate office and other concerns. For a moment, he stood outside and studied the gallery’s facade, so modernist and minimal, its lines and planes so clean and sleek, yet substantial, made from brick and stone; heavy, solid substance, like Mary Margaret herself. It stood apart from the preserved, historic style of the rest of the remaining buildings in this way, no doubt in an excepted violation of the strict local building codes. Mary Margaret had pull. Its separateness was made even more distinct by the crumbled edifices to either side, attached. Or rather, detached, in piles of rubble. Proteus watched for movement inside. He watched for shifts in the light. He saw neither of these things.

  The heavy front doors, framed in wood and paneled in glass, did not chime as he opened them. He moved through and into the warm space. It was not a large space, though it was divided by a single extra wall into separate display rooms, the entryway being one of these. Demarcated by this central, free-standing, non-load-bearing wall, which was centered and about seven feet back from the entrance, open symmetrically at either end to allow passage into the interior space, the gallery now had extra display surface both for the street-facing entrance gallery – essentially a huge window display – and for the open gallery space behind it, which paradoxically made the entire shop look bigger than it would without the additional barrier.

  The paintings on display were not those of anyone whose name he recognized, but they were top quality, the product of accomplished talent, if somewhat disturbing – impressionistic portraits in lurid colors, thick with paint, of people he felt that he should know, their heads distended and misshapen, features askew, eyes like those of freshly killed trout. These subjects were warped as if through a lens of nacreous goo, with wide brushstrokes and demented fury.

  “Pavlov,” said Mary Margaret – who’d appeared from nowhere beside him – into his nearest ear, “like the one who makes dogs drool. But not the same one.”

  “This is the artist?” Proteus asked, recovering from his surprise.

  “Yes. Nikolai Pavlov. Despite the name, he’s local. He lives in the valley. He’s from Georgia originally – the country, not the state. What do you think? Do you like them?”

  “I do. Very much.” He looked at the price tag of this first piece, and the small red dot of a sticker beside it.

  “You should have seen the opening party the other night. Most of these pieces sold right off the bat.”

  “You don’t say.” He wondered to whom, but didn’t say as much. The number of digits on the price tag made him slightly queasy.

  “You’re here for the keys to the Warehouse?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Okay, great. I’ve decided you’re not so much squatting as care-taking the property. That’s how I’ll present it, anyhow, should there ever be an issue. And the terms are alright with you?”

  “The terms?”

  “The terms being that you are invisible. You’re not there, unless for some reason you are.”

  “I thought you just said –”

  “That’s if there’s an issue. There should be no issue. To make sure there’s no issue, you are invisible until further notice. It has to do with the banking and insurance requirements and the wording of legal documents. Believe me, you don’t want to know about all of that in detail, much less try and navigate it. It’s just easier to be invisible.”

  “Oh. I can do that. But I thought nobody knew who the bank was.”

  “They don’t. The bank doesn’t even know who the bank is.”

  “Then why can’t they be invisible? I mean, I’m not complaining…”

  “Well, there’s invisible and there’s invisible.”

  “And then there’s not there at all?”

  “Exactly.” Mary Margaret turned her back to him and walked around the middle wall, toward the open back space, where her desk was set dead in the center, its surface clean and uncluttered with anything but a blotter, a phone, and a nameplate.

  Proteus followed, practicing not being seen. He more sort of floated, as if his feet and legs had little to do with how he moved. He liked the feeling. “So which one am I again?”

  “You’re not there. Which means that you’re there,” she explained, looking back over her shoulder, “but nobody will know it. Not as far as the banks – any banks, any at all – are concerned. Or the law. That’s important. Don’t forget that. If the law knows, then the banks will have to know, and if the banks know, then the law will have to know also. But they won’t know, because you’ll be invisible. It’s like they can see right through you, if they were to look.”

  “And since the banks don’t know who they are, and the law is unlikely to look…”

  “You would actually know more about that end of it than me.”

  “What? How could I know any of that?”

  “I was under the impression that you were the law now.”

  “Where’d you get that impression?”

  “Word gets around.”

  “What word?”

  “That you were the law now. Congratulations. You’ve got the badge, and the gun, and all that. Don’t you?”

  They had arrived at her desk. On it was a plaque that read MARY MARGARET MARY ALICE. Four names, given, two of which were Mary.

  “Well, yeah…” Proteus admitted, “but I don’t know that that means anything. It’s not like I’ve applied for the job or anything. It’s not like I even want to.”

  “That’s for you to work out. All that I’m trying to tell you is, if you are the law, you’ll need to look the other way.”

