New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  A woman demonstrated to a small group nearby her technique of grabbing and striking with a nightstick, in fluid slow-motion. The others, maybe six of them, watched attentively. All, students and teacher alike, wore guns hung from complicated equipment belts.

  I found a bank of plastic stalls across the lane and up a short distance, took an open one, and once inside, unzipped my fly and let go. The urine came out in a bright yellow stream that seemed to go on forever. It made a flat, yet resonant sound as it dribbled through plastic piping and into the tank. I held the cigarette in my lips while smoke curled and twisted around my face, shut my eyes against it and held my breath.

  Leaving the plastic toilet again, I took a long look around, up and down the lane where I stood. The door slammed shut behind me. This camp was settled amidst the foothills of a range of short, jagged mountains, their peaks no more than a few hundred feet above us, but the ground here – that not interrupted with bursts of deep gray rock – was otherwise flat. To my right the range grew deeper. To my left lay the open expanse of the steppe. The impromptu class on nightstick technique had dispersed already, its members moved on. Others milled about with less coherence. No one seemed to pay me any mind, so I crossed the lane back to where I’d started.

  Dead Tom said he’d be waiting when I got back, but all I found was the upturned bucket. The giant, Khenbish, was also nowhere around. Looking inside the tent where I’d lain for three days I saw only the cot where I’d slept. The tent next door was likewise empty. I was on my own.

  EIGHTEEN

  The World

  [Early Spring, 2006]

  What remained of the day’s light filled the slate of sky above with an even sepia tint, fading in its time back toward dark. There was nothing of the sun to be seen, and the light itself was so mis-directed and confused, it itself didn’t know which direction it came from.

  I followed my nose along the straight lanes. I took turns down the crooked paths between encampments. I could feel and often see the eyes following me where I walked, and though I know I looked at least a little like these others did – enough, it seemed, to pass for one of them – they all carried the same question: What are you doing here? What, exactly, are you doing here? I imagined, at least, this was the case. My judgement was likely clouded, and my sensitivities were no doubt far too acute. But it was true that I was being watched – only an idiot wouldn’t have noticed that much – and it may have been also true that the eyes that followed me were, by their nature or acquired temperament, suspicious, shadowed, gleaming with the potential for wonder that had been stifled and turned by hard experience to expect always the worst that humans were capable of – whether they were suspicious or not specifically of me. My hat and badge, if poorly worn, were at least enough, it seemed, to mark me as belonging. The hat, so badly abused and crushed and ill-fit, was still the sheriff’s hat, and it was my head this rested on. And the badge, well… someone had been kind enough to pin it to the wrapping of bandages that covered my chest and restrained my arm while I was unconscious. So that was the first thing anyone noticed about me, all prominent and shining (sort of) against a field of near-white. Breathing hurt, yes, movement hurt, yes, and my left arm had fallen asleep, but at least I was marked for admittance and allowed to go on my way. And I worried how things might go if I’d not had these.

  Everyone I’d seen yet had been police of some sort, and they weren’t necessarily local. In fact, it seemed very few of them were. Aside from Khenbish, who could be nothing but Mongol, there were as many white Europeans and black Africans as Asians, and mixed in as many ways as were possible, and most of the Asians were smaller – as almost anyone would be – and all were identifiably police, by their uniforms if not by their behavior, all of some nation or union or fledgling state, or of some dirt-township somewhere in the world. They came from all over, as far as I could see, and represented a truly cosmopolitan mix of people of every sort. Except that they were all the police. If anyone were not entirely obviously so, it could only mean one thing: they were the secret police, and must carry a badge somewhere, and almost certainly a weapon, if only in their hearts.

  I did not have mine. I’d traded the gun away. I worried about this for a moment, but then came to my senses. So what if I did? What difference could that possibly make here? What would I do with a gun, if I had one? What had I managed so far? No, I was better off without it. But the absence was… conspicuous.

