New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Oh, believe it, I still might.”

  I nodded. “She says she’s got a gold mine. She says that she’s hiring.”

  “So she’s here, what, recruiting?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Ayah? You think I crossed the sea to be ignored by you? By you?” the woman said, annoyed. Her face contorted into a petulant scowl, which was no more or less frightening than her happy smile. “I tell you, inside the tail of the hollow snake, every sound I make rings and rings! Hollow inside, hollow out! And you… you will listen!”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Dead Tom nodded his agreement, though he watched the woman very closely.

  She gave him a suspicious, squinty look, then turned again to me. “Our hearts aligned,” she said, “and we… we are of the same kind. Agreed, then.” And her eyes sparkled – somehow, though the fire was behind her – and she turned and trampled off, though with difficulty, her legs swung stiffly at her hips, and disappeared, wobbling into the shadowed murk.

  “Did that just happen?” asked Tom.

  “Probably not,” I said, “but we’ll never know for sure. Likely as not, though, it’s her persistence that’s key to her success.”

  “God love her for that.”

  •

  The shadow returned to my tent wall that night, a woman’s form, faint at first and misty-blurred by the light of the small campfire that cast her. She approached, large, wavering, and unfixed, and as she neared shrank and sharpened her edges to a certain clarity. I watched this happen from my folding cot, where I lay without sleeping. My eyes were open, and I lay on my back to study the canvas ceiling. The movement caught my eye; I’d been watching for it.

  “You’re here,” I whispered, sitting up, wincing from the pull at my rib-meat.

  “I haven’t got long.”

  I stood, with effort, and made careful steps to the wall, where I raised my hand while at the same time the shadow raised hers from the other side. But neither of us touched the fabric, or through it, one another.

  “Do you believe me?” I asked.

  “That doesn’t matter now. Too much has already happened, too much time has passed. What I believe or don’t believe isn’t of any consequence anymore. Things are changing now. I don’t know if you can feel this, but I think that camp will be moving soon. Our work isn’t done – we’ve barely even started it – but the wind has shifted. Now it’s coming from the northeast. The snake is shedding its skin. What we’re becoming is something different altogether, something new. Isn’t this good news?”

  “I –”

  “Don’t answer this question. This is not a question for you to answer. There can be no answer to the question. Of course it’s good news, but you wouldn’t know that. You’ve only just started. The work we’re doing is the work of the body, and the pictures of the body will reflect this work. You’ve been here before, but you know about this. You’ve been here always, but you don’t know about this. You will need to make the world, but you also don’t know about this. Are you ready?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t answer this question. This is not a question that can be answered. There is no answer to this question. When you’re ready you will be ready, but not until that happens. Have you seen the snake yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the question you may answer, but you have answered incorrectly. You have not seen the snake. When you see the snake, you will know you’ve seen the snake, but not until then. Then you will be ready.”

  “No.”

  “That is the wrong answer.” She stepped away from the wall and was gone.

  I lay back down and stared at the tent’s cloth ceiling. Was it true, what she’d said? Was the wind that stirred the cloth tent’s walls and lifted its ceiling, only to let it drop again, truly coming from northeast?

  •

  Come the daylight I stepped from my tent with my lips already stretched tightly back and stared at the even gray sky above. There was little wind, and the air had a chill to it. My neck hurt when I looked up, and my eyes watered. I was looking for something, but for what, I didn’t know. But I didn’t see it. Or I did. I couldn’t tell. I stared up at the sky and watched and waited.

  When nothing presented itself, I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, felt the pull of torn muscles, and let go again. With the handy travel toothbrush and toothpaste package that someone (Khenbish?) had been kind enough to leave beside my cot, I took a metal cup to fill with water and carried it with me to the latrine. The metal cup, already cold to the touch, became colder with the water from a five-gallon jug I filled it with. There was little activity in the lane yet, it still being quite early, but a few persons here and there went about their mornings as well. A man on camelback some distance up the road led another camel by a rope in steady, deliberate steps. I opened one of the toilets and stepped inside, then latched the plastic lock behind me. Light through the plastic turned the interior greenish and cold, but I could see.

