New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Give me just a minute,” she said, and went away. The air felt different with her gone. It felt as though an Amanda-shaped space hovered beside him now, only without her in it. A few seconds later, she re-emerged from wherever she’d gone to and dropped into the bench across from him. The empty shape beside him retreated. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  She smiled brightly.

  “I guess a lot has happened,” he said.

  “A lot,” she answered, “has been going on.”

  “I’m homeless now. But I’m rich. Sort of.”

  “There’s been talk. You were gone. The things they’ve been saying.”

  “Things like what things?”

  “I’m sorry you lost your coffee shop. I’m going to miss it.”

  “Me too. Like what things?”

  She looked first to one side and then the other, as if telling a secret no one else should overhear, then she leaned close. “There’s been a rumor that those photographs, the ones you put on exhibit, the ones that Mary Margaret Mary Alice sold, weren’t yours. The rumor said that you’d only found them in your home – that they were really the remaining work of Jim, of Jim Lent, who owned the Warehouse, but you just put your name to them and said they were yours. Your photographs.”

  “That’s not true. You know it isn’t.”

  “Of course that’s not true. I know that. That’s the rumor. That’s what people say.”

  “Why would people say… oh…” He realized it then, what the woman had meant by prep work. “Mary Margaret…”

  “…Mary Alice.” Amanda, nodding.

  “I guess I never could quite believe the prices she put on those things, and that’s why.” He looked again at his pancakes. They were very impressive. “You said you wanted to show me something?” he asked.

  She looked off again to one side and bit her lip. “I… do. But not yet.”

  “Okay.” Proteus closed his eyes, then opened them and said, “Thanks for the pancakes. You know –”

  “I know you like pancakes.”

  “I do.” Proteus poked at the stack again with his fork. He’d not put any butter or syrup onto them. “I’m really hungry, too, you know, actually.”

  “Then please, you should eat.”

  He did. Or he tried to. He smeared the pancakes with a little butter and then poured a small amount of maple syrup on top. The syrup drizzled down the side, puddled and pooled toward the edge of the white plate. He cut out a spongy wedge from the tall stack with his fork and raised it to his mouth. Then he stopped. His sausage hand, stiff and sore, could only just hold the fork. He let it drop back down with a clatter onto the plate, wedge of pancake still attached.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What?” She blinked.

  “I… don’t… know…” Proteus told her, “a single thing about you.” There was an edge to his voice that he’d not intended. He found himself, surprisingly, more than a little wound up. He watched her smile falter, her bright blue eyes narrow and wrinkle in worry. “Not a thing,” he continued. “We’ve spent time together. You and I. We’ve talked. Yes, we’ve talked. We’ve had our conversations… about this and that; about all kinds of things, it’s true. I think we can say by now that we know one another. You and I, see? Us. This is a fact. We do know one another, in the way that it matters, because we recognize between us… this thing, what it is that we share. We don’t know what it is, but we recognize it all the same, this thing. But when it comes to the facts of our lives – and by this I mean really the facts of your life – we know so very little. Nothing, I might say. I know so little about you in fact, as a fact: Amanda as a fact. Who are you? These points along the line of all the little things that happened, from there to here. Your history – you have a history; where you’ve been and why. All the things you’ve done, and the things you haven’t. Maybe those are more important, the things you haven’t done. And really, when you get right down to the matter, I know you – the you, who is sitting here right now, in front of me, as a phenomenon. Amanda, the phenomenon of. There are things about you. I know you and I like you, for all the obvious reasons, and lots of reasons that are not obvious. But I don’t know anything about your life until this moment right now; certainly not before I met you, which wasn’t all that long ago. I don’t know where you’re from, or how you came to be here, or why you’ve stayed and not gone somewhere else. Because it’s clear to me, for instance, that you’re not from this place, as much as you’ve made it your own. And all of these things, I’m thinking, these must matter for something. This is unfinished business. You and I. We have unfinished business. Don’t you agree?”

