New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  Khenbish calmly replaced the tape over my mouth and pressed it sealed again, and I went, “Mmf.” Considerately, he wiped my nose of the snot I’d blown, using a stiffened rag. My eyes rolled from one to the other of them: Khenbish, Dead Tom, Khenbish, Dead Tom, etc.

  “Should we take him to the Man, you figure?” said Tom. “You figure he might be ready?”

  The tall Mongol grunted, then said, thoughtfully, “He did tell us he wanted to see him.” Actually, what Khenbish said was itself no less opaque than anything I’d ever heard from him yet, though with my new gift for the preverbal, I understood this for what he meant. The tiny handwritten note on a folded paper helped also, in such tiny, deliberate block letters: I WANT TO SEE HIM. The hand was immediately recognizable. The page had come unfolded in angel-fan lines of symmetry, once it was tossed and fallen from the sky and having glided straight into the Mongol’s hair-sprouted ear – the shape of a paper airplane. He’d pulled the device from his head, opened it, and made a noise, nodding as he read.

  Both looked up to the mountain’s top, where its sole resident stood, hands on hips, a small silhouette in the distance, looking down at them, creamy oval of a face nothing but a dot, so far off.

  “Well alright then. Nothing else for it, we take the man along to see the Man. He’s taped. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Not minding, Khenbish hoisted me onto his shoulder like a soggy sack doll and I hung there, limp. I wanted to scream from the pain at my rib, but like Dead Tom said, I was taped: shut and shuttered. It wasn’t just my mouth, but my hands and ankles too. I’d made enough a pest of myself this severity must’ve seemed justly aroused.

  “So let’s get going,” said Dead Tom.

  As the giant walked, I flopped and hurt, making little moaning sounds with each step he landed. I didn’t want to complain, but this much I couldn’t help. The pain was blinding me, tears pouring from my face, and with my face pushed into the large Mongol’s back, like this, I couldn’t see a thing. Likewise, I could scarcely breathe from the snot pouring prodigiously from my nose. I had to blow and gasp, blow and gasp, alternately, growing dizzier by the minute, making a horrible, slimy snot mess on Khenbish’s flak-jacket back, likewise reapplied and rubbed into my face. Geh!

  Jeers and taunts followed me across the camp. I guessed that was to be expected. I guessed it only a matter of time until it came to this, or something; my fate to be decided, tensions growing, word spreading: the stranger in our midst, he is not police, an impostor – should we kill him? This was my answer, in part. I will be carried. I was being carried. I was near-choking on my own snot and sneezing from the pain, and now the object of good-natured fun. Well enough. Could be worse.

  “Friend, I see you’re dying,” Dead Tom’s voice hovered somewhere near. He must’ve looked around the giant’s shoulder to check my progress. “Don’t worry, friend, and don’t fight it. Make death your love. Love you let go of. Holding on only makes it worse.”

  “Mm-mm?” I squeaked, blowing mucous.

  “I know it makes no sense. My father said that to me once. Figured he must know, but it made no sense then either. Myself, well, I loved a puppy once. Cute little thing with fuzzy, floppy ears. That animal loved me the moment it saw me, that was clear enough – just whoever was there would do just fine – and, you know, I couldn’t help but love it too. Let the little bugger nip at my fingers with those teeth. Oh, he’d never bite through the skin, see, it was all just in play. Such a shame to have to twist its little neck and snap it, but there you go. We all do what we gotta do at gunpoint, see. Even when we can’t see the gun.”

  “MM!”

  “Aw relax, I’m only joking. I never had no puppy. Or did I…? Now I can’t remember all that clear. That’s the trouble with childhood, don’t you know? Especially with being kept in a cell. You can never tell what really happened and what didn’t. Hell, you can’t hardly see half of what’s there in the first place. Still, it’s the stuff that makes us, innit? The weird dreams of our youth, the blows and the dark, the pain – oh yes, the pain – and the… luminance… after all. That. The secret light. Oh I do remember that… oh yes.” I couldn’t see but imagined the dreamy, lost look on his wild bone-face. “Ours is a favored world, innit?” he continued, talking into the back of my head. “The half-world of the blind, the staring men at the sides, and the one with the electric prod. We learned to trust him, innit. Always knew the jolt would come, send us a-shudder. Could rely on that much. Just never could tell when. There now, that’ll do. Set the body down, Khenbish, it seems we’re at the foot.”

