New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

The figures on the screen moved in short motion. They gesticulated, they wavered, they took small steps forward and back, or sat otherwise still and shook in the flame-light. One stood, hair gathered in a single, long braid in back; a woman – I had no doubt of that once she’d turned and I’d seen her figure in profile. She stood stern and straight, and held the others rapt, Khenbish and Dead Tom and one or two others less distinct. Or so it seemed, so I imagined. I recalled how there’d been a woman present when I was found, and wondered if she was this same one. I’d seen more men than women so far in this place, though the women weren’t so scarce. She could be anyone. Yet there was something that told me, she was the same person.

  I put the camera onto the ground beneath me and lay back again over the cot, facing up toward the stretched ceiling and pole at the center that supported it. Here the firelight reached only faintly, but it reached, and its glow colored the faded fabric with a wan shade of orange, and warmly. And if I could not sleep, I could at least watch the light, which was attractive in that it was warm and it moved, and was faint but faintly there, at least, and there, in it, I could snatch the small details out of the shivering dance of it – ripples in the canvas folds, and the hanging of frayed seam strings, and the blur of a stain of mildew out of some long campaign or damp storage. The air shivered with this faint firelight, and all the while I could feel my heart pulsing in the veins of my neck and head, bulging thick and blue-red (so I imagined, because it felt like this), and these were things.

  My hands lay cold and weirdly at my side like flippers. Useless on land. I would… I would once sit facing a wall, and sometimes, after a long time like this, the wall might change.

  I put my hands up to my chest instead and crossed them at the wrist, to lay there like the dead. But that was no better.

  Voices and laughter ran outside. Did these others never sleep either? If not, what else would they do?

  I could get up. I could go to look.

  And so I got up, came near to the wall where the shadows wavered, and reached forward, but didn’t touch the screen. Putting my head near it to listen, I heard only muffled sounds. Voices and laughter. Words. Other unstructured sounds. Things not words. The flick of sand-flecks striking fabric, blown by gusting wind. And then the voices, or only one voice, different this time; I understood it. I understood what it was saying. “The skies,” a man said – he spoke English, “where I grew up, these same skies, they all were so full of… of fine, small, dark things… of little fine dark things… and they… they all knew me. They knew something about me. I think they did. I think they all knew my name…” And I stepped away from the fabric wall of the tent. It was buckling slightly and rippling waves in the wind, and I stepped back again another step. I had known that voice. I had heard it before.

  The woman’s shadow grew in clarity and density as her form approached the other side of the wall between us, as if in silent response, and then it stopped where she and I stood equidistant. Neither of us moved. Each of us regarded the other. After a moment, I held my hand up, reaching toward it again, but again not touching the screen. A moment later, she did the same. Closer to the fabric, her shadow was more sharply-lined and did not waver so much as the others did, further off. Her head tilted to one side in apparent curiosity. Her fingers brushed the air near the surface. Her hand turned. I was certain that if I should touch my hand to the fabric, she would do the same, and we would be together this way, connected, if through the thin substance of this tent wall. But I did not do this. Instead I stepped back. The woman withdrew her hand, but stayed at the fabric.

  “Do you believe me?” I asked.

  The silhouette didn’t move. “We know you aren’t who you say.”

  “I’ve never said anything,” I protested, “about who I am or I’m not.”

  “Your badge,” the voice corrected, “said you were Friendly. But we know you’re not Friendly. We know that much.”

  “I never said I was.”

  “You wore the badge. But you aren’t Friendly.”

  “So you don’t believe me?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Does it matter then what I say? Or what I don’t say?”

  “No.”

  “And you won’t believe me either way.”

  “No.”

  “But I can be Friendly. What if I told you I can be Friendly?”

  The silhouette stepped away from the membrane, became larger, more diffuse, until the flames took it and cast it elsewhere, and it was gone.

