New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  I have no food, he thought. There’s nothing to give old Albert. Even if he’s dead, if he’s starved, if he’s in diabetic shock, I’ve got nothing for him or for myself. There’s nothing I can do. I can run, he thought, to the top of the hill and do nothing. Or maybe, what, call 911?

  He was 911.

  He faced uphill into the wind. He turned and faced downhill toward town. He breathed heavily and waited. He stared straight up, into the sky, where he saw nothing at all – not a star, not a cloud. Nope, nothing. He lit a cigarette, cupping the lighter’s tiny flame against the wind within his fist. He turned first to every angle, trying to find the one where the flame did not blow out. It took forever. Nothing seemed to work. He lit the cigarette. He stood panting and puffing and thinking and when he sucked on the cigarette it burned in his throat and he coughed, and almost coughed out the cigarette from his hand, but didn’t, and so then he stood and he stared into nothing and felt helpless. He even contemplated going back home to his Warehouse-house, just saying the hell with it and if the man’s dead he’s dead. Because sometimes people are just dead and you can’t help it, particularly if you’re incompetent. Yet finally he decided this would not be right, and, finishing his smoke, crushed out the butt underfoot and started back up the mountain – walking now, and not nearly so fast – because he could at least, at last, check on old Albert, right? It was the right thing to do, right? The civil thing: go check on him. He would at least check on him. He could do that, at least. Right?

  •

  The police station was utterly dark. When Proteus flicked the light switch, nothing happened but a dull pop, a sick sound from somewhere neither in the switch nor the fluorescent tubes above.

  There came a low, grainy sigh from in back, from where the cage was, from where he could not see into. Everything was dark.

  “Aaahhhhh…” a voice seemed to be trying to speak, but barely able.

  “Albert.”

  “Yes, he is known to us,” the voice said in something like Albert’s own, but pitched low, graveled and debauched. “He was of some use, once.”

  “Just checking to see that you’re alive,” said Proteus, a little too chipper perhaps, under the circumstances.

  There was the sound of breathing, thick and phlegmy, but steady and strong.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “ALWAYS!” the voice shrieked.

  Proteus jumped at the violence of this response. “I’ll try and get you some food in the morning,” he said helpfully. “The diner was too busy. I forgot. Something distracted me, and there is no food anywhere now.”

  “Step closer…”

  “Nah, Albert, I won’t do that. You just hold tight. There’s a toilet in the cage if you need it. I’ll bring breakfast in the morning. Get some sleep for now, okay?”

  “I can see… where a part of you is missing. There’s a hole in you. I can see it – I can see the hole! Step closer… Everything leaks out!”

  “That’s alright. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Proteus fingered the light switch back down, then remembered it hadn’t worked in the first place, decided it was right that it should be left off in any case, and stepped outside the building, shutting and locking the door behind him.

  •

  “When I found him in the morning, he was gone.”

  When the eastern light shone direct through the window, this was the only time – in the morning – when the Ignatius! coffee! Co! might be described as adequately lit. It seemed the inner darkness wasn’t quite enough to kill the sun, though it could smother any other source with ease.

  Amanda stood at the counter across from him. She asked, “You’ve checked?”

  “Of course I’ve checked,” Proteus explained. “I went back there first thing. There was nothing of Albert in the cage at all, not a trace, but it was still locked up tight. There was no sign it’d been jimmied. Nothing was broken. Someone with a key would’ve had to let him out.”

  “You’ve got to be the worst sheriff this town has ever seen,” she told him.

  Proteus hung his head in black dejection.

  She hurried to say, “Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” When that didn’t work, she added, “You make really good coffee…”

  “I never wanted to be sheriff. I never thought I’d be any good at it.”

  “Look,” Amanda told him consolingly, “someone has to wear the hat. That’s almost all there is to it. And he chose you. He had a reason.”

