New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Is that why the cameras? The paparazzi?” Proteus asked.

  “No, the cameras just follow them around anyhow, no matter what they do. Those photographers have their own reasons for showing up. It used to involve selling the photographs to the tabloids and whatnot. Now that’s become mostly irrelevant. Truth is, they’ve gotten beyond that, the need for an actual image. At least the ones who are worth their salt. There are less substantial sorts of energies involved in the transaction now. The image, like the event, is just a residue. Ultimately unimportant. Besides, celebrities at this level don’t need photographs – they don’t even need eyes – to be seen. They have more sophisticated ways of generating image and making sure the image is perceived. Rumor about who is and isn’t, or about who will and won’t be at an event gets around long before anything ever happens. The important work for everyone is done long before, which by then the event doesn’t have to take place, not really. The event itself is rather pro forma, and can oftentimes just be scuttled altogether – assuming, of course, it was ever actually intended to occur. You can see how sometimes it’s much more efficient and cost-effective not to really do anything. But then people like these two actually sometimes show up. They only bother coming because, well, they want to go out or do something for the night, so why not? In the end, we benefit by it. All the buzz.”

  Proteus was happy to see that Amanda had re-emerged from wherever she’d gone to and now moved again toward his side, opposite Mary Margaret.

  “This is what I do,” said Mary Margaret Mary Alice. “I plant the necessary rumors in the necessary places about how important it might be not to show up somewhere. Or something like that. Today it draws these two out, maybe next year it’s somebody else, whoever’s at the top of the food chain by then. But people like these, they never buy anything. Granted, they could. They could buy up the whole damn collection then forget they’d done it, and never notice the difference to their combined bank accounts. They might even like the stuff, except I don’t think it ever occurs to them to look at it. Obviously, that’s not the reason why they come.”

  Proteus looked at Amanda, who smiled.

  “Come back inside with me. There’s someone I want for you to meet,” Mary Margaret insisted.

  “Okay.”

  But as soon as they re-entered the gallery – which now, again, was reasonably full of people who were not nearly so famous – Mary Margaret was immediately distracted by something or someone else more important, told him to wait right there, and rushed off again, leaving him this time at least in the company of Amanda, who blinked up at him and said, “I told you.”

  “I guess there are reasons why she’s well paid for what she does,” he said as they drifted back into the heart of the little room. Though the crowd was thinner now by far, still there were a good number of people about, and many of them seemed like they might have money and could perhaps be there with a mind to buy something. The music had been turned down considerably from before and the disc jockey was gone on a break. Now a record simply played on one of the two turntables at a reasonable volume. Now, he noticed, what people who were there were even actually looking at the pictures. That made him, after a fashion, happy. Proteus tried again to gauge the amount of interest these mingling and well-dressed folk showed, though he puzzled over the inexplicable presence of so many little green dots stuck next to the prices – there was one beside each of them, in fact – the same as those in the front display. Curious, he thought. He asked himself what it could mean, and found in himself no answer at all.

  “Did you see their eyes?” Amanda asked him. But because he was lost in thought, at first he didn’t understand that she’d spoken to him.

  “What?” he asked, looking up, once it sank in.

  “Their eyes,” she said again. “Did you notice the look in their eyes?”

  “No,” Proteus admitted. “I didn’t. I couldn’t see their eyes, not with everyone in front of them.”

  “They seemed happy.”

  “They did? Good. That’s good. I want them to be happy, I really do.” Proteus, after all, was happy. After a fashion.

  “Me too.” She took his hand in one of hers and spread his fingers apart, then interlocked hers between his. Then she leaned forward and kissed him lightly once more, lingering a little, and when she stepped back, she looked into his eyes (surprised) while he stared into hers (wide, soft, and knowing of an ambiguous and indefinable something) before she again turned and drifted away, leaving him where he stood, his heart quivering like a little bird.