  All the while, as he’d been speaking, Proteus had watched her face changing: at first confused, then worried, then sad, then aloof – even, for a moment, her features turned sharp with a sudden anger, but that vanished as quickly as a flash of lightning. Finally, when he was done and quiet again, she looked into his eyes from some incomprehensible distance – one not unfriendly, simply very, very far away – and asked, “Is there something wrong with your pancakes?”

  That caught him short. He had to tell himself to breathe. He said aloud, “There’s nothing wrong with my pancakes.”

  But in the time he’d taken to say to her all he’d said, any number of people had walked in through the front door of Lorelei’s, ringing its attached door chime again and again – and not all of them Ceres people, and not all in a single party, but in several parties of several persons both unknown and familiar – so that the diner was, all of a sudden, and strangely for this late hour, extraordinarily busy. Amanda, the only waitress on duty, had no end of things to do and needed to leave his table, though it was clear when she stood that she was relieved for the opportunity, and this bothered and it baffled him.

  Proteus poked at his pancakes. Now there was an empty, Amanda-shaped space across the booth and nothing to be done about it. He said into the space, “Well, go on, then.” The wedge of food he’d impaled on his fork was still there, and so he studied it. Six thick layers of pancake-wedge, soaked and dripping in syrup. He turned it over and over. Spongy. With blue, smeary dots inside. A fine piece of food, and a large one. No doubt it would take a large food like this to fill his hunger, because he was, as he’d said, very hungry. There was an emptiness inside of him too, just like that across the table, and it was nothing new, and it also had a shape to it, but that shape kept changing, and it was never any one thing. And, he figured, then, that if it were possible, if he could just pick the fork of food up (its metal tines shone bright and flickered under the wan, wavering lights of Lorelei’s; a whole room, true, narrow as it may have been, but glass and reflective and always, always filled with light) and if he could put the fork in his mouth (and if his mouth was opened and opened wider still, wide enough to get the whole of it in) and if, if he could get the food inside him, if he could just put the food there in him, and fill it up, then maybe…

  When she came back she brought the small person. Amanda carried him up by his armpits and set him atop the table, directly in front of Proteus, ker-plop. It may have been the same small person he’d seen before, the one who’d shut his party down; the little man in overalls who’d come with a stepladder, and unscrewed the bulb, and made everything dark. If it wasn’t him, it was another who looked just like him: same blue coveralls, same thick boots, same… face? Scraggly and haggard. Blunted. Compressed. A similar face, at any rate. And this small man appeared to be really angry. Maybe he always looked that way.

  Amanda looked to Proteus with her eyes blazing (with the fire, the kindred, what…) then removed herself, stepped back to her work, left them there.

  The little man folded his thick arms over his chest and glowered. Yes, he was very angry. His face was a mass of thick, leathery knots and creases and wrinkles and angles: cheekbones, chin, forehead, lips, nose. All these things were close and crashed together. His nose was a knob, long and bent, bright at the end, bright at its red-blue,
broken, bulbous tip. His eyes squinted at Proteus through folds of old eyelid flesh. His eyes were both green and gray and they were flecked throughout with cold color in fevered clarity, and they were stern and cold and regarding, and they regarded him, and it was clear to Proteus, by their seasoned cold and their utter disregard, that they did not like him, not even a little.

  “I’m sorry,” Proteus apologized. His offense, by this evidence, ran deep.

  “It’s time,” cracked the small man in his ageless, stone voice, “you should go.”

  THIRTY

  The World

  [Winter, 2006]

  [THE SPIRITS HAVE TAKEN IT ALL BACK. ALL OF IT back. All back…] The voice retreated back into the metal, back to a whisper. The metal was cold. Proteus pressed his ear against it, to the slats of the iron cage in the corner, and waited. He pressed harder.

  “Yes,” he said, “they have. They’ve taken everything now.”

  In time, the voice returned. There was the sound, first, of a sharply taken breath, withheld, in time slowly spent in a sigh, then the voice said, [YOU REMAIN. PERSON PERSON, YOU’RE STILL HERE, WHY WHY WHY?]

  “I’m not that person now,” Proteus told the cage. He held the letter tight in his hand, folded over, crushed in his fist. “I’m not a person anymore.”