  I was relieved from the large man’s shoulder and dropped. It took a moment for things to stop spinning around and to orient myself enough to see how this, the base of the little mountain, was where we stood. They stood, that is, with me on the dirt, tied up, wheezing and muffled, and woozy like at the bottom of a fishbowl, all else swimming, me sunk.

  “I’d take the tape off,” Dead Tom said, “but you’ll just start talking again, and we’ve had enough of that, haven’t we? Yes, indeed. Jumpin’ Jesus on His celestial puck-fuck pogo stick, I swear! Hardly two words out of you the whole time you’re here, and then… well I don’t know what then, but then you just start jabbering away all this crazy shit and there’s no stopping you now. ’Cept with this.” He pulled at the tape with a finger. “Can I perhaps trust you to keep your bloody face the fuck just shut? I mean, it is in my interests to leave you breathing, innit.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay.”

  And gone was the tape in a jerk, and I was gasping in huge ragged gulps of air, my eyes – I could feel them, itching with eye-wobble – bulging hugely out.

  Khenbish seemed to’ve noticed the smear of snot on his back and was twisting and turning and reaching his head back to find its extent, wearing a disgusted look.

  A knife came out in Dead Tom’s hand and hacked at the tape over my wrists and feet, and I was, in word, free.

  “You’ll need to find your own way up top,” he told me, pointing. I turned to look. “See, we weren’t ourselves invited. And besides, by now, I think you understand the risks. It’s all quite beyond my pay grade.”

  Khenbish, for the first time ever that I’d seen, took off his trusted flak jacket and started rubbing it on the ground to get the snot off.

  “Great…” I gasped, thankful to be out of the fishbowl at last. “If there were ever any word for the kind company I’ve kept, or the sorrows I’ve since seen, and these sorrows I’ve since accepted, at least in part, for my own, or for the wind in all its sublimity, or the mystery of that received name, or text, or body, of this especial god or blood-filled, dank, and barbarous angel, and what current underlying may have once situated us within its round, its sound, or circumference, we have, with this same word given also allowed entreaty –” but I was choked to a close by Dead Tom’s hands wrapped around my throat and squeezing, his thumbs pressed upon the airway so that I would not breathe, and again my eyes bugged wide, just as I was not breathing and thereby choking to death.

  “Oh,” he said, “God, but, see, I told you, my good, new friend. Don’t get me wrong. I like you fine. I’m just not prepared to listen. Not for any more of this.” I stared up into his impassive face as the man choked me back into the fishbowl and its weird distance from everything else.

  I’m not sure if I registered properly the sound of the gunshot before or just slightly after seeing Khenbish’s huge body, from the corner of my eye, jerked sideways and rolling – and so much too sudden really for somebody so big. He’d rolled to his side, deflating with a sad little sound. The man, would he be dead? He was hit! He’d been hit! I realized it only now. Officer down!

  Dead Tom let go my throat and I could live, and was gasping again. He sprang to the fallen Mongol’s side, knelt beside him, searched around, found the bulletproof jacket and picked it up… waving it in the air and saying, “See? That’s what happens! That’s what always happens!” But where had the shot come from? />
  “Ayah!” she called. She climbed the gradual slope. The gun was in her hand until she let it drop in the dirt. “You seek audience as I do, but I’m here first! I own the land! I’ve got mineral rights! I wear dinosaur bones at my throat, and I am who is breathing back the ghost! Me! And where the ghost falls, I shout into the cave where no voice echoes back! Do you know why? Because I’m not there! I am no one! And no one sees the Man before I do!” It seemed to me she would’ve climbed the hill with difficulty, and she did. Her asymmetric stride lacked balance, her wide, hip-leg swing scarcely cleared her feet of the ground and often didn’t, kicking patches of dirt into spray and knocking rocks about, more often than not. What she lacked in grace, though, she corrected through determination, and scrambled, after her fashion, resolutely up. Past us, past the wounded man – wounded, though he was not dead, as the bullet had gone through his shoulder – to the part where the hill turned truly steep. There, she hugged the mountain with her thick, stiff arms and pushed with her knees and feet, pushed herself up, up and up, kicking loose rocks to roll and clatter. “See now I’ve touched the sky!” she announced. “I always would! The sky is mine! Nobody owns the mountains, but I do! My audience is with the sheriff, but don’t worry. I’ll let him know you’ve come too!” And she crawled beneath the yellow-tape perimeter around the mountain’s flat top and was gone from sight.