  He realized, after some moments of smiling down at his own shoes, that the red-haired Ceres wife now stood next to him. It didn’t happen all at once. First he’d felt a presence, and all the small hairs on his skin stood up. Only then did he look over to see that she was there. She stared at him fiercely, directly, without blinking, with holy fire in her eyes, as if she meant to burn him, if she’d only had a regular flame to set him on fire with. For now, her eyes would have to do. Proteus realized in that moment that he’d not spoken one word with her for as long as she’d been in town, and that this was because she scared him.

  “Hi,” he said, his voice breaking.

  “You know,” she said, leaning toward him, “we’re forbidden to say the angel’s name, just as we’re forbidden to portray its nature in images. The angels you see aren’t the angels that are there. We show it, when we show it, as a man with wings. But it is not a man with wings.”

  “No. No, I didn’t know that.”

  “It can only bring disaster. It can only bring plague and famine. To say the name is to destroy the world.”

  “Oh.”

  “To portray the angel’s nature in its nature is to invite it to show itself in this same form. No human can withstand this form.”

  “He… it sounds terrible.”

  “It is. Terrible it is.” She poked his chest, surprisingly hard, with each word: terrible… it… is… “Now you’ve been told. The word has been spoken.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ve not sounded your horn yet, have you?” she asked, eyes burning. “Have you called the terrible thunder?”

  “My… horn. I… don’t believe that I have. I would know, right?”

  She regarded him askance. “You’ve been told,” she said. “The word was spoken.”

  With that she left him. He watched her walk off with purpose, as it seemed that the woman considered her work here done. He found Amanda, who stood to the other side of the room. She looked to him now with flaring eyes – not gentle as before, as only a moment ago, but with some similar, terrible intensity, one shared with the Ceres woman. It struck him. What had changed? Because something clearly had. Had he done something… wrong? Was Amanda angry? No… no… that wasn’t it. She wouldn’t be angry. Would she? It was, he thought, as if Amanda had a purpose also, and she shared her purpose with the Ceres prophetess, with them; it was a family purpose – having familiar origin, in a kindred sort of way, of a kind – and though this made him uneasy and always had (because, yes, he’d seen this look before, this purpose, if only in dreams – or had it been a dream?) it did not frighten him quite as much nor in quite the same way as that of the fire woman. The Fire Woman. Because she really did scare him. Yep. But this look in Amanda did something to him also – because now he could feel, somewhere inside his body, that there was a deep, disturbed sensation, now only just beginning, or that had been there all along, only so subtle that he’d not felt it, not until now: a quavering, a quivering, a shivering; something shuddered within his wet tangle of guts.

  It was like a living thing. No, no – it was a living thing. A bird. That bird. He didn’t like it; it wouldn’t stop. Across the room, Amanda seemed to dilate back, to recede into vague distances. He watched her go, and it was terrible…

  “Oh, there you are!” came Mary Margaret, as if he were the one who’d discarded her. She thrust at him a thin, thin older woman dressed all in frill and fur and shades of
pink. Everything was pink: her coat, her collar, her shoes, her skirt. Her shirt was light and satin, and though nearly white, ultimately not, no: it also was pink. So were her eyes, bloodshot and bulging from her skeletal face. And she carried a tiny, fluffy little dog. The dog was not pink – it was a white dog – with dark eyes and a black little nose. But the collar around its fuzzy neck was very, very pink. Its eyes rolled up at him. Its ribbon tongue stuck out: pink. The old woman smiled. Pink lipstick smeared her teeth.

  “Oh my, oh! Hello.” She extended a bent and bony hand toward him. He took it, trying not to break the fragile thing.

  “Proteus, this is Mrs. Felicia Drudge,” offered Mary Margaret.

  “Of the Houston Drudges,” added Felicia.

  “Of c-course,” said Proteus, the shaking deep inside him making his voice unsteady.

  “And you’re the artist?” she drawled, not releasing his hand.

  “Y-es.”

  “You’re sure about that?” she asked, and gave him an exaggerated stage-wink.