  My nose led me ahead. A scent came from somewhere, and it wasn’t the smell of flowers, and it wasn’t the smell of shit. It was a good smell, something warm and rich and sweet and heady, a smell of a favorite food, something familiar that I couldn’t quite place, and the most welcoming thing I’d had the chance to sniff in what seemed a very long time. But I couldn’t make out where it came from. The scent was as directionless as the light, or as confused as Dead Tom had said that sounds could get on the steppe. So I followed after the smell, first one way, then suddenly another, then looped back and around between the tents, near-stumbling over lines of taut cord. It was making me crazy, this tantalizing smell, because it wasn’t just familiar, it was something so close that it could have been a part of me and maybe once was, something long lost but never quite forgotten. Only now I couldn’t figure out what, or where, it was. Some bit of my soul that hadn’t made it back from Fake City, perhaps? The price for admission into the land of the dead?

  I stepped out from between another of the army tents and a circular, semi-permanent gher, and found myself again on the straight main road. Riders on horseback trotted slowly down, deeper in toward the mountains as the sky now visibly darkened. A number of small motorcycles, all with the same Cyrillic logo on the tank, were parked to one side, not in any tight formation, but in a loose scatter, like horses tied to whatever hitch was available.

  A nagging sensation like an itch inside my head made me think to look up and to my left, where another short mountain stood apart from the rest, rugged and low, with a well-trod path leading straight up the steep side to its peak. At the top, behind a cordon of yellow ribbon that flapped in a breeze – clearly stronger up there than it was down here – a single figure stood, a man, square and square-shouldered, square and solid. I couldn’t see much of him, no detail, not from this distance, but I could tell that much. He wore a tan uniform without a hat, and so stood out from all this surrounding blue, even if he were not the only one dressed this way. But he was the only one on top of the mountain, and he seemed to be looking right at me. I froze. I stood staring. I took my hat off, cradled it under my wounded arm, and scratched the top of my head in a sort of nervous frenzy. The figure on the mountain lifted a hand to shade his eyes from a sun that wasn’t there. When the good smell caught up with me again, it seemed to be coming from far down the road, where the riders were heading, so I put the crushed and ruined hat back onto my head and followed after them, turning to look every so often back up behind, toward the hill. The squarish figure remained above, and seemed always to be watching me. But then it seemed like everybody was.

  •

  My feet carried me along, one and the next, over the trampled ground. As most people tended toward one direction, I followed after them down the straight lane toward the mountains, now a mere outline of dark against dark. The mountains’ small profile was lost to the dimensionless evening, and they had the reduced scale of much larger peaks in miniature, the serrations of their ridgeline seeming much higher and further off than I knew them to be. Not everyone came this way. I glimpsed various small clusters of officers grouped around the fires of their respective camps, forming conclaves against the coming night in the glow and warmth of living flames. But enough people did carry on ahead that I could see how a general movement was at hand. I trusted – I hoped – it might bring me closer to the intriguing smell that had urged me this far.

  In fact it did. After some distance, the lane ended in a focal point of several such lanes, at the heart of a rough semicircle. And what lay in the cente
r, and what the general tide flowed toward, was a larger fire, or a cluster of several fires, around which a loose crowd gathered. I couldn’t see what was at the center, but I could smell its goodness now, immediate and strong. With so many people gathered at the pit, it seemed I had two choices: I could hang around at the edge as I was, or I could try and get to the center. I decided on the latter.

  Dozens of backs were turned to me. The cluster was a tight one, and around to the other side of the fire was no better. Finding a space between two bodies where I could put myself was, it soon became clear, just not going to happen, and I would have to be aggressive if I was to get any closer to the fire and whatever secret it held. I checked my resolve: how much did I really want this? I didn’t know for certain, but for the first time in a very long time, I felt hungry, and the rich combination of fragrance smelled so good. I stepped up, reached forward to touch the shoulder of a man in front of me, but was stopped when another hand fell on my own shoulder from behind. Surprised, I turned to look.