  “She’s motivated,” I stood and said, but to no one. “I suppose I should let her go first.” Looking around from even this short elevation, I could, for the first time, get a sense of the extent of this camp. “Not in any particular hurry, am I. Nope.” It stretched far, and farther than I would’ve imagined, tent after tent, one upon the hundreds if not thousands, rows and rows and rows of them, a web of inhabitation, a police-force occupation, for the Law does in this place reside. I picked up the handgun she’d dropped. It looked a lot like the one I’d lost. I hefted it, held it, still didn’t know what to do with it. “Not really, no,” I said, looking around, up and down, “come to think of it now. No. Not in any hurry whatever.” I stood nodding my head like a bird. The wind answered me with little trills. Or something. But the more I climbed, the closer I came. To the top, that’s right, whatever. A path was worn here, in this little mountain’s side, in the dirt, in the patchy grass and rock, and an oft-travelled one at that. Oft-enough. By others who, like myself, gained elevation and wonder both, and both, I imagined, concurrently. Here, the birds circled not quite so far overhead, though still overhead by far, to be sure. They did their circling business very high. “After all this time,” I said, “really, I’m prepared to wait. Why not? Wait and study. Gain some understanding of this range of land, this various air, the insects – I’ve seen few enough of those – and these strange, hideous birds, made to scrub the dead bones dry, to eat what life left supports them, in death, with death, with itself. You can see it from here… so many different things. So many. But no, she’s right. It’s like she says, and I hate it too, hate it as much as I love it. Everything is the same, isn’t it? I guess it is. It would have to be. Yep, guess so. That’s the way of it. We’ll see in a moment.”

  Finally, with some difficulty, I scrambled up the summit, and reached its periphery of tape. There. POLICE, it said, and DO NOT CROSS all across it. It flapped in the wind, supported from stakes around the edge. There was, beyond this, inside this, no sign whatever of the gold-mine woman and her claims to mineral rights. No sign.

  •

  And, yet, but, if not of her, not any sign whatever, here I found the sheriff, who was at least, at last, right there.

  “Oh, there you are,” he said upon seeing me. But he didn’t see me, he couldn’t, he didn’t even look at me – not at first. His eyes were fixed at the ground, at the dirt in front of him that covered the rock summit, and he mumbled, “I was sure I’d just made you up. Wasn’t that it? I’d just made you up. In my mind? Yes.” Or, no, wait – wasn’t that what I said upon seeing him? My lips were moving. My lips. But the sound came from over there, from him. It was carried on the wind. The Man himself was on the rock. He sat there looking a little ragged, a little hollow, a little haggard, with his legs stiffly crossed beneath him, his gaze fixed at the dirt, his tan sheriff’s uniform deep-stained with the Gobi dirt, and a shaggy growth of beard that sprouted out of his gaunt chin and cheeks. The look did not suit him. Not only did it run contrary to police grooming standards (everybody knew that), in his case it just didn’t seem real. Like some movie make-up artist had done a quick job, intending him as background, never intended for close-up. The hair, for instance: it was too long and wild and windblown and unkempt. Obviously a wig. Except I could see his eyes were alive, and that was important: that the eyes were alive. “The little voice in my head,” he mumbled, again as if to himself, turning away. “My radio voice. You would tell me things. I remember now. Yes, you’ve always been there. Always? No, not always. Telling me things. Horrible things.”

  POLICE and DO NOT CROSS said the yellow ribbon dividing me from him. I read it again. POLICE DO NOT CROSS. But I was not police, and everyone knew it, so I crawled under, just as she’d done, but stopped of a sudden when he held up one hand in warning.

  “Really,” he said, finally looking up at me, the thing alive in his eyes, like the hair, the beard, a little bit too much so. That was what halted me. “Please stop. No one ever listens when I tell them that, but please. Really. Any closer’s just not a good idea at all.”