  •

  By daylight, in the pickup’s rusted blue bed, we jostled over hard bumps in the land and scrub, each knock sending my bruised rib screaming back at me so that I rode with my teeth clenched the whole way. The others in the truck-back jostled with me, their expressions all flattened, their faces giving nothing, but I could expect none of them hurt like I did. Every breath was painful enough already.

  The sun above shone down direct through a cloudless sky, drying us and the ground, pulling water from the scrub, burning our faces, pulling water from our skin. We’d brought water for ourselves, to replace what was lost. Water, coffee too. And doughnuts – rough-hulled, hand-holed, and knobby, but good.

  Khenbish had not come along, having something else that needed taking care of back at camp. Dead Tom rode in the back with me and four others. In the cab there were three more to make nine altogether, and we did not follow a road. Not out here, not this far, where the road didn’t reach. The driver took us to somewhere else. But with or without it, the driving was much the same.

  The others were all heavily armed – machine guns, rifles, sidearms, and God (or a munitions expert) only knew what else – but not me. All I had was my camera. And yes, this was my camera, down to every particular, every scratch, back again, returned from the long road. Dead Tom kept looking at me with that sly smile of his, like he knew something, sitting propped up opposite me against the wheel well. The others little noticed or paid me any mind. I may’ve thought to ask what he was thinking under that scratch-face and wise-ass smile, and for that matter where he’d gotten that white splotch in his hair, but the noise and the wind back here prevented anything being heard below a shout, and I wasn’t ready to start shouting. I held my hat to my head with my good arm, and cradled the camera with my other, no longer bandaged to my chest. Luckily for me, nothing was broken, only bruised and torn and sore. But my arm had been wrenched hard, the socket hurt down at its core, and my forearm was bruised blue and yellow to my elbow. My ribcage looked much the same, purple-yellow, when I’d seen it in the light. Any rotation made a tearing sensation deep inside my shoulder, and the whole thing ached, everything ached. But still, at least it wasn’t broken.

  The driver hit the brakes and we all slammed forward in the bed. I barked, dazed with pain, smashed by a tall, dark-skinned man against the cab. The truck slid sideways in the dirt, and by the time we’d come to a stop the others, excepting Dead Tom, had already jumped out, guns at the ready, sprinting toward a low rock hill, shaggy with wild grasses up its side. Tom was kind enough to wait for me to recover and crawl down from the truck, which I was able to manage myself, if slowly.

  “What is it,” asked Dead Tom, “that actually happened to your gun? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I thought I’d told you,” I said. “I traded it for the motorcycle I rode out here.”

  “So you lost it.”

  “Lost it? No, I traded it. I didn’t lose it. I needed a ride or I never would’ve gotten as far as I did.”

  “You surrendered your weapon,” Dead Tom accused me with those gleaming eyes, “whatever the reason. Meaning that you lost it.”

  “Well, I guess, if you look at it that way…”

  The others in the group had raced to the other side of the mound. It was only perhaps a hundred feet or less wide and all of twelve high. What I’d not been able to see from where we’d parked was the gaudy setup of oddly-painted monsters for use as targets. There was a purple triceratops pa
inted onto a sheet wrapped over a bale of hay, already shot to hell but still recognizable for what it was. Or maybe that was Godzilla. Next to it was a tall, furry biped that I guessed must be Sasquatch, done in brown and white. Mannequins – of course – lay in varied arrangements, none of them whole, all neon-colored where bullets hadn’t stripped and chipped the paint. Their parts were scattered, mostly arms and heads. The torsos remained upright, mounted by the legs. An old television lay in dust, its screen a ruin. There was a tin-foil robot, assembled from boxes, now frozen in its attack, that had never stood a chance yet stood firm in its resolve. Other hay-bale supports retained targets more conventional: silhouettes of bad men, concentric rings, the like. There was a photograph of a bunny. I could see why the targets were all to this other side: the terrain here was softer, dirt-covered, less bare rock and less apt to ricochet the fast-flying metal.