  “And not see myself.”

  “Right. Exactly.”
>
  “It’ll be like with the bank, who doesn’t know that it is the bank.”

  “Except that you will know that you are the law. If you are. I’m assuming, anyway. In which case you’ll have to make yourself not see yourself, even if you know that you’re there. It will be tricky. You’ll have to be able to look in the mirror and not see anything. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I can do that,” Proteus said.

  She handed him a set of keys. “Great. Let’s go show you your new home.”

  •

  They walked to the edge of town and beyond it in the space of another block’s lateral movement, a connecting one-lane’s brief jog over and up, then a short residential street’s curving wraparound of the mountain’s edge, where at the dead end of the wooded block perched a smallish cement box half on stilts, half dug into the angled ground. “This is the Warehouse,” Mary Margaret proclaimed.

  “Uh huh,” Proteus tried to sound enthusiastic, though his first thoughts were, I might die here.

  The closer they came to it, the more uneven he could see that it was. The whole, simple box of a building held itself with a sense of deep weariness, a slight sag all throughout. No angle seemed quite plumb or square as maybe it once had. And if it had once been an even sandstone yellow, it now ran tears of mineral accretion over mottled gray or mud-colored walls. The building seemed to be trying to erase itself, very slowly, across the decades, and failing. What ground there was around the structure that was level was that of a cracked but serious and grim driveway, terminating at what appeared an actual loading dock in the side of the building. The place in fact was a warehouse, or at least had once been. All of one tiny window, one square of melting, wavering glass, high up in the wall, faced out to the street. Otherwise, the old gray box, some thirty by sixty or so feet on the horizontal plane and maybe fifteen feet total high, appeared to be sealed tight from the day and the night, both.

  “It’s an historic structure,” she explained, “one of the first buildings constructed after the town’s incorporation one hundred years ago. The Warehouse itself is not quite that old. It was built I think in 1910, 1912 – something like that. It might not seem like much from the outside, but wait until you’ve seen the inside.” It seemed almost as if she were trying to sell him the place, following his apparently unconvincing attempt at enthusiasm.

  But all Proteus needed was a place to sleep. He was well aware of this. However lackluster he felt about the building, he wasn’t about to complain, not intentionally, not aloud. He followed her to the front door, a massive, metal sliding thing on rollers, of which she unlocked the deadbolt with a modern key in a contemporary lock – obviously installed fairly recently – and pulled the heavy barrier aside, using her entire body’s weight to start it rolling.

  “The light switch is in here somewhere…” reaching in and feeling around the inside wall until, “Aha! There we are.” In staggered sequence, lights flickered and came by degrees on to fill the massive room in a warm illumination. A series of overhead bulbs in wide glass hoods hung from the ceiling down about a third of its total height, several of which continued to flicker and flutter as if not quite certain how willing they were to commit.

  Proteus couldn’t have said what exactly it was about the interior that changed everything for him, but he suddenly felt positively excited about the space, as if seeing it and imagining that he might exist inside of it suddenly made him come vividly alive in a way he’d forgotten that he could feel. The space was wide and open, mostly uninterrupted inside, and seemed somehow larger than the outside had let on was possible. As he stepped through the front door, he found revealed to him the simple arrangement of the kitchen area against one wall, with all the necessary, if modest, appliances just inside, and that this wall contained another room, separated off from the rest of the space.

  “You would think this room behind the kitchen is the bedroom,” Mary Margaret explained. “It’s not. What Jim used for a bedroom is the loft space just above. There’s a ladder around the corner. No, this room is a dedicated darkroom. Light tight. Jim was a photographer. Is a photographer. Wherever he’s gone to.”

  “Really?” said Proteus.

  “I not only sold him this building, but I’ve exhibited his work a number of times. He always sold well. He was a good client. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  Unlike the street-facing facade, the back wall was almost entirely picture windows, looking for now out into blackness mostly. Occasional interruptions of distant light-specks showed star-like through the murk: the window- or street-lights of distant habitations either in or across the valley. The vague shapes of tangled, arching branches hung, overreaching the emptiness, their shapes only suggested in the vestige of that evening’s fast-fading light.

  “What are these extrusions along this wall?” Proteus asked, noticing a pattern in relief, a series of long rectangles bulging just slightly out from the nearest wall’s plaster and progressing diagonally up.

  Mary Margaret turned to look, didn’t see it, then moved her square face in close to where Proteus pointed and felt along the wall. “I don’t actually know. It looks like a staircase must’ve been here once, like the steps were sawed off. Honestly, this is the first I’ve seen of it.” The two of them followed the pattern of bulges all the way up, along the wall, into the ceiling.