  There was a shadow. The light of the fire could not reach her face, only the oddly reflected glow could, by chance, highlight here a cheek, there a slope of the forehead, and there, a strange strand of her full, dark hair. But I could tell she was a woman, and slender, and her long hair fell dark in a smooth, straight sweep over her shoulders, and if she were in uniform (though I could easily assume she must be, since everyone was) I couldn’t see the uniform by any of its telltale markings or detail. All of this was hidden in shadow. She was just a form. “Please,” she said, her voice was soft and familiar, soft and deep and breathy, soft and gravel and not pleading but insistent that I recognize her.

  “You speak English,” I said, and winced. Speaking hurt, breathing still hurt, turning around had hurt. Unfamiliar and normally unnoticed tissues connected to my ribs pulled and strained at every effort alarmingly.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said softly, almost a whisper. “Haven’t I?”

  “I’ve, uh…” I started. “I’ve been around…?” But it was true. I knew that silhouette. I knew that voice, though I’d not expected I might ever hear it again. But where were the stars, behind that blanket of sky? The sky now showed nothing but darkness, thick and heavy and close.

  “Oh, it was you,” she told me. “I’m certain of it now. You’ve lost something important, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve… what?”

  Her silhouette watched me.

  “Vivianne?”

  She stepped away, and just as light as a summer breeze, was gone, her shadow merged into every other shadow, and every other shadow merged into the void. I looked around from one shape to another, then back at the massing of human shapes, formed into the fold around the pit, pulling off my hat and scratching at my head with my free hand at some subtle itch too deep inside the bone to reach. The hunger was gnawing at me now, a thing too long unacknowledged. I felt my stomach turning over on itself, turning inside out. Again, I stepped forward towards the crowd, now a flicker-outline against the growing flames in the pit. The crowd, if possible, seemed even tighter than it had before, and more intent in its focus. But so was I, and I reached my free hand out to grab at the shoulder of the person directly ahead…

  And felt another hand again on my own shoulder from behind, and it pulled, and forcefully spun me around. “Gah…” I said, wincing.

  “So here is where you’ve got to.” A dark shape followed by another, much larger dark shape.

  “Dead Tom, is that you?”

  “Aye, tis so, and the peeled man Khenbish. So you thought you’d have a wander, is that it? We’d waited for your return back at camp, but you never showed.”

  “No,” I said, “I did! I came straight back and you weren’t there. Neither of you.”

  “It’s not so. You see, we waited for you. Right there, long time, we waited for you, figured you were just having an especially long piss. But then, after so long, we thought how maybe you weren’t enjoying our company, so you’d struck out on your own. Began to feel a little offended, we did.”

  “No! It’s nothing like that, I swear it! I came straight back and you weren’t –”

  “So you say, so you say. Don’t worry about it. Been given the brush-off by better than yourself. Khenbish, however… well, he tends to take things rather personally. He might not be as apt to forgiving as I am.”

  The large shadow stood there, darkness on darkness, arms folded over his great chest.

  I scratched my head furiously, then said at last, “Ack…!” as my knees gave out beneath me and I started to drop.

  The large shadow reached forward and grabbed me by the good arm, holding me up. Again. I dangled, boneless. The Mongol had reflexes lightning fast, I had to admit.

  “Relax!” said Dead Tom, or at least his smaller, dark shape. “I’m just winding you up! Truth is, we knew you were confused, out crossing the street in a traumatized state. Figured you’d find your way back, sooner or later.”

  “Epff!”

  “Or not. Out like that for three days, you’ve got to be hungry. When was the last time you ate?”

  Ate? When was the last time I’d ate? Or, er… eaten? But all I could say, dangling by my arm, was, “Pfeck!”

  “Oh, no. That’s much too long. Come on, then, this way. ’Bish, let’s get him to the soup, what.”