  The toothbrush was a godsend. It was just what I needed. After several days without brushing, my mouth had grown fuzzy and tasted terrible. I’m sure my breath was no better. Maybe that was why Khenbish (or whoever) had thought to bring me this gift. I didn’t exactly smell good either, but that I could deal with later. In the green plastic toilet, the camp felt both some distance away and somehow also closer. Sounds turned hollow and immediate. The light scattered. What wind that blew made a thin whispering against the rounded corners of the structure. I tore and unwrapped the plastic from the toothbrush, dipped it into the cup of water, and laid a portion of paste across its bristles, then scrubbed at my teeth deliberately and with relish. When I was done, I rinsed my mouth from the cup and spat into the tulip-shaped urinal.

  God is good.

  I finished by taking a long, easy shit.

  God is very good indeed.

  Last night’s goat had gone down well.

  I washed my hands with the remaining water from the cup.

  Stepping out again from the little toilet box, I grinned my death-mask grin at the day, which had turned brown-red, and was smacked in the side of the face by a stiff rider’s crop.

  By the time I realized what had happened, I was struggling to regain my feet, laying once more on my injured side in the dirt, dazzled by the pain in my ribs, my eyes swimming.

  “Sorry!” said the rider on camelback. He held back the switch he’d been using to drive the animals, and had absentmindedly flicked me in the side of the head with. “I didn’t see you there! But I couldn’t have hit you that hard. What are you doing on the ground?”

  But that wasn’t what he said. Or that was what he said, but he’d said it in Uzbek, a language I didn’t know a word of – except that I’d understood his meaning perfectly well. Between or behind the actual words, I’d sensed a meaning that was clear enough – what this rider had meant to express, the moment before he’d said it, in pictures and feeling-tones and colors, and…

  The tall camel he rode turned its lumpy, peanut-shaped head to look down at me, its jaw slung, lips jutted askew. Its tethered companion behind wasn’t the least interested, and stared off into space. Half of both their rough fur coats seemed to have sloughed off in worn, rough patches.

  I wobbled up, struggled stiffly, fell back, flapped my arms, and grinned idiotically at nothing.

  “Are you drunk?” The rider asked.

  “No, sir, not drunk,” I managed, stuck there, “only amazed. It’s true, what you say, another blow to the head, and what’s that? I’ve had a few already. No doubt there’ll be more. Sir, you’ve given me no trouble whatever. No. You’ve done me a service in fact. I think… you see, I’m a whole again. I wasn’t before. Not even all that long ago. And my mechanical nature… help me, will you?” I held up a hand, and the rider offered me down his crop to hold, so I grabbed it. I pulled myself to my feet and swayed there a moment, then let go. “Much better, thanks. But… ah, my mechanical nature… how to
say this? It’s been upset. The robot, sir, is disturbed. Displaced. Dear God. The whole thing comes apart, falls to pieces, and now at last I’m seeing clearly. I am seeing… for the first time… everything.” I didn’t know what I was talking about, but neither could I stop myself. It didn’t help that my lips had pulled somehow even further back over my newly-cleaned teeth (at least they were that), revealing, to the full, my stiff, stuck, idiot’s grin.

  The rider looked down at me, his face a puzzled mask. The gleam off his policeman’s badge flashed, drawing my eyes to it. So I rubbed at my face fiercely, as if trying to wipe the whole thing off. But the flesh only bounced back, and my wide-fixed smile was still there.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me. I am… not myself. I… never was myself. I’m one person, yes, now, it’s true, but that person isn’t me. I don’t know who it is. Can I give you something? I have no money. Can I give you… my time? I’ve learned so much since I’ve been gone. I’ve learned that the Law has… it has… a part for me. A part in the play. I think. The play of Law? Please, give us this chance. We will show you everything to be true, because everything is true, and you – you’re also a part of it! You don’t believe me? Why? I know – you shouldn’t – I know. And you know this too. That’s why you don’t. But that’s just where it begins. It begins with the Law, you see, with disbelief, and this is everything. You, me… everything. Wait!”