  “There was a what? A trap door in the roof or something?”

  “I don’t think so. None of the old, archival photographs ever showed such a thing. But back when? In the day? Who knows?”

  “Once there were stairs,” he ruminated, “that led to nowhere.”

  Mary Margaret shrugged it off and asked, “So what do you think?”

  “Think? What’s to think? This is great. Thank you.”

  She handed him the key, which seemed newly-cut. Its serrated edge was squared sharp enough still to slice through skin. “Given that this is Cleric, you’ll probably never need to lock up, but here’s this, all the same. Legally, the doors probably should be locked, but whatever. Just don’t burn the place down.”

  “Got it. Thanks again.”

  •

  After Mary Margaret’s departure, there was still some part of her that remained, like a wake that followed a ship, rolling through and over the empty spaces where Proteus now stood. He stood waiting, letting it wash over and past, just like so many echoing, small waves, eventually to ebb away, leaving him with only himself and the Warehouse, a more or less silent thing. He considered its horizons.

  There was a curious lack of furniture. In fact, there was almost nothing at all to indicate that someone had actually lived there, aside from the foam mattress that he found in the “loft” above the kitchen – no chairs, no tables, nothing couch-like. Consequently perhaps, there were also not any footstools, nor worthwhile counter spaces beyond those minimally functional to the kitchen, no cabinets… Nothing. So far as he knew, Mary Margaret hadn’t emptied the place out of the missing citizen’s personal items; things were just as the man had left them. One got the feeling, Proteus noted to himself, that this former owner Jim had just been camping out here, too. If Jim had not foreseen an abrupt departure for himself, he’d certainly put new meaning into the word “spartan.” Where, for instance, had he ever sat down?

  What the large and open space did have, by way of objects to occupy it, was a small pile of construction debris: some scraps of two by four, most cut on the bias, also a small, plastic bucket (formerly for spackle, its label explained) filled with anodized nails, some random segments of leftover drywall, and a roll of drywall tape. These were all neatly piled on the cement floor, against the one, road-facing wall.

  The kitchen was nearly as empty as the rest of the house. There was nothing edible in any of the cupboards, and the refrigerator was bare, save for a single, opened can of olives, covered with plastic wrap that was held in place by a rubber band around its top, which who knew how old that was. There were, at least, a few beat-up pots and an aluminum saut
é pan, some pieces of mismatched silverware and a rusty can opener, a wooden spoon, and finally a Mr. coffee coffee maker, its carafe stained around the bottom with etched-in residue.

  “He could’ve been me,” Proteus said aloud, and scared himself with the sound of his own voice.

  He paced the open space. The closer he got to the windows, the more he noticed the cold. If he stepped away from the windows and their impenetrable darkness, just to the other side, he didn’t feel the cold as much. The large picture windows radiated cold, though it was not, so far as he’d noticed earlier, especially chilly outside. The windows were just that way. There was also a large door at the further end of the house, where, to the other side of it, he figured, the loading dock must be. Finding the catch at the bottom, he unlatched and lifted it by the loop of strap. The door rolled noisily up in articulated segments, rollers following curving, suspended tracks to either side, opening out to the narrow strip of bumpered concrete that he’d noticed when first approaching the building. The loading dock. Or, alternately, he supposed, his new back porch.

  “We’re home,” he said, facing into the spotty, warm lights of town, again frightening himself with the sound of his own voice.

  •

  He stood again for a moment, like before, like he often had, hovering outside, considering the exterior of Lorelei’s Diner, its interiorized bodies, persons clustered in booths or scattered about in singles at the long counter – their stasis, their movement, their eating or awaiting food – all gleaming within its bath of artificial light. Beside the diner stood the Tooth Or Claw, front door shut, walls vaguely thrumming with bass notes that rattled through in a synesthetic glow of blue and purple neon; colors reflected wanly off the asphalt of the street; wanly, for it was not wet and had not been raining – not yet – these colors bound inextricably with the music, from the otherwise darkened windows. The diner, with maybe two-dozen-plus customers, was busier tonight than he’d seen it for a while, perhaps ever. There seemed to be more people in town tonight, out, or just there, as if the normally sedate Cleric nightlife were suddenly stuffed full-to-bursting, comparatively; God only knew from where these people came or what the occasion. Proteus watched Amanda, in her waitress apron, weave amongst these irregulars with an easy grace. She took the food orders. She brought the food. She sometimes did both at once, though not to the same customers – nobody was that good – but she made everyone she served feel special and tended to. This much was obvious.