  But it wasn’t soup they brought me to, not exactly. The large Mongolian supported me – really, all but carried me, since all the strength had left me now and I was useless to move on my own – while Dead Tom pushed his way without difficulty through the gathered mass at the fire, clearing a path for the three of us. And once the crowd had parted, and Khenbish set me down in a clear space near the flames where I dropped to my knees, my legs folded uselessly under, I could at last see these things that had been concealed before.

  Two great kettles were suspended over the flames on a grate of metal re-bar, and one of the kettles was being removed by two men who used poles to support and carry it, linked through the kettle’s handles, and set it off the fire onto the sand, near me. One then began to ladle dark and steaming liquid through a strainer and into proffered cups, and this I came to recognize as the source of one familiar scent: black coffee, boiled cowboy-style. I’d not recognized it alone, since it had so completely combined with that other smell, so rich and sweet, that came from the second of the kettles – that still on the fire, where someone fed shaped blobs of dough into the boiling oil, while another turned them and pulled them again out using a pair of sticks, laying these into towel-lined pans. Doughnuts, of a sort.

  “Stand aside, then. Give us room. We’ve got a critical, clinical, chemical emergency here, it’s truth. Our man can’t be left to wait; he’s well unto dead already. I should know. I’m Dead Tom.”

  Someone took up the chant: “Dead Tom! Dead Tom!” soon taken also by the others surrounding until a proper chorus had formed. The rhythm of the words soon matched the pounding of blood through my heart and the rush in my head, and I felt as if my bones and entire body shook with each beat, though I could scarcely hold myself upright to receive the plate now offered, what Dead Tom held out, freshly served: in one hand a metal plate, an irregular shape upon it of fried and still-glistening, greasy dough; in the other a metal camping cup, full of rich, if muddy black coffee, unsweetened, unwhitened – just the way I liked it.

  The chant had developed, simplified, and quickened, now to “Dead! Dead! Dead!” and I looked up into the grinning man’s eyes, wet, reflective, now lit by fire, their whites, so wide and open, and the asymmetric streak of white through the stubbled hair, and the strange lumps of his skull, and to his teeth, gleaming wetly, lips pulled back in either a grin or snarl, I couldn’t tell, then back again to the eyes, too wide, really, really much too wide.

  •

  To the best of my knowledge, I’d lost my old camera to the road when I’d dropped my pack outside Dalanzadgad. But here in the darkness of the tent where I’d been set, and sat, and where I s
hould by rights lay sleeping now (but couldn’t) the giant Khenbish had stolen in all but silent, and stealthy as a cat, to set the thing beside me. My machine. He’d muttered something when he saw that I was awake, and I’d understood the Mongol words no better than I ever had, yet somehow was able to read his meaning as: your gun is gone, you will need this. Yes, I’d thought, yes, I will. I’ve set the weapon down, I’ve laid it down. I’m unarmed, and I do need something, you’re right. Jacket in a cold land, umbrella in the world of rain. This will protect me. If anything can.

  Khenbish the giant – did he bow, only slightly, as he backed quietly, and shadowed, again from the tent? He did.

  I picked the camera body up in my hands and felt its familiar weight, the pebbled surface of its metal face and cold, smooth back, the stiffness of the leather of its protective half-case, screw-attached, and whip-thin, worn strap. I turned it over to stare into the extension of cylindrical eye-lens. Not that I could see anything inside it. I couldn’t. But I would swear this was my same camera, my antique Nikon, a stripped-down, minimal machine, older than myself and better, and more reliable. Certainly more loyal.

  Square on the cot, I sat. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. Yet I scarcely had the will or strength to move either. From a nearby fire, the flickering shadows of shapes and humans – of human shapes – were cast against the wall of the tent from outside, as if on a movie screen.

  I unlatched the back of the camera, ran two fingers inside. Celluloid stretched across the film gate, from at one end a canister to a winding spool at the advance. The thing was loaded, ready to shoot. I was ready to shoot. There.