New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  I wonder if I’m seeing the future. I must be seeing the future. I think: this is not now, and I am not here. Is this the Golden Buddha? (No. Yes. All things are but aspects of the Golden Buddha.) And/but: am I still and only dead? But if I’m – if he’s – alive in the future, why, or how, could I be just and only dead now, unless I am not still and only just? Unless I am not just and only still?

  [THIS IS STILLNESS. THIS IS THE TABLEAU. UNDERSTAND HOW THIS IS THE TABLEAU: THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING. THIS IS HOW THE WORLD GETS MADE.]

  “This is?” I ask, because, well… frankly, it hardly seems enough, and… and my voice is all wrong, and… and I’m pulled back, pulled viciously and suddenly…

  •

  “That’s quite enough of that, now,” said the red Ceres woman, whose powerful hands pulled him back from the darkness and threw him out from the cage, where he staggered skew-wise across the floor, struggling for his balance. He bounced off a file cabinet. He bumped into the desk. The Ceres wife watched him reeling around, eventually reaching out her hand to catch and steady him as he staggered once more past. There was something clearly not right about him. That much was obvious. His eyes were wide, but vacant, and he was smiling like a fool.

  With his head still spinning, Proteus could see, easily enough, the metal box where he’d been, it’s door open. But he did not understand this. And there was the light that came in through the windows, which meant that it was day once more and the whole night had passed without his knowing. He did not understand this either. He held his hands in front of his head, the one all swollen and splotched – maybe a little less so now – the other normal. Then he looked to her, her fierce eyes blazing as ever.

  “It’s you,” he croaked once his balance was restored. “You…?” His eyes rolled and rolled.

  She held up the key to the cell.

  “Oh,” he managed, grin widening, “You found the key.” A trickle of drool ran down his chin.

  “The key was always mine. Prophecy was always mine. Zedekiah said it couldn’t be so, that a woman couldn’t have the vision, but he was wrong; I’ve always had the sight. It was given me by God. He never had it. Zedekiah never had it, though he said he did. That was how I found you. Though you’d been gone in the cage and the darkness had taken you. Though you’d been gone for three days and a night.” She studied him, looking him up and down as Proteus wobbled. Her assessment: “You don’t know where you’ve been. Do you, boy?”

  “No! I don’t!” His grin widened all the more.

  “You don’t know where you are now.”

  “True enough. Three days, you say? Well now, that is something.” To say that his expression seemed imbecilic would not be wrong.

  “Don’t know who you are now.”

  “Never been… so clear to me… how much I don’t know that.” His eyes rolled up, his grin tightened painfully.

  “You’ve been in no one place for as long, I’d say it’s no wonder. Look at you. The damage is deep. Soul’s flown off, and what’s left is just broken all to bits. Still,” she moved in close, her face not an inch away, her eyes boring into his, “you’ve got much to answer for.”

  “I do?” he gulped. “Why?”

  “You’re the sheriff,” she told him. “That means you’re responsible. You’re responsible. You’ll be held to account for all of it. Doesn’t matter what it was, or where you were when it happened. Doesn’t matter how involved you were or weren’t. It’s your job.”

  “I didn’t want it,” he protested. “I didn’t ask for it. And… and… I’ve not been paid…”

  “Oh…” she moved in so close that her nose crushed against his, “you’ve been paid. Make no mistake. I’m the one who paid you, and you’ve been paid handsomely – in blood, in script, in visions, yes… You thought these things were for nothing? What did you think would happen when you spoke the name of the angel? Nothing? And when you showed men his form? Nothing? No, we’ll not hear any more of that, any more of this you’ve not been paid. Yes. We’ve a new law in this town now: it’s the law of the Father. There will be no barter. There is no negotiation. The cost, boy, is in cold money. His law is hard and certain and exacting, but it is just. Now come. Spend your money, spend what you’ve been paid and meet His justice.”