  [NOT A PERSON TRUE TRUE. Give us the time, then. Doesn’t know the time does he, then WHY WHY DOES HE? WHY DOES HE? Remainnnn…] the voice hissed.

  “Could be I’m asleep. Could be I’m dead already and don’t know it.” He lifted his face from the metal a moment to give his ear relief and rubbed it, then pressed it back. “Could be –” he started.

  But the voice was in mid-sentence already: [… WOULD KNOW THE HOUR IF IT WERE HIS DEATH, but in death he doesn’t know it, HE GOES TO THE WALL AND DOESN’T KNOW IT, he goes, he goes, he falls in the forest, falls the tall trees, AERATOR, AERATOR, DOESN’T KNOW, goes inside the desert, goes to the flat Earth, where to the valley, where to the valley, TO THE SNAKE, AND HE WILL BREAK, AND HE DIES, HE DIES AGAIN, HE DOESN’T KNOW IT, won’t see the future anymore, won’t see it, doesn’t know the ocean, has forgotten, DOESN’T SPEAK, HASN’T HEARD, DOESN’T NAME THE CREATURES OR THE THINGS, DOESN’T KNOW THE MEN, THE WOMEN DO NOT KNOW HIM, THE PEOPLE DO NOT SEE HIM, HE IS WIND, do you see that he is wind? He can’t be seen. He is the wind and doesn’t know…]

  He pulled his ear away again and rubbed the cold and the ache from it. The crumpled letter crushed in his hand was soaking up the moisture of his palm-sweat. Once more, he opened the page and read the words: DON’T GET IN THE CAGE, it said. Good advice. Always, certainly, good advice.

  “I have nowhere else to stay,” he said into the empty room. The light tubes flickered in response.

  When he’d arrived at the police station with his bag on his back, Proteus had found the letter on the desk, delivered there by the helpful postman sometime between then and when he’d last been to the place, and it was addressed to him. That is, it was addressed to the “Current Sheriff of Cleric.” The return address in the upper left was several lines long, complicated, and very specific, but ultimately, so far as he could tell, amounted to an apartment in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. The uppermost line, in small block letters – the same handwriting, it was undeniable, as filled his several journals – said FRIENDLY. So this was where the man had got to. And why not? Mongolia was as good a place as any.

  To the jail cage, Proteus said, “I don’t see the future now. I haven’t since I came to Cleric. I don’t know why that is.” He put his head to the metal again and listened.

  [COULD BE HE’S IN A PLACE WHERE NO FUTURE IS no future no time, he’s here he’s there, NO TIME NO FUTURE. NOTHING TO SEE. But we… we can show you something, if you like, if it’s something you want to see then WE CAN SHOW YOU, see, just, pray, maybe, now, you GET INSIDE THE BOX, in there is where you’ll find a thing to see…]

  Proteus looked again at the letter. It said, DON’T GET IN THE CAGE. And that, he knew, was sound advice. At any time. Under any circumstances. It came from the sheriff himself.

  “Thank you,” Proteus said to the room. The light tubes flickered. To the box of iron slats, he said, “The small man told me it was time to leave.” He put his ear to it.

  [It’s the sort of thing they MIGHT SAY.]

  “But I had some idea I might like to stay here. I liked it. I had a job. I liked the girl. She’s pretty.”

  [SPIRITS TAKE HER NO JOB NO FUTURE NOTHING TO SEE SHE’S NOT THE GIRL YOU THINK SHE not the girl you think she is said so herself if we’re not mistaken, why not just DAMN IT GET IN THE BOX ALREADY, YOU CAN SEE THE DOOR’S OPEN.]

  “Oh, right,” said Proteus. “I wasn’t going to do that… But I will.” He started around toward the open cell’s gate, then hesitated. He said to the empty metal, “You’ll take me to him? At least show me how to find him?” Then he listened with his skull to the slats.

  [OH FOR GOD’S SAKE you think that he can show you what you think you already know NO, YES, whatever it is it’s the BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING THE VERY BEGINNING OF IT ALL LET ME SHOW YOU let us show you…]

  “Okay.” Proteus got inside the cage. He waited a moment, and when nothing happened, he asked, “Do you want me to shut the door?” When nothing still did so, he pulled the gate shut and heard it latch, remembered he had no key to it on his person, panicked, and that’s when every light in the station went all at once out, even the desk lamp, throwing him into absolute darkness.