  But the rider had goaded his camel forward, and the second animal followed as well, turning away. All turned away from me and kept going. On. Into the sun. Toward the mountain. Toward light.

  “Wait!”

  Only there was no waiting, there could be no waiting. The Law was not fixed; no, it was a changeable thing. Mutable. Ever-constant, ever-shifting, becoming new. It had to be. I knew this, so why should I be surprised? “Good point,” I said aloud, to no one. “I knew this was coming. The Law demands it. The Law allows it. We’re instruments, just that, no more no less. I couldn’t hold still if I wanted, and that’s not what I want.” Was I becoming like her? But I couldn’t stop myself. “I want motion. I want to see some difference between things – the one thing and the next, the first and the other things as well. If they’re all the same, that’s no good. Everything needs to move and keep moving, and so do I.”

  And so I walked across the little dirt road into camp, mumbling. “The ground under my feet: good. The air on my skin: also good. These are two things, and I’ll swear they’re not the same. She doesn’t understand this. As far as she knows, there’s only gold and what isn’t gold. What’s the use of it? There is the Snake, yes. She will recognize the Snake. Good for her. I’ll still take the differences between things, even if there’s no profit in it. Not much profit in anything, so far as I can figure. Such is my lot.”

  Both Khenbish and Dead Tom were up and making a breakfast of coffee and bread and oats. No doughnuts as far as I could see, but those would get made in the center of camp at the large cook-fire where the colander of oil was kept. The two looked up as I approached, muttering. “There you are, my friends. I call you friends. Is there anything else I should call you? Do you wish me ill? It would neither surprise nor trouble me, nothing does anymore. I’ve lost my capacity to understand the difference between things and am sad, if only for this reason. Yet who needs a reason for sadness? You understand sadness, don’t you? The both of you? In whatever language. Damn it! Everything really is the same. I don’t think I can stand it. Let me borrow your gun and I’ll shoot myself, before it gets any worse.”

  The two traded looks.

  “Coffee ready yet? No, wait, don’t answer. I’ll see for myself.” Putting my face near to the little metal percolator over the fire, I watched the liquid inside bubble slowly through the glass nubbin up top. Thin and watery and just beginning, it looked to me. “Nope, not ready. See, there’s a difference right there. A thing not ready. A thing only beginning. That’s what it’s like when it’s new, isn’t it? Because in the beginning, just at first, a thing isn’t ready yet. It’s new. That’s how it was with the world, when first the world was first made. Would you like me to tell you about that? A story, how it was when we made the world? What do you think?” I looked from one to the other of them. “No? Never mind then. Another time. It may seem relevant another time. I know this. I’ll wait.” I stopped talking. I smiled. More precisely, my lips stretched more tightly back. “We’ll talk instead about something more immediate and relevant to our current situation. See? The wind comes from the north. Clouds overhead. These things would hardly seem significant of themselves, but don’t you feel, both of you, my friends, that a change is or must be coming? Or if not the change itself, what necessity lies behind it? Why the change needs to occur, to cause a difference, a movement, a recognition of how one thing before is not like another, or much like itself even afterwards, that is, what difference a change has wrought? Is this not the Law, irreducible, yes? Yes: the movement, the recognition. This is love, what we serve. The flesh and the body of Law. Please, we’re all servants here. We know one thing from another – we do – if we know anything. If we know ourselves, I mean…”

  NINETEEN

  From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

  [Early Spring, 2004]