  •

  Though she was small woman, her strength was ferocious enough to shove him forcibly out through the station’s front door and into the cold light of the Cleric morning, where, to his surprise, it seemed the whole town had turned out, both Ceres newcomers and what locals remained alike. Mary Margaret Mary Alice stood solemnly to one side. She shook her head in a pantomime of disappointment. And the two tree sisters, serene Ceres wives they were, willowed in the wind, bending side to side like branches in a breeze, but otherwise stood expressionless and impassive. Their two sons, the missionizing ones, set to haunches and looked to one another.

  “I knew there wasn’t something right about him,” said Nephi. “The heathen would corrupt us. He took the measure of our souls. I saw him do it!”

  “Meaning,” offered Laman, “he would sell them on the soul market, no doubt, given half the chance.”

  “Half the chance is all the chance the devil needs!” Nephi concluded and spat.

  And there stood the sculptor Sarfatti as well, arms folded over his barrel of a chest, obscenely top-heavy on his sticklike legs in their fashionable pants, and available, as always, to add his knowledge: “It was clear from the start there was nothing inside him. Liar and a lie, hardly a person at all; nothing more than an empty cup. I scoped his fraud from the beginning-wise. Me.” Hands to his hips now, the man rocked back and forth precipitously, as if inviting gravity to take him, and added, “I did.”

  And Davis, tall and spike-haired, who windmilled his arms, who twisted his frame this way and that (while the others gave him room enough to not get themselves flapped against) said darkly, “He told me had no cigarettes. But he did. He did.”

  “You’ve done this to yourself!” shouted Mary Margaret, her broad face splotched with red, and thus her act more convincing. Or maybe that was just her blood pressure.

  “I am,” said Proteus, pivoting about to face them all, “and I have been… the man in the moon!”

  Silence.

  “Ah, the Moon Man,” said Shulamit, stepping up beside him. “Good enough. I’d thought you were the sheriff. Once, I’d even mistaken you for an otter. Still, that isn’t much of a defense. In any event, where you stand now is beyond defending. We’re not here to determine guilt; guilt is known, and known too well. For which, by the way, I’d like to offer my sincerest regrets and my thanks. Your service is an invaluable one, truly. That you are human, that you are… the Moon Man? This only makes you better suited, it seems to me.”

  “I will go to my grave!” Proteus complained, whirling and shouting into the crowd.

  “No. You will go to the desert,” Shulamit corrected him, and she put a ring of small red flowers over his head.

  The crowd pressed forward, closing in. They formed half a circle around him. Red-faced children screamed, and those that were big enough to coordinate their hands picked up some rocks and threw them.

  “Ow!”

  “Always with so much noise,” said Maude Rumsey. Her husband Stan beside her nodded his agreement. The two glowered in stern disapproval of his noisome ways.

  Something hit him in the face and broke. Thick liquid trickled down from his temple and he touched it: yolk and white combined. The shell dropped from him to the dirt.

  “Everyone here knows about your time in the cage, I’m afraid.” Amanda, smiling, approached him from somewhere unseen to stand beside him. “The matter left its taint on you. The darkness, the pitch-black darkness; it isn’t something you’ll ever get off. You were in for much too long. I may’ve been able to help you once, but things have moved beyond that now.”

  “But I saw the future!” complained Proteus. “Don’t these people value the sight? I wouldn’t share it,
but then I’d lost it, and not until then… I haven’t… I’ve been… It was always too distant, too small a thing, all but forgotten. Now… that I’m in the sky… and these children throw eggs at me, they throw stones, they paint… my face? Would they have me go back into the sea?”

  “To the bottom of the ocean!” said the crowd as one – all except for Amanda – “Where the wavering sunlight slants and spears, where creatures dart and squirm!”

  “The sea is so much calmer now, the further down you go,” she told him. “Everything at the bottom is blind and weird and flat. You know this. But you came here instead, to the mountain. I’ll never understand why, though I’m glad you did. I’m sorry you have to leave now. These people don’t know what they want of you, other than you should leave and take away the sins of the world. Or, at least, theirs – that would be enough. By now they expect it of you. The family is intractable, as you know, once they’ve made up their minds. But they’re nowhere near as stubborn as… them.” She pointed toward the door of the station, where several of the small people in blue coveralls were crowded just inside. They jostled and peered over one another’s shoulders to get a look. All seemed so much alike, perhaps because they were all dressed exactly the same, while at the same time, they only looked like themselves.

