New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  All Finch had to say to that was, “WOO-HOO!” staring at the nearly-naked girl up top, whose feet were planted in front of him. She shook the strands of her silver wig from side to side, then wrapped herself around the pole and slowly inverted herself. Finch thwacked the platform loudly with a palm – though it seemed to me more in anger than enthusiasm – and this caused the bouncer to move a little closer.

  I myself was taken aback. If I’d understood what he’d said, this old fella had clocked the situation quite completely. I wondered what kind of professor the man actually was.

  “Yes, she is very pretty, now isn’t she?” the Professor agreed. “I’ll bet you haven’t seen the likes of her in any life, before or since. Am I wrong?”

  “No, sir, no, sir! You’re not wrong about that!” And Finch leaned over to me, “Give us another dollar, will you?”

  “I haven’t got any more,” I said. “That was my last single.”

  “Then what have you got?”

  I looked. “A five…?”

  “Then gimme the fiver!” So I did, and once the girl was upright again, he stuck the bill into her strap beside all the others I’d loaned him. That much did win him a smile and a wink from the lady, whose full attention it seemed could be won with the higher denominations.

  “I’m curious, boy, what was living like for you before, once upon?” the Professor asked him.

  “Before? Upon?” Finch looked slowly toward the man.

  “Yes…” A widening of the old guy’s bushy eyes. Was he trying to hypnotize Finch? I watched, now curious, and waited as dumbstruck Finch considered.

  “…Lonely,” he whimpered at last, turning back again to his drink, which was mostly just melted ice.

  “And how is these days, son? With no one to see you? When nobody hears you? What is it like today?”

  Finch seemed truly lost. He wore his sadness like a mantle. He visibly slumped. “It’s even… more… lonely.” But then he brightened, sitting up. “But I’m in Fake City now! Everything’s better, innit? And I’ve got my buddy Proteus here! He… he can see the future!”

  “Don’t…” I growled, under my breath.

  “And this here girl! She likes me. I can tell. Prot, buddy, give me whatever you’ve got in your wallet there, whatever’s left. I’m good for it!”

  The girl cupped her breasts in each of her hands and rocked forward, lifting them, as if to say, here they are, these are my boobs. “I’m broke, Finch,” I lied. “No more money.” And though she’d given no sign she’d heard any of our conversation before this, on a dime the dancer turned and stepped down from the platform, disappearing into a back room. Break time.

  “Aw…”

  “Apparitions come and go, son. The soul, void of the mind; the mind, as empty of degree or purpose… What among these things remains? And what doth pertain? Have you, for instance, had a decent meal recently?”

  “Huh? A meal? I had some doughnuts once… a while back.”

  “And how satisfying was that?”

  “Not very.”

  “And before that? What had you to eat?”

  “I… I don’t follow…”

  “When you were alive, boy. What was it did you eat?”

  “Eh… ramen, mostly?”

  “I think I see the problem here,” I offered, but the Professor held up a finger for me to be quiet.

  “And now you’re dead, son, what is it that you nourish yourself with?”

  “Wh-whatever I want!”

  The crafty old codger leaned in, eyebrows moving all over the place. “And that would be…?”

  There was a moment’s dawning, a draught of air. It played across his face. A door somewhere had in fact opened, and pale daylight came strewn in through the club in a wash. I realized after a moment’s confusion it was the club’s entrance, not just some mystic light that metaphorically illumined Finch, where in the frame there stood a tall and asymmetric figure in silhouette, hesitant upon entering. The bouncer looked this lank person up and down.

  But Finch: I had never seen anyone so stricken as poor Finch in that moment. His face held a sadness and a fear so complete, it broke my heart to see it. There was no disguising it for anything else, and there was no laughing it off with a joke or evading the truth of the matter. He was genuinely stricken, utterly lost.

  “Fair comes the morning, son, and full in its meaning, just as every birdsong breaks the sky. Its pieces are left to fall and scatter, its pieces left to litter the land of the living. You can forget about all that now, my boy. It’s not your problem. It hardly matters at all.”

  Finch: bent. A broken bird.

  “I’ve just got one question for you, Finch,” I chipped in, since it seemed to me the money shot had just flickered through the gate. “When you stuck that needle into your arm? Did you mean to do it? Did you mean to die?”

  Gray-faced, hook-shouldered, he took a suck at his whiskey water, scowled sourly at it, then looked up at me. But his gaze was somewhere else and his eyes were round and flat. Finally, he said, “I thought I’d fucked it up.” And with that he was gone. No more Finch.

  Between the Professor and myself there now sat an empty stool, and in the glass before it a small amount of tinted liquid. After a moment, after I realized what had just happened, it also slowly dawned on me that he hadn’t quite answered my question. Fucked what up? His suicide? Or his trial run at some new, desperate kick he’d been talked into? Goddamnit.

  “Well, that’s that,” said the Prof, standing, “and another day’s work is done. I’m off!” Taking his little Irish hat off the table, he perched it back on top of his head and gave me a nod.

  “Uh, Professor…?”