  “Friendly never knew me from a hole in the ground,” Proteus said. “I was coming to see him, but I never said anything. I don’t know how he found me. I don’t know what he could’ve been thinking when he brought me all this… this stuff!” He was, of course, referring to the illfitting and crumpled hat – that is, the wide-brimmed sheriff’s Stetson that rested on his head – the golden, shiny badge that weighed against his skinny chest, and the all-too-prominent gun holstered loosely around his waist. These things were now a normal part of his daily garb. “None of it even remotely fits!”

  “Okay, don’t worry about this. Sometimes people disappear. It isn’t necessarily your fault. Or maybe it is, but now you’ve got to pull it together and do your job. You’ve got a solo art show coming up in less than two weeks, the town is full of religious fundamentalists, and you… have got some issues of self-control to work on. This is hardly a time to feel sorry for yourself.”

  “I’ve got… what?”

  She set her eyes with a look that was scathing.

  And in that moment, as if by command, there streamed in through the door the whole – or as many as would fit – of the Ceres clan, mothers and sons and daughters and small ones all screaming, all needing something to pull them into the day: hot chocolate, gallons of the good thing. After them, lastly, entered Shulamit, lugging her large purse, a stern and serious set to her face. She approached the counter. Amanda obligingly slid away, though her gaze on him lingered. Shulamit, amid the noise of her sudden crowd, said to him, “We’re here. And we are thirsty. Prepare us a potion, good man, in good number. Help us set this day in order, and well.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

  [Spring, 2005]

  – because the last, among the last, the thing I have to look into would be that space, yes, that terrible space; the last thing I have, the last place, every word and every gesture relates lastly and at last to and into that space, and I don’t know what it was that I put in there, or if I put it in there, or what it was that went in there, maybe in there on its own (maybe), but at any rate it is there, in there now, looking at me…

  It is there now, looking at me. I don’t like it.

  It doesn’t like me.

  The buzz of the lights. The lights are the worst. The hum of the warm wind. These are desert winds. They blow warm; they make the building hum and sing; and I, and it. It.

  The thing there is growing and it doesn’t like me. I don’t like it. The thing there is looking out. I’d say it hates me.

  In the cage, why where it is. Cage-kept. It stays there for some reason. It stays for its reason. It has its reason; it knows its reason; I don’t know its reason.

  And so but then I jump around the room and I jump from one end of the office to the other end of the office I go BOUNCY BOUNCY BOUNCY I can’t help it and at last I end up at the cage – the cage is empty except for it, but but but the cage is FULL of it – and I put my hands against the metal slats (and, please, you will, see, that these slats are cold) and I wrap my finger fingers around the cold cold slats and I call out (listen), “HELLO,” and there is nothing, no word, not even a feeling of, nothing, so I say it again I say, “HELLO?” and stick my ear up against the cold metal and the thing there it goes like:

  [NOVEMBER. AERATE THE PLACE. ONCE WE KNEW THE WIND IT TOO. IT WAS OFTEN IN US. IT WAS TOO BUT IN US. THEREIN LIES THE. DISTINCT AND AS WE KNOW IT NOW, TO FACE OR NO EFFACE IT NOW, THIS THE WIND IS OFTEN HERE IS OFTEN HERE WITH
IN US. WE IN. WE IN THIS WIND. IT WON’T KNOW IT YET BUT NOW WE IN IT. THIS THIS THIS THE WIND. (And then more quietly:) Yes we know the one the one he is not now no more but a broken one the call we shore we shore him up it goes good now good god is does now but no it goes. Seen to that, we seen to that, nothing but to what it seems and sure enough we’ve seen to that but no we know it. Doesn’t know that. Would better but it doesn’t no it doesn’t even know that. Good is god. Good god…]

  I took my ear away. My ear was cold; I couldn’t feel it. I looked around the room. The room was still, sick with the pale, even light, the light the worst thing, quiet again but for the wind and nothing more about it. But it was here too, yes. And I didn’t like it much, and it liked me less than that. And these terrible lights in this terrible space, and the last thing now, I have –

  ALMOST TWO WEEKS LATER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Fake City

  [Outside Time]

  I poured water from a plastic cup into the soil of some kind of sick-looking plant, and the gray dirt soaked it straight up, as the soil had been dry and the plant was dying. The withered plant sat on the sill in the little window. The window looked onto the street. And the street, the street, the street was in the city, the street was in Fake City, where the cars and the buses never stop, never for a minute, no, not for one moment; these old things roll and run so heavily along, and never all that fast either, I’ll say – it’s true – never at all very fast, but they are always moving. If barely. Yes. Day or night, dark or not, there is always somewhere someone has to go.