  “It’s less how I look at it than how it is that matters,” Dead Tom said. “What do you think this lot will think? We’ve got standards to keep to. We’ve got our code, our principles. Honor.”

  “I have this.” I held up the camera.

  “That won’t keep you safe. I doubt that’ll even keep you awake.”

  “Yes it will! You don’t understand –” but a burst of rapid gunfire cut me short. I winced.

  Dead Tom never even blinked. The smile remained. When the frenzy reached a pause and the machine guns fell silent, he answered, “Some might tell us that police don’t need a firearm. I might’ve said the same once. Since I’ve come here, though, I’ve seen different. I’ve been informed. I’ve held a weapon and found it’s known me better than I knew myself. I learned something about myself then. That’s when I learned the truth, the truth of the law.”

  “He showed you this?” I asked, expecting he would know who I meant.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Another volley of fire ripped the air apart. Mannequins chipped, shivering, and their frenzied bits flew. The photo of the bunny was torn to shreds and the head was blown straight off the robot. Bullets by the hundreds pocked the dirt with tiny explosions in the scant space of seconds and then were done.

  “My point,” he continued, “is that, without your gun, you’re not police. You’re not police, you’re not here. Yet here you are. Why is this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because we’ve allowed it.” He raised his rifle to his eye to sight along it, and squeezed off a single round. From this distance it was hard to be certain, but I thought I’d seen one of the tiny lizards get launched off a mound and spatter a splotch of red in the air. “So far.”

  “He doesn’t have a gun,” I offered.

  Tom lowered his rifled and looked at me. “How do you know that?”

  “I… I just…”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s… I…”

  “Nobody knows that. Not even me.”

  “No! Look! That’s not true! You do know it! I just told you.”

  Dead Tom eyed me with deep suspicion. Another round of gunfire from the others made the steppes sound with echoing thunder. All had targeted the empty television set and sent it skittering and finally aflop with a lethal group aim to the top, and yet the firing continued for what seemed a very long time afterward, uselessly, but to a point. Tom may have flinched, a little. I’d tucked into a ball and covered myself. Also useless, but also to a point.

  When the firing was over, I unwrapped myself from myself and stood.

  “He doesn’t make the law here,” Tom said, calmer now, but not any less suspicious. “The man is transparent to it. Might be, there’s nothing of him left but this thing, the spirit, what he serves. Law’s bigger than any of us, or all of us put together. Might be, the man’s his own gun, that’s the case. It’s instrument, like. Still, it doesn’t answer my question, does it, how it is you know this to tell me. And now, since I know, what that means, or what it makes me, according to the new reckoning. I’ll have to change my name now, looks like. I’m no longer Dead Tom, not to the world, and not to you. I’m Tom Who Knows Also, And Is Also Still Dead. This’ll be my new name. Learn to say it. Because what you know, I know too, and that’s because you told me. Seems to me that you’ll need a new name yourself also, but I’ll leave you to puzzle that one out on your own. But what I still don’t understand is why you come wearing the badge of Friendly.”

  “It’s true, it isn’t mine,” I confessed, “and I can’t explain it.”

  “No. No, you can’t, now can you? Any explanation would only be a poor fit to the truth. And you’re not the police either.”

  “I’ve tried. It didn’t work.”

  “Of course it hasn’t worked. It’s not the sort of thing can be faked. The Law knows the Law, knows it well. Might say it’s an expert. And knows just as well what isn’t. And yet…”

  I winced in preparation for the next volley of gunfire, but it never came. When I looked back to see what was happening with the group, I saw they’d all lit cigarettes or were otherwise standing about at their leisure. Break time.

  “…Here you are. Why is this?”

  I scratched my chin and thought about it, then blurted, just as sudden as it had hit me:

  “The Magic!”