  “Fair be thy days, and fairer the weather. What is it, son? What’s the problem?”

  “He’s… really gone, yes?”

  “Son. That boy is as gone as the year before last. It’s like he was never here to begin with.”

  “So… He isn’t still stuck to me… right?”

  “Boy, you’ll never know what’s stuck to you or isn’t, much less how much of it, much less where it’s from. Most, I’ll square, you couldn’t see or feel but for the faintest tug, if that. But that one? Yes, he’s all gone now, gone as it gets, gone all floaty and lost his mind to the far, far horizon and dissolved into the whatever. For him to come back at this point would take the one thing he hasn’t got.”

  “Thanks,” I said, relieved. “You’re like a professional at this. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Just check you’ve got your credentials in order, my boy. The guards at the gate are of a certain stern sort, and lacking humor. You’ve stayed as close as long as this to the land of shadows, it’s hard enough to hold to your own name, never mind what it was you thought you were up to. I’d daresay, you’ve even got another one on you already…” indicating with a jerk of the chin at the figure in the doorway, who as yet hadn’t moved, that skewed and spike-haired silhouette at whom the bouncer stared levelly, as ready to discourage the uncommitted as deflect those overly so. “You’ll sort it out, I’m sure.” He must’ve seen something truly dire in my look, as he stood hesitating then, “Boy, you do know where you are, don’t you…?”

  TWELVE

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  “… Right… here?” guessed Proteus, after some long moments of consideration.

  “You,” expressed the Professor with a certain degree of emphasis, “are in spot. If split.”

  The slam of the front screen door followed the bent entrance of the long, tall man, Davis, who wound his way around the front of the store to where the Professor and Proteus spoke, facing one another at the counter, everything, every look, every inflection, every slight shift of a tone of the voice, a little overly significant between them, as if… as if… so that Proteus, by now, didn’t even know what they were talking about anymore. “What?” he said at last.

  “Can I get a cigarette?”

  Had the Ig
natius! coffee! Co! settled yet, or begun to settle, into its day? Maybe it was too soon to say. There were birds outside, in the trees, in the sky, perched on walls and windowpanes, flittering in the branches of trees in squads, screaming out the morning with a certain cheerful belligerence. Ignatius himself had wandered over to where old Albert had taken a table; who, sitting there, staring into his coffee, seemed he’d been transfixed. The owner stood behind him and peered over the old man’s shoulder, down into the cup. Neither moved. Amanda hovered nearby, present, in an abstract sort of way.

  Proteus and the Professor yet faced one another, the Professor’s bushy, gray, overlong eyebrows performing lateral athletics of signification beyond anything Proteus had thought could be done with only a human face. Adding further indication into the mix, the Professor pursed out his lips and puffed his cheeks meaningfully.

  “Can I get a cigarette?” Davis bent forward and slightly to the side; a person not entirely vertical. But mostly.

  “Professor,” said Proteus respectfully, “just exactly what was it you were a professor of? Exactly?”

  “Semiotics,” his catastrophically-dressed elder replied.

  “Can I get…?”

  “Davis. Wait. Let me see. What are you…? No. Wait.” Proteus checked under the counter, dipping his head to look for the Sharpie-marked packs of generics kept… oh, right. “Wait. Davis? Why are you here?”

  “I want a cigarette,” replied the bent man.

  “Davis. Davis? You’re out of context. This is not where you belong.”

  To that, Davis had no response whatever, but only looked toward Proteus expectantly, his dark and spiky hair a mess. Some small bug may have jumped a gap between strands, but Proteus wasn’t sure if he’d really seen that.

  “Alright. Have one of mine.”

  “Thangew.” Exit Davis, with desired cigarette, through the door in which he’d come. It banged shut behind him, its screen rattling for a moment after.

  “He doesn’t belong here,” said Proteus to the ever-attentive Professor, whose eyebrows had at least stopped waggling. “He doesn’t belong here,” he explained further.

  Davis poked his head back in the doorway and said, “There is somebody’s car… is in the way,” and then ducked back out, the screen door going bang back shut.

  Sensing, perhaps, that he’d reached some limit, Amanda drifted forward to offer her assistance. “Here,” she said, “here, why don’t you just step away from this for a moment and come with me? What do you think? Let’s just go outside. It’s nice outside. Come on. With me.”

  “Um. Oh.” He stared at her in amazement. Or maybe that was bewilderment. Turning to the Professor, though for what, he couldn’t say, he found the man immobile – seemingly frozen, at least unmoving. “Okay.” He shuffled out from behind the counter and allowed her to hook her arm within his and lead him away, through the shaking, flyspecked screen door that went bang shut behind them, and out onto the sidewalk, under the bright, too-large sun, where the birds, like living clouds, some settled, some still floating, were fairly screaming their hello-good-morning ratchet song at each other, at the sky, trying to break it.

  •

  Tilted at a harsh diagonal across the sidewalk, a silver Prius, all but brand new, a little dusty, its windshield cracked, straddled the high curb by three of its wheels, the fourth, rear left, the only one remaining in contact with the street. Fluid leaked from somewhere under the chassis. “I’m happy that you brought those with you, like I told you,” Amanda said, releasing the crook of his arm and slipping her hand into his, which was sweaty. “The magic, I mean.”