  •

  What to say of the long sleep? The width of a room? In this room there will be darkness; that much is certain. And there are, or will be – and this now is the substance of the dark – visions. Feel how the eyes unfocus – these are the eyes – how they turn back on themselves. A message comes from the valley where the like-kind people are. Or it comes from in here, in the room, where, like the valley, where there are not people – but, no, rather, instead, here we find the like-kind people, or the kind-of-like-people, who tell us of necessity of the laying of the self down, the hiding of the gun, and of these magic things – which gun it is hardly matters. All become magic. I’d had one once, a gun of a sort, I didn’t know what kind, but I’d already hid it away, lost it or hid it away, every gun of every sort, always, also, setting it down, setting it away, all the sacred objects set onto the table, beside the grim self, and gently sinking into bone, this gun, like every gun, this, like a dream or like dreams, or like of a kind, or of like-kind, an object or shape (see fish-people flashing, whole schools turning, an echo of motion, flashing, and I, forgetting, no – no – have already forgot) – all of these were things I would lose because I was somewhere else; I wasn’t there. What I mean is I am not here. And I’m hoping this long sleep does what it does, does what I need it to, like in-with dreams, in-like what they need to, and I’ll be allowed some approximate of being, of need, and of some sensation. There is a belief that I am perhaps not the vision’s only source. That is what I hope. Or if the source of the visions is itself perhaps, I (not here) may yet step through it. Because, yes, it is a door, and the door is shut. And yes, the cage is only locked, and that is not enough. And after a fashion, this forgetting – the laying of the self down, the setting down of the gun, the badge, the crumpled Stetson – no, he lays it down, not me; there is no self, only flashing, entire schools of fish-people, who, turning, all as one, all with one thought, and so as I turn – and he didn’t know (I wouldn’t know it either, because I am not here) how close he’d come – he, him – how close, that is, to being taken – by the things of long sleep – by the things (given) – only but this was no thing, only but this was a shape – and how, after a fashion, you will see, because the eyes will open, again and again – yes, they would have to be – they would be open (given) and they would turn again (being no thing, only shape) – and how every sound that reaches me here (no, not here: no-place, like-kind) is less like a sound in an empty room, is less like a thing, is less a thing; how every sound (approxima
te) was not there, was not a thing. And, and, the shape of a room, given…

  With my eyes open, I waver, and see:

  Here is the light of the great Golden Body Buddha (and so I die), or, no:

  How in this current arrangement, in another room, Proteus occupies a battered wooden chair in the kitchen of some small, bare apartment, under a yellowish light. This is not someplace I’ve seen before. This is not somewhere that I’ve been; Fake City? No, though it is in some ways a little bit like it. This is the future. I can see the future. Image shifting: he, Proteus, sits at the table, and it is a long table, and his head leans heavily on one fist, elbow to the table. The shape made through this gesture – we might even call it a dance, but that nobody moves in it – made in the space between his head and his neck, the length of the shoulder to the arm, within the width of a room, at the table in the room, the arm that rests on the table, the upper arm flat, the forearm turned, formed with the fist, where his head sits so heavy, this, a triangle is. Is. The shape it makes is a triangle. The wedge-fist indents a face. Does. It is his face. He smashes his fist to the face. It looks as if his head must weigh ten tons. I think this. It’s all that he can do so his head won’t hit the table and maybe break the table, and likely break his face too, it is so heavy. In this current arrangement, this is the space that Proteus takes, as much as the shape he composes. On the table in front of him there is a plate. The plate is empty except for a film of grease and a small and delicate pile of cigarette ash near the rim. The ash is smeared, the grease has been smeared. A smell of mutton fat and vinegar pervades; the walls themselves are thick with the smell. But his breathing is so thin it doesn’t disturb the small pile of ash. It’s as if he is scarcely alive. But, then, he is alive, and this is maybe something.