  He screwed up his face in confusion. “…Ye-es?”

  “I see. Oh, this is all so very… so very…”

  “Felicia is a collector of artists,” Mary Margaret broke in, though Proteus thought he must’ve misheard her.

  “An art col-lector,” he commented. “I s-see. Yes.”

  Mrs. Drudge gave him a mocking look, as if to say, Oh no, my boy, you simply don’t understand.

  Again, he wondered: had he done something wrong?

  “Well if you are the artist,” Mrs. Drudge said, “this really is something now, isn’t it?”

  “…Th-th-anks?”

  Mary Margaret leaned in close and whispered to him, “This is not who I meant to introduce you to,” then she led the old woman away as the two laughed between themselves as if at some private joke – at his expense – and the small dog yipped at them both, looked back at Proteus imploringly, and then forgot about him. Proteus actually scratched his head. When he turned again, with some intention of finding another place to stand, just for variety’s sake, he all but ran into the two missionary boys, both in their same suits as ever, now even more closely shaved (not that either could grow much of a beard yet) and somehow more brightly, redly, really well-scrubbed than usual. They smiled patronizingly at him.

  “Hi,” said one.

  “Hi,” said the other.

  Proteus couldn’t remember their names. It must’ve shown on his face.

  “Nephi,” said the first.

  “Laman,” the other told him.

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. We know our names are strange names,” Nephi told him. “That’s why people usually don’t get them. Why are there circles?” He pointed toward a nearby photograph.

  “Was something wrong with the film?” asked Laman. “It looks like there was something maybe wrong with the film.”

  “Maybe,” explained Proteus.

  “We’ve been told not to look,” Laman said. “But so we had to.”

  “You were told…?”

  “Why did you put circles in the sky,” asked Nephi, “when they’re not supposed to be there?”

  “I’ll bet it was because somebody told you not to put them there.”

  “I didn’t puh-put them there,” said Proteus. “They were just there.”

  “When are there just circles in the sky?”

  Laman punched his brother in the shoulder, hard.

  “Ow!”

  Suddenly angry, Laman said, “You know when.” Then he turned to Proteus and shined his accustomed smile, full of bright teeth, saying, “Thank you, sir. Have a good day. Night, I mean.”

  Laman then pulled his brother away, who seemed on the verge of tears.

  When Proteus looked up to try and find her once more, he couldn’t. Amanda was nowhere around. He thought to go outside and have a cigarette, thinking maybe he would find her there. But when he turned in this direction, he all but walked straight into Mary Margaret Mary Alice, who now had another guest with her. Because his clothes were, for the first time that he’d ever seen, flawlessly coordinated – even, he had to admit, downright dapper, if maybe several decades out of style – Proteus did not at first recognize the Professor. The wizened man – whose white beard and hair were for once neatly trimmed, combed, and miraculously under control, and whose understated plaid sport suit was meticulously tailored to fit him, a brownish vest underneath his jacket and even a pocket watch, its gold chain draped between front pockets – beamed at him with his familiar beatific, if not downright ecstatic, smile.

  “Proteus,” said Mary Margaret, “this is the person I’ve been meaning to introduce you to. Please, I’d like for you to meet my good friend, Professor Stolen White Head.”

  So that was the Professor’s actual name, thought Proteus, wondering if he’d heard it right, and wondering if it was Indian. The man did not the least bit look Indian, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. “I already know the Pro-fessor,” he said. “He c-comes to the coffee shop every day.”

  The Professor beamed.

  “Oh I doubt that,” Mary Margaret corrected him. “No, I don’t think that’s possible at all.”

  “Wh-what do you mean? Of c-c-course he does. I see him there all the t-time. I fix him a d-drink that’s… impimp-impossible?” Proteus began to doubt it himself then.

  The Professor beamed and beamed.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no. There’s no chance you could have met him before. You see, the Professor’s been dead for more than forty years.”