  Off-kilter and skimming the sidewalk’s gutter, Davis passed by into some veil of shadowed corner as he lit his cigarette and looked back over his shoulder furtively, like someone getting away with something, or thinking that he had.

  “Yes,” Proteus said, not looking at her, not looking at the car, not watching after Davis either, his eyes wide and cast straight forward into the middling distance. “Yes, the magic. I’m… I’m wearing it today.” Her hand to him felt small and delicate, warm and dry.

  “I see. Thank you.”

  “It doesn’t fit.”

  “It fits you just fine.”

  “Thank you. But why is the sun so big? Is it always that big?”

  “Will you give me one of your cigarettes?”

  “Of course. But why are we here? How did we get here?”

  “What? The police station? We walked, silly. We walked up the side of the mountain.”

  “Oh. I just… I don’t remember that.”

  “I brought you here to show you something.”

  “But… you’ve already shown me this.”

  “Yes, but there’s more. You’ve not seen the important part yet. The really important part that I want you to see. Do you have a light?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course. He’s not supposed to be here, you know.”

  “Hm?”

  “Davis? That funny man with the spiked hair. You saw him walking down the street. He’s not supposed to be here. He’s from where I came from. Not here.”

  “That’s alright, we’ll worry about him later. Now, will you let me see your gun?”

  “My gun? It’s not my gun.”

  “Alright. The gun, in that case.”

  “It’s his gun.”

  “Can I see it, please?”

  “Of course.” He unholstered the weapon, handed it over.

  “It’s quite a large one. Oh my.” She held it in front of her with both hands, inspecting the firearm.

  “Nothing phallic about that.”

  “Oh, now! Silly boy.”

  “I mean… sorry.”

  “None of that now. Here, I want for you to do something. Take ten steps back, okay? Ten steps toward the station house. And just stand there.”

  “Alright…”

  “Did you take ten? I counted nine.”

  He took one more step backwards.

  “There.” She raised the gun and sighted down its barrel, straight at his face, clicked off the safety…

  [oh how the sun now snakes its golden golden feelers through my ever-quivering heart, it is like fingers, that’s right, isn’t it…?]

  And with her stance that of a shooter with some experience, one leg forward, the other back, she made a bipod of her body, solid and straight, supporting her trigger hand by the wrist with the other. She was magnificent, he thought, perfect, her body lithe and lean and strong, light-colored hair blown only a little in the little wind that blew, her blue eyes – or, really, just the one eye opened, squinting down the sightline – so clear and bright, so clear and very focused. He loved her then. He felt a warm weight in his crotch that grew into a sudden, hard erection.

  [the presence of each dancing bit of light now screaming out of the over-wide sun, every photon alive and sharp and singing we give life! WE GIVE LIFE! but it was this way always]

  And I could see, even from this distance, the slight clench of her finger on the trigger, small muscle contracting, the slow squeeze, the pressure release, and… and… and…

  •

  Of the emptiness of walking in the city, I perhaps already knew too well. But of this, a city whose depth of emptiness shifted with each step – shifted the pitch of its grade, with stable horizon, if any horizon at all; the one thing different, different, and, if I should look at the one thing more than the one time, it will change into another thing, wholly other, a different sort of thing, or thing – I… I was never one for keeping overmuch with casual company when still alive (and still? when alive? when it comes and when it falls and when and when was that?) but with my dead friend Finch gone away (well, let’s be honest, he was never that much a friend, was he?) I’d begun to become, what, a little less certain of certain things. Things like… Well, for instance…

  It was best at times like these to keep our mind on the simple and most direct things. Yes. Nothing
was more simple or more to the point than feet, feet planted, planted on the solid earth, on the hard soil, on the flat street, the sidewalk; and it seemed enough, it did, to put the one foot in front of the other, and then the next, and then. To keep doing that. Because I could at least, I could at least do that, doing that. Facing, as I walked, the sky, empty as everything, empty of everything, colorless mostly, no, not of everything, but of the one thing, simple and unmodified, the… one…

  •

  “Did you see it?” asked Amanda, once she’d lowered the gun.

  “See wha… see what?” I asked – I mean, Proteus asked – and blinked uncertainly, squinting against the light.

  She cocked her head to one side, as if not sure what to make of m… of him. As if maybe he were putting her on somehow.

  “I don’t know how I should take that.” The safety back on, she indicated his tent-poled crotch with the gun, waving the firearm like it was nothing more serious than a Hello Kitty pencil.

  “As a compliment?” he offered.

  Amanda shrugged and held the gun out to him, handle forward this time, lit cigarette dangling out of her mouth. He stepped the ten paces back again to her and accepted it, awkwardly replacing it in the holster hung around his waist, then lit up a cigarette for himself.

  Around them, at the peak of Charles Mountain, the broken, scrabbled rock absorbed heat from the sun, bouncing its light, at least some, back at them.