  “Who are they?” he asked her. “They always seem so upset.”

  “Nobody knows, but when it’s time for you to go, they tell you. I think they might’ve always been here. They’re kind of, like, friends. Good people.”

  “Are they responsible for… what’s in the cage?”

  “Them?” She looked confused. “I thought you did that.”

  “Me?”

  “You put it there,” she said, though her uncertainty was showing. “…Didn’t you?”

  “No!” he protested. “It was already –”

  “He is responsible,” the crowd interrupted, their many voices merged in rough harmony. “Responsibility is assumed. That he’d not known the object nor flowering of his mind’s recesses makes little difference. His reckoning yet approaches, despite his unawareness; ignorance of the law is no excuse. This reckoning settles over us all, approaching, like a false dawn. The moment of daybreak knows where we stand, and payment will be collected in a common coin, that both recognized in Earthly and Heavenly Kingdoms.”

  “I guess that settles it, then,” Proteus muttered.

  “What?” asked the whole town, who couldn’t quite hear what he’d said.

  “I SAID I GUESS THAT SETTLES THE MATTER!” he shouted back at them. “You’ve all decided my guilt or innocence quite apart from the facts, and apart from my involvement in any of it. You’ve laid guilt at my feet and decided I should carry this shadow, whether it be mine or not. In this way it becomes my own, though my guilt, just as my innocence, remains an alien thing to me.”

  “Do you see?” shouted Laman. “He admits it!”

  “I admit nothing!”

  “Do you see?” shouted Nephi. “He denies it!”

  “I… oh, hell.”

  “He assumes a double shape,” said everyone (everyone but Amanda, whose half-smile remained at play on her lips, haunting him, mocking him, knowing, somehow, that everything was funny, most of all, he himself), “the shape of a beast, the form of a goat,” continued everyone, “goat-god, second-god, devil-god; he assumes the many forms of the hell-people. He feels about in the darkness, with the pads of his long fingers, those gleaming and shimmery, darting bodies of fish-people, who shift past him, who move in schools, who turn suddenly as one, and whom he distrusts; much the same as he knows that he is watched by eye-people, who in some fashion he recognizes, though not in the abysmal fullness of their form. To him all sins are assigned and all darkness given. When he meets with the darkness, and when he meets with himself in the darkness, this is what he says: that it was given. A flat thing, a section of uncertain volume. As such, to him it was. Yet he carries this in himself, as he does upon himself. The basis of such assignment is professional, true, however broadly-defined the term, still true, again. Amen.”

  “This is not how I would have it!” Proteus shouted, waving his arms around, advancing on the crowd.

  “Definition is a service of the requisite form,” they answered in their massed voice, and stepping back to avoid him.

  “As people are a function of the eye!” Proteus shouted, poking into the air with an upraised finger.

  “Eye-people watch, as in the manner of their function, for which they are adequately equipped by God. Amen.”

  Last Man Tunker, true to form, was the very last to appear of all among this crowd of townsfolk, approaching from downslope and riding Proteus’s own blue motorcycle. He wound up the mountainside, a rattle-sound in the far-off growing nearer until, once arrived, the puttering of the engine was killed, while its wheels still rolled over and crunched along the gravel of the level lot. He levered the kickstand to the side and let the bike lean, saying, “Aye, you and myself could be more alike than either of us had thought, coming as we do from separate sides of the liquid debate. Still, our future’s the same, I suspect. Alcohol is no better friend to this lot than coffee, as we both well know. You, now, and I, soon enough, are to be run out of town, though the sins you carry are those of the past, while mine will be those of the future. So I brought along your bike, seeing as how you’ll need it. I brought my sympathies also, for what it’s worth. Things could still be better. You know.”