  “You’re the sheriff…” I said, guessing as I did it wasn’t really necessary I should tell him that. I shrugged my shoulders and held my hands apart.

  “Well, yes,” he brightened, to my surprise, as if genuinely glad to be recognized.

  “You’re Sheriff Friendly,” I said, another thing which didn’t seem strictly necessary.

  “That’s right.” Smiling.

  “We’ve…” and my legs gave way under me, and I dropped to the rock with a thump and a little gush of air from my lungs and went uh! And now though my eyes were dazed and glazed with surprise and I had no breath left to speak, still I managed, after some struggle, “We’ve…! Met…! Before!”

  He steepled his fingers together in contemplation and contemplated me, peering across steepled fingers.

  “I’ll bet you don’t remember! We’ve… You, I…! We’ve met before! We…!” I pointed my finger between myself and him and back and back again, and back and forth, and again some more. All the while, he maintained his smile as he wore his equanimity: contemplatively.

  Finally, he said, “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no, don’t be sorry. No, never be sorry,” I said. “No, you’re never sorry. Not at all.”

  He shifted a little, a scowl crept across his face. “But you’re the voice. I know you, that little voice. That annoying little voice, always needling me, always… Now you’re here? Of course you are. Of course. I knew you’d come. Sooner or later. You’d have to, wouldn’t you? You don’t look at all how I’d pictured you. But of course. All this time… I’m afraid I’ve become unaccustomed to receiving guests. But maybe you’re not so much a guest? Maybe you’re the… No, no… that’s not right. The voice is never a guest. It never is. But I have nothing to share with you. I have no… I’m not prepared, see, and that’s what one does, isn’t it? One offers something. Refreshments, yes. Gifts maybe? I don’t remember how this is done. What does one do? Maybe if I send a note, they’ll bring us some coffee. That would be nice. coffee. And doughnuts too, yes?”

  I nodded. I liked coffee and doughnuts. I liked them.

  From a nearby notebook the sheriff tore a page, and with a pen he scribbled onto it a note – a note which I imagined must say something like coffee and doughnuts, bring, please – and as he wrote I was able, for the first time, in proximity to his person, to see him at work: the way he bent so close to the page, the infinite care and concentration he bore upon the script, so tiny, so straight, his pen held tightly in hand, so tight it hurt to see it, the fingertips that gr
ipped it going white. This would be the same posture he’d held, I thought, and the same deliberate scrutiny he’d given all those many pages of such little hand-writ words, the ones that filled to bursting all those many notebooks. The ones I’d broken my eyes against to read. And I’d read them all, too, every one of them. It had not been easy. And it was painful to watch him now, but also fascinating.

  Finished with the note, he folded the page into a paper glider and tossed it, not bothering to aim or take measure of the wind – and the wind took the page away and carried it, and soon enough it would be delivered to the one whom it most needed to reach. “Give it a minute, they’re usually pretty quick,” he explained.

  I gaped around, my eyes watering, at the mountain range beside us, at the tents all in their neat rows, arranged into rings below. The mountains were a different thing at this height, and though the altitude was itself not so considerable – we were not more than two hundred feet above the desert floor – it was little less or more than all these other crags and peaks and ridges and valleys beyond, all in miniature, like so many bumps. In a word, we were all of a height.

  “I brought gifts! These… these are yours!” and I pulled the badge off my chest and the ruined hat off my head and the… the… gun, which I’d tucked into my trousers (as far as I could tell, it was the same gun, the one he’d given me, so long ago), I pulled that out too, and I threw the lot of them onto the rock between us, where they lay in a loose arrangement, and they looked more sad and beaten than ever. “You remember giving me these,” I said. “Right?” And again, “Right?” And the gun went off, all by itself: it shot a round bang! into the nearby mountains. A puff-cloud of brown dust went up on a slope.

  “Grant us safe passage,” intoned the sheriff, looking over these objects. “A little worse for wear, I can’t help but notice. Not my place to complain, though. Not my place. But these gifts – and they were gifts, freely given, if I don’t remember doing it – I’d tucked them into a clever place in my own mind, I’d thought, a clever place, I wouldn’t remember, meaning to never see them again, thinking, well, that must be what is necessary, that is what the voice says, and now I’d… I’d heard you lost the gun, but…”