  And? And.

  Me, I’m right here. Or: I am right here. Or: I was right there.

  The apartment, it’s true, was a miserable apartment, a snotty little place, a room, really, with only a sort-of kitchen and my little squeaky bed and some light, and a bathroom, more or less, with an old tub but no shower. But it was my miserable studio apartment, mine, in a corner of the city, and I could at least be there, unbothered, in my little place, where I was. I was.

  The plant sucked up the water, and sucked the pale light from the sky, and maybe it came back to life a little. And the window was all speckled up with dirt and dust and bugs, or bits of bugs all left behind, legs and tongues and random jointed parts, stuck there as the bugs had died and the rest of their gut-sacks had gone and their short bug-lives were well done and all over. Never mind the roaches in the corner, the ones that scattered and ran skittering for cover when I turned on the kitchen light. At least they weren’t so big. Each morning I found more dead and floating in my coffee cup in the sink, and their drowned carapaces looked to me every time so incurably sad.

  I think they loved the fat that spattered off the frypan.

  I think they loved the dust that grew on the floor beneath the stove.

  I think they spoke a language, a language of bugs.

  No, listen: each roach (this is what I think) was a word in a sentence. And all together, they formed a grammar-glob and this said something, it had meaning. It had the meaning that I lacked because I’d lost it, with all the dim yet specific stuff of memory. I couldn’t tell what it said, though.

  Just as well. I didn’t really want to know.

  And since, on a day like this one, I wasn’t working, there were days like this, and I had time on my hands – all the time of the dead or nearly dead – I would sit at the window and stare out, and watch the things that moved in the street, and the things that moved in the air: the birds, the blimps, the helicopters and all that. And then of course there was the silver sphere, the silver, silver, silver silver metal –

  TWENTY-THREE

  The World

  [Winter, 2006]

  On the table nearby him lay the sacred objects arranged, all except the gun. Amanda held that one in her competent hands, with a competent stance; she held it to his face, held it steady, watched how he breathed, watched his eyes, the way they flickered and fluttered and seemed to look toward somewhere else, and then she lowered it, lowered it slowly, let the soft shadow it cast on him drop, let the man with the sudden and uncomfortable erection in his silly and now strangely worn jeans return to this world, to this place – to time, people, everything…

  “Wow. Thanks,” said Proteus. When he noticed the visible signs of his excitement, he mumbled, “Eh, excuse me. I guess. Sorry…”

  She ignored this. “Did you see it?” she asked.

  “Yes. Yes. I saw it. I was in a room. He was, I mean… He, I…”

  “And life…?”

  There beside the low stone wall, sunlight fell in a moment’s break between quick-moving clouds onto the arrangement on the table, likewise onto the broken and weed-grown concrete. Likewise it fell in moving patches over the valley far below. The wind blew her hair in an impressive flail of puff, reaching in all directions if not all at once, obscuring for a moment her vivid face. He had little hair to get in any way mussed. Proteus just blew; he wobbled.

  “In death,” he said, “it continues.”

  “Yes.” She said, and then added, “It’s good this time you asked me to do it. It’s good that you’re seeking. You’re taking a part. This is important, I think.”

  She put the gun onto the table with the other magic bits. Nobody had thought to bring the table back inside, despite unfriendly weather, or that no one much ever sat there anymore. Consequently, the wood had begun to warp in the wet of the rains that fell, abrupt and heavy, and had gotten under the finish. The Ignatius! coffee! Co!, whose small building they stood beside, was full to bursting with locals and Ceres clan both, whom had somehow found room for each other, despite physical over-occupation and philosophical incompatibilities.