  But Proteus’s finger was yet upraised and shaking, pointed toward the flat gray sky, and his face twisted with outraged astonishment. Somebody threw a wad of lime jello at him, which exploded when it smacked against the side of his head, though some small blob of it remained stuck, with marshmallow and cornflake inclusions, to his temple. With that, he dropped his arm, as well as his head, muttering to himself, as to any around that could hear him, “I may have never felt anything until now. Truly. But now I am a bird.”

  “Second-shape and double-shape,” chanted the townspeople, “he assumes the many forms but feels nothing. Goat-god, second-god, devil-god, he assumes the many shapes: a bird – as he says, and as we now are witness – and snake, otter, cloud, and compass as well. Next he will become a small truck, after that, a caribou. Yet the sunbeam of God falls elsewhere, not on him, for being of the darkness he avoids it. Having the substance and the nature of sin on him, he avoids it, as he avoids the task at hand.”

  “I just don’t like it.”

  “It was never asked of him to like it; not of the sheriff, nor the Man in the Moon. It was given him the responsibility, the charge, as was given him the stain of black sin that he takes it from us, he carries the sin away, and we are without sin in the eyes of God, and are pure.”

  “Thanks!”

  “He expresses his gratitude.”

  “I’d give you a kiss goodbye, but you’re covered in egg and jello,” Amanda apologized.

  “And, say, you might want to wipe that off your head before you put on your helmet,” offered Tunker, sage advisor, throwing him a useful rag.

  “Thanks.”

  “Twice is his gratitude expressed. But no more.”

  “I guess I’ll be going now.”

  “You’ve got the magic with you?” she asked.

  “The magic…” he pondered, gloomily.

  “He will express his attitude with relation to the magic.” Proteus explained, “It hardly seems like magic to me now. What is it good for? Shouldn’t magic have utility? What has it brought me but troubles and more troubles? But yes, I have the sacred objects, such as they are, such as they may be. By now they’re only dreams, but this is more useful to me. He gave me these things, though I’ll never know why – and so I’ve hidden them away in a place outside time. And the notebooks; I’m taking all of those. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? What’s to mind? I couldn’t read them. I knew the man; that’s enough. And now you, you’ve taken what you can of him. You’ll never understand him. Nobody will.
He’s become entirely too abstract, even more abstract than yourself. Ideas… vapors in the air… All the same, Proteus, have a good trip!” Amanda waved.

  “Fine day for a ride, don’t you think?” said Tunker, looking around him at the weather. “I don’t think that’s snow to the east…”

  And so Proteus wiped the film of various foodstuffs from his head, grabbed up his rucksack and helmet, and mounted and started the motorcycle’s engine once more; a small sound, all told, for a smallish bike – certainly, compared with that great rattle of the Ceres clan’s first advance, all upon their former hogs – which impressed no one. “I’m going now,” he said. “From these places… to other places…?” He looked around, up, down, as if stunned or uncertain where he was, and muttered, “Aloft, sideways, I may simply roll the entirety of the hillside, rattling the whole way, a tumble-down… oh, oh my…”

  “Get on with it!” shouted Mary Margaret Mary Alice from the crowd.

  With ferocity in her eyes, the red-haired Fire Woman pushed Mary Margaret aside, though the latter was twice her size and more, and she advanced, leaning into her stride as if battling gale-force winds, she shouted, “OUT WITH THE MONSTER! ON WITH THE GOAT! FROM THE MOUNTAIN, FROM OUR SIGHT, FROM DARKNESS AS FROM THE DAY, RIDES THE BEAST OR MAN FROM ALL THINGS. DEPART, BE GONE, EVIL DEMON, AND TAKE WITH YOU WHAT IS UNHOLY!”

  “Right.”

  And it came to pass, thusly, thusly, how Proteus left his mountain home, in the shame of ignominy (given), in the wake of small dust, in the twisting of roads, with the massing of townsfolk behind him, in his mirror, diminishing and gone by the next bend, and there above, the changing shapes of all clouds, snow or not-snow to the east, merging, moving, increasing, and the dark, dark, dark stains that were everywhere…

  EPILOGUE

  Fake City

  [Outside Time]