New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  Little. Nothing. Less.

  A single, thick, wet drop fell onto my head and spattered.

  “The Law,” Sheriff Friendly stated, crouching low, his face pale, “is language. Law is the expression. The body and blood, the… the… head. Yes! The Law is the head of the body, while the body is in motion, constant motion, defined by its motion, the living sentence or word. This is no theory, no. It is articulation of the substance itself. And so why not these people? All of them? They’ve come… to refract, to bend the light, overhead, what reaches them. They’ve come to express the word, their… words… Yes, I sent the signal. I did. It was mine, but… Law moves in and through me, and I transmit… so it’s not me. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see how, when they look at me, they don’t see me, that I’m not here, there’s nothing of me left? I’m hollow. I’ve been removed. The voice didn’t do it all, the voice wasn’t even the first part, but it was a stage, I remember now, I didn’t see it then, oh, but now I see it. Now I see it. And these… these poses the body assumes, these shapes… the semblance, the resemblance… methods of articulation… and, and it takes these forms, and it moves itself. It is its own reason, isn’t it? What you must know. The reason of becoming… for becoming… any shape whatever. And the police have made themselves into one single body now. See? Look? They’ve become, like that, the body and the head, and they’ve pushed into the form, they’ve pushed… the form of the body and the head of Law, and the head thinks, the head thinks… and it directs the body, and the body expresses, it assumes postures, and the work of the body is theirs, it’s before them, in front of them… And nothing is behind them, nothing is behind, not anymore, nothing of that… other thing left, the who, the what. The work of the Law is to express… its kindness. Yes! Its kindness. Semblance, resemblance. And articulation… always the articulation… the being and becoming, the one thing and… the same thing, side by side, in infinite reflection. It is one thing, but it is infinite. While you, the voice, you know about that too, how a single… a singular body… can make itself into that one thing, and there’s nothing after that, nothing after or before, but still it goes on forever, it is infinite. There is only… That’s why I brought you here, why I made you. You know that, don’t you? That I made you. I invented you, out of nothing. I made you up. Because I wanted you to see it too. What beauty there is. What form. What inform… information… when the body is… pressed…”

  But the more that the sheriff spoke, and the more abstract, and the more lost he seemed within that abstraction, the more I felt an emptiness opening up within me, bleak and perfect, this form and shape and variously-sized hole that had always been so familiar. It was the shape of the world, this hole, if only the shape that remained once the world itself had gone. I understood that he and I were, alternately, variously, the inside and the outside to this shape – reversed and seeming, if side to side, if not exactly the same. There was, within me, and surrounding him also, the same emptiness. This emptiness was itself a whole thing, entire and needing nothing, but it made us into separate men, both in the shapes of humans. I understood then, finally, why I’d come here, all this way, and for what, and why I truly and absolutely hated him… what was left of him.

  I felt the weight of the solid shape in my hand, the heavy camera – the body, the lens – how it fit there, its unforgiving metal. I considered how much force it would likely take to crush his skull with it, and wondered if I had the strength. I figured that I probably did, with the necessary determination. But I knew also that I was hardly match for Friendly – he was easily twice my size and six times as strong. But I might have one thing in my favor: I could surprise him, because no one else could get close enough. He would never expect for me to come and brain him.

  “I want to show you that quality of faith – if faith is what that is. I want…” I said, “I want to show you kindness also. The kindness of vision. You know the vision. You’ve seen the shape. I know you have, because I read it in your journals. Yes, the shape. Amanda knew what it was, even if she’d never seen it herself. She’d seen you. It’s made you, just the same as it’s made me, inside and the outside. I need to return to you everything you’ve taken from me. But…” feeling the weight of the Nikon’s metal body in my hand and hefting it, “what I really want to know…” I stood, I turned, “the most, the very most…” readying my best and only weapon, “is what…” and I came at him, charging the short distance, “you’ve done…” and he held up his hands (and I was right: he was surprised) – he held his hands up and out, forward, waving, waving no, waving NO, NO, “with Vivianne!”

  And, as with the approach, there was first a distance crossed, then a distance crossed again, if not that same distance, but half: the level ground of the mountain’s summit plateau, its scrabble of dust and dirt that covered the rock, and police tape flapping in some small breeze, and the approach… the approach of rain, of colors, depth, and colors in a gray plain, of distant storm clouds not so distant anymore, but close now, and touching all of us.

  And there it was. And there. There it was.

  THE ULTRAWORLD!

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Ultraworld!

  [1994] (Hollywood, CA)

  OFFICER FRIENDLY, with a stick, a gun, a fresh cup of coffee, and a radio strapped to his belt (telling him things of the immediate world and what might be required – by it, of him) sat humming to himself in the bright room of glass and steel and formed orange plastic that he’d known formerly and knew now also as Dirty D’s Donut Hole, glass box in the desert, best in the basin, the best at any rate known to him, with air conditioning so advanced it was likely back-engineered from recovered alien technology, and though he had no fresh doughnuts to match the coffee (granted, how many doughnuts could a man eat, in any case?) he did have the sudden and disarming sense – no, don’t call it sense, because it was more than that, it was a knowing – that he was new, here now, brand bang happy squealing new. This. Him. He was not and never would be the same. Not again, not after what? Nope, nope. The same as? Well, the same as before, the same as he was once. Never. The same as just a moment ago. That was all gone, all over and done, and he, he, OFFICER FRIENDLY, was a new man. Here now, what do you know.

  “Explain,” came a tinny voice from out of his radio.

  He, the man, OFFICER FRIENDLY, drear-faced and lonely, sad as the song, patrolman beached off the Hollywood beat like a dried-up, limp kelp, long lost in the sun, formerly dead and gone, he, he sat crackling in the controlled climate of a fishbowl while outside Santa Monica Blvd shimmered, blah-blah, a four-lane car park producing smoke and smog, terrestrial trip-wire, highway to and from the stars and sun, and the beach, the beloved, if existentially bereft, of so much seaweed, of light and the shore, a favorite among the faceless of all the inland empire, now drift and shit-dappled, whatever his accoutrements, and so young! He was like a light, if a light now dim, all but burnt, maybe broken (yes, definitely broken) – a railyard, a stagecoach, grave cast in granite, all the rage, given to the like-mindedness of the man with the hole in the head. That was where he’d put one bullet, that one that he remembered. Bang, straight in the face! The face had crumpled and collapsed like so much paper. But he was still here, still a cop, even if just a corpse with a pulse. So-called corpse, so-called pulse.

  But now he was new! New life! A new body heat. Braced in the square-back of the molded seat, legs and feet beneath the table. But he could not would not say (if he should) who he was. Because he’d been someone different, if an empty man, only a moment before.

  “Explain,” squawked his radio, “explain…”

  Well, yes. In the moment after the going-over the turning man circled here and he called, “Willy,” he said, “Willy,” and “Willy, look. Do you know who I am? Do you recognize me?”

  The turning man, sticklike, scarecrow, flop-hat, more dried-up than he, turned, turned and circled, said nothing, looked straight ahead. And once, for a moment, their eyes met brief, met briefly, bu
t there was no recognition from his side. Or so OFFICER FRIENDLY would’ve said. But there was.

  “Willy, do you know me? My name is, was once… no, wait – it never was…”

  Proteus.

  END

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  A Repeater Books paperback original 2018

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  Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Copyright © Brian C Short 2017

  Brian C Short asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Cover design: Johnny Bull

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  Typefaces: Corbel and Gill Sans

  ISBN: 978 1 91224 800 1

  Ebook ISBN: 978 1 91224 801 8

  Printed and bound in Denmark

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