  Dead Tom studied me – or Tom Who Knows Also, And Is Also Still Dead – a dark glimmer to his eye, and finally, he nodded, while all about us a darkness came and enfolded the steppe. Clouds rolled in, obscuring to deny the sun of its formerly assumed rights to the sky. In their footprints, slants of rain or dust – more likely dust, I figured (and was wrong) – pointed toward where the sun once stood, as if mockingly, or perhaps in honor of its former position. Now everything was brown, the color of rust, or slate, the color of the buried dead. I felt a drop smack my head, then another. And soon the smell of dust newly wetted filled the damp air and everywhere I looked was rain. Magic had brought the rain. Magic had always brought rain.

  •

  Through the glass, the officers struck a pose they may have intended as foreboding, yet they were far too genial about it. Or, alternately, they might have intended geniality, crowding in close together to fit inside the frame, arms around each other’s shoulders in a show of bonhomie, but the implied threat could scarcely be well-hid for all their heavy belts and weaponry – if not for their stony, cruel faces and dark looks down the lens. I waved them in a bit closer to one another. They were, the three of them, cooperative enough; they crowded in more tightly, though in truth it wasn’t necessary. There was plenty of room in the frame. I just wanted to see if they would do it. I clicked the shutter and lowered the Nikon, thanking these men even as I wound the film absentmindedly ahead.

  They smiled and nodded, breaking apart, going on as they had before I’d stopped them.

  Without a light meter I could only guess the exposure. I didn’t even know what film was in the camera. Though it was without a doubt my own camera, and would likewise have whatever film I’d last put in it, I couldn’t recall what that may have been. But it was bright again, the rains had passed, the sun resumed its domain as sovereign of the sky, in all perplexity, washing light and with it a dull warmth throughout this region, our Valley of the Snake.

  I walked on, my legs unsteady, my feet always managing to find the unseen rock or patch of soft sand or trip over a stick or otherwise slide out from under me. I wore a fool’s grin permanently plastered over my face, not that I was that happy; I was not. My face had just stuck that way now, with my lips peeled back to show forward my teeth.

  I used the camera to navigate through the camp, holding it before me like a divining rod, measuring through its lens a scene here, a scene there, but shooting very little. I had only the one roll of film, and I didn’t want to waste it. But I followed the frame, or what I sighted through it, toward interesting groupings and odd angles and shades and lines, if mostly for their compositional sense.

  I’d always done better with shapes than people.

  The camp seemed
a different place by daylight, everyone so purposeful, if not busy in the typical sense. People here seemed to be waiting for something. I couldn’t guess what and they wouldn’t say, but they waited with purpose. I would have called them idle, if it weren’t for this sense of purpose in how they waited about. If there were preparations being made to undertake a coup, or if this were an army forming for war – however abstract their enemy may be – I couldn’t see how it was being done. Our drive out to the shooting range had been only fun and games, boys blowing off a little steam was all – hardly serious training. No, something else was being prepared for here. The waiting was the object. At least for now. There was little organization about this whole gathering, apart from the shared meals among tented groups, and the communal fire pit with its coffee and doughnuts for all. But that all seemed more a neighborly thing. Someone, though, had thought out a basic infrastructure to the encampment, what with the plan to the arranging of sites, the rental toilets, a supply of water and goats.

  Had he managed all of this? I didn’t think so. It didn’t seem much like him. But somebody had. They’d done it around him.

  The police were still watching me, everywhere I went. I could hardly go unnoticed, though the camera should have properly rendered me invisible. If I put it down, if I carried it by my side, I could see how eyes followed my erratic progress through camp, as if they were all of a single mind and all thinking the same thought: Why is he here? And: For how long will we allow this? Conversations stopped, entire groups, those who stood in circles and those who walked alone, heads all swiveled in my direction to stare impassive and silent until I’d passed. If I put the camera up again to my eye, the same thing happened, but through the lens this behavior seemed proper staging and natural enough, as if everyone were characters adopting poses in an enactment. It was clear no one was fool enough to believe that I belonged among them, that I was police, like them. The word, or something else, had traveled quickly around. This wasn’t simple paranoia or supposition; I’d already been called out.