  “This is your soul,” she told him, “or something like it. This fragment…”

  “It lives in the land of the dead,” he completed her thought. “I think that’s what that is. They – the people over there – they remember this place, but only vaguely. It becomes unreal to them, I think, after a while… while I seem to be lost in some kind of dream over there. But they think that we’re all dreaming on this side. Do you see? They call this world the Land of Shadows, like it was some kind of puppet play. Some stay closer to it than others, at least for a time. But that, over there, that’s Fake City. I don’t see that it’s any better.”

  “Or any worse?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been there for quite a while, it seems.”

  “Despite there being no time.”

  “Yes. No. There’s no time. But I’ve settled into a sort of… horrible little apartment. In a bad part of town. I have a job. It’s a bad job, and it doesn’t pay. There’s bugs all over the place. Really, I don’t know what I’m doing there. It isn’t any kind of afterlife worth speaking of. I’m not really dead, am I?”

  “It’s probably the best you can manage with your soul all split off like that. It sounds like it’ll take some serious voodoo to put you all back together again, but at least you’re seeing it now. That seems like progress to me. That’s a first step. Don’t you think?”

  “Erm.” He’d lost his erection by now.

  “You’re opening is tonight,” she changed the subject. “At the Infinite Eye. People are going to see your work.”

  “Erm.”

  “You look sick.”

  “Ack.”

  “Forget about it. There’s nothing to it; the hard work is done. You just have to show up and act like a person. Sort of. A little. At least Mary Margaret Mary Alice isn’t insisting that you work a portable espresso bar for it, not anymore.”

  “She had some kind of hair-brained idea that we should try and pass off the work as Jim Lent’s and not mine, that it would sell at a better price that way. Since he’s kinda famous. And maybe dead. It’s all vaguely insulting, never mind the ethics of the thing. I insisted, though…” pointing at his own chest.

  “It sounds like something she would do,” said Amanda. “Despite the killing she’s made in real estate lately. These Ceres people are buying up every
thing standing. Some stuff not standing too. I don’t get it.”

  He lit a smoke for himself. “The family’s decided to put their money into properties now, rather than the market. With Zedekiah gone, the wives have restructured their finances. They’ve decided that real estate is the best investment. Especially around here, with so much of it in foreclosure? It’s a steal; somebody had to buy all these houses up. Plus they’re all a little sick of wandering, I guess. I’m just surprised they’ve got so much of it. Money, I mean. Who’d’ve thought?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I mean Mary Margaret Mary Alice, that’s what I don’t get. Why perpetrate a fraud, when there’s so much legitimate money flowing in her direction already? Just how she’s wired, maybe? Give me one of those, will you?”

  Proteus handed her another cigarette. “I thought,” he said, “I’d been smoking really heavy since I got here, the way I go through these. Then I realized I’d given them all to you.”

  “But I’ve quit.”

  “Again?”

  “No, still. I’d always been quit.”

  He lit her cigarette. “How’s that going?”

  “Well. Thanks. And you’re still being haunted?”

  It took his mind a moment to catch up with her sudden turns, but then he lowered his gaze sadly toward the ground. “Every damn night,” Proteus said. “It’s always the same. The ghost walks down the stairs that aren’t there. Then it sits on me. I can’t get a night’s sleep. I don’t know what to do.”

  “And then?”

  “And then what?”

  She gave him another of her Loaded Looks, this one with a playful hint to it.

  He blushed.

  “It’s not that I don’t like meeting you there,” she said. “And your… self-restraint has much improved…”

  “I don’t know how you know about this.”

  “But I’m thinking it would be nice for us to meet in this world sometime. What do you think?”

  “I…” Proteus looked at her, frightened. He couldn’t help it. “It’s been so long… I don’t know if I… I’d like to, believe me, but… it’s not always even you in there. Do you know what I mean? If you mean what I think you mean, I mean. Because I mean it’s sometimes her, too. Her. You know? I mean, you two get confused. You’re both… you’re nothing alike, but you’re both…”