  I remember best from the first few days how it was to be this new and better thing, this better person, a person new and different from myself, better than myself, though it was at first difficult to recognize myself as that person, as myself, looking over there, looking in the mirror – or if it wasn’t a mirror, it was a reflective table at least – and with those hands – those were my hands? – how were those my hands? They were all wrong: too thick, and so much hair on the knuckles, and the self and the body were all wrong: too thick, too much hair, etc. Taller. Yeah, I was taller too. Oh, I shouldn’t have complained. It was an improvement. The hair. A wider man now. Stronger by far, yes, stronger than I’d ever been. All this muscle, this bulk. With this new self I could’ve crushed the old man. Skinny little twerp. Besides, he was gone. No, this: its width, the strength of it, this new body, that took up so much space; this was the person I’d never been and never was, at least until now. I wasn’t, even now. I was two people now, and I would learn to inhabit all this space I took. I thought, maybe then I could do things, maybe I could do the things I’d never done. I could find the things I’d never found. I could look in the mirror. Why do that? Why would I look in the mirror? I could look in the mirror and find the new and better person who could do these things that I could never do, me, and now I could do them, and it would be – it would have to be – better. A better life. Right? Yes, of course, a better, more solid… a more solid, stable life. All this muscle, bulk. Solid. A person this stiff, this solid. Someone who lived in the world and could be that way.

  But then, well, right, who was this new man?

  I remember, just woken, only born – sitting in a bright room, with bright light, everything shiny and gleaming. I didn’t know this place, much less how I’d got there. But I had, and I’d been there, it seemed, for a time, and if I didn’t know what business I was about, it seemed at least acceptable, among these others here – there was, for instance, the gaunt and wheeling man (I knew him), a man who knew nothing and said less (I knew him), who neither accepted nor protested my presence there (I knew) – that I should sit in a booth, at a table, and look into this weird and bright new world with my new eyes. No, it was a chair. Where I sat. There were no booths, only chairs, at tables. Those were days, I remember that now, days in the doughnut shop, not so long ago. All that time spent, and yet, all that time past; the details grown dim in some little time, and I have to think hard to recall it sometimes. Everything low. Everything glass, and light, and beaming. Jun-suh the owner brought me a doughnut, bowed slightly and stepped back, like an offering to a slightly mad and annoying and likely dangerous tyrant child-king. I’d said my thanks, thank you, thanks. The light burned, this fierce and unreasonable sun, and if I knew I was this large man, with th
is new body, now I knew then who I was, if not who I’d been.

  Yes, we were the new man. I’d traded out my old name. Things would be different now.

  The person that I’d been was in a mist – vanished some, retreating a little, and then more, and I supposed that was fine. He was broken. Snap, break: broken. Broken by things events, recent or recently past, broken bit by bit, piece by piece, he and I, we’d never been so much attached. He, I. Except that we were. The person that I’d been, and the person that he’d once been, who or whatever that was; these were gone, or at any rate fast disappearing, and the new man – thick, with hair, all that muscle and bulk, that jawline, that thousand-yard stare in a small room (the width of a room, I remember, the laying of the self down, I remember, the losing or the laying of our weapons down) a combination now of both of who we’d been, but neither of us, exactly – he was getting made. I/we were getting made. What could we become in this gleaming room in all this light, this glass and the see-through, and all this new thing; this fair, fresh doughnut, small lump, still warm from the oil, good, golden, and all the world still to be made, only outside – you could see how, through the glass, and it was all just right, or it was just right there, or it was all just there, so busy and so fast – just waiting to be made.

  TWENTY

  The World

  [Early Spring, 2006]

  Khenbish pulled the duct tape off my face, uncovering my mouth, letting again my teeth reveal themselves from behind pale, pink, residue-sticky, and now slightly torn lips, stretched back and smiling. Or something like smiling… “What were my accountings of?” I immediately started babbling. “A place, a person, an activity, as such. And I want firstly, mostly, fiercely, to see where the dough is made, and what method used to mix it, and what words the apprentice learns to speak to make the sorcery come alive. Then we’ll let the bird fly out. The bird… Then we’ll get to business. This hardly seems unreasonable, you must agree?”