  “I… I see. My m-m-mistake. In th-that c-c-c-case.” Proteus, the shaking now so firmly established in his gut that it couldn’t help but show in the tremble of his arm as he extended it slowly toward the Professor to take…

  “My child.” The Professor bowed stiffly and ever so slightly, even reverently, but did not accept the proffered hand.

  That was when the small man came and shut the whole thing down.

  •

  The small man truly, truly was a tiny man, scarcely more than two feet high, squat and solid, barrel-chested, clad in blue overalls with black, heavy boots and a little cap. He carried also a small wooden ladder, and if only a short painter’s ladder, it was still several times longer than he was himself. He crossed in from the entrance and made straight for the center of the room, vectoring a quick path through what remained of the crowd. By now this was not much. To all appearances nobody noticed. Or if he was noticed, no one paid him any mind but Proteus, who definitely himself did – both notice and pay him mind – since the small man crossed in the narrow but awkward space directly between himself and his interlocutors, smacked against his shins with the ladder, and offered not so much as an I’m sorry. The Professor and Mary Margaret didn’t look at the small man; they hadn’t seemed to notice that anything was amiss. In fact they were unusually still and silent, as if stuck in a trance, and they only stood there, looking to him – that is, to Proteus – in a bovine, seemingly narcotized complacence.

  The small man passed behind the sculptor Sarfatti who, round and great in his gut and chest, his legs again pressed into stick-skinny jeans, and who, bent stiff with his waist to look close at some part of a picture (and who by all rights should’ve fallen face-first into it, yet didn’t), also failed or didn’t bother to notice how the very small man set up his ladder in the gallery’s mid-point, just beneath the hanging central light. No one but Proteus paid any attention as he climbed ponderously up, his foreshortened legs stretching wide at each rung’s height to reach the next, and no one bothered to say a word in protest when the small man, at the ladder’s top, reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb, making not only the one, but somehow every light in the place go dark.

  The turntable, still playing unattended, ran down to aural sludge before its speakers lost power.

  Mary Margaret seemed to come back to her senses with that, announcing, “Well that will do then. Closing time!” Obediently, the sca
tter of remaining patrons filed placidly toward the door. She then said to Proteus, “We’ll clean all this up and get our accounts straight in the morning. Don’t worry about it for now. Enough for one night.”

  But he was watching the little man pack up his ladder, fold it flat, balance the thing on a shoulder, then march ceremoniously out – all of it a difficult thing to see in the dark. “Wh-what?” he said once he realized that he’d been talked at.

  “We did very well tonight,” she told him.

  “We d-did? Great. Where’s the Pro-f-f-fessor? H-he was just h-here.”

  “No… no… he was never here in the first place.”

  “Oh.” Proteus then thought to ask, as the two of them shuttled out toward the door, talking as fast as he could to avoid a stammer, “Whatwereallthose… littlegreendots… beside the p-price t-tags about?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything sold. We sold every piece tonight, in fact as soon as I opened the place. We did very well.”

  This only confused him, but he didn’t want his, he knew, underwhelmed response to show and draw comment, so he made a point of saying, by way of overcompensation, “W-well. That’s n-nice. That’s r-r-really s-s-something. Isn’t it.”

  “Yes, Sheriff Proteus,” Mary Margaret said drolly as she turned the front door’s tumbler with her key, “it is.” She shook his hand stiffly. “Congratulations. Now good night.” And she stalked off into the darkness, leaving him there, stunned on the sidewalk, the last person left.

  He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, struggling to reach the small flame to the tip. He stared into the impenetrable sky and felt the living thing inside his belly jump up and down and back and forth. First he looked, nervously, in one direction up the street, then in the other. Nothing moved except for him. The limousines had all vanished to wherever they’d come from, long ago. The streets were empty. Taking a long drag, he exhaled slowly and watched the escaping smoke drift off in whorls, realizing, a little at a time, that he, unlike everyone else, was still there, and that his guts were slowing, also a little at a time, back to accustomed, relative stillness.