Super Flat Times

by Matthew Derby

  “I wouldn’t be asking you about this unless it was really, profoundly important. Everything about the person I am is inside her head.”

  The admiral did not respond. He was bent completely in his chair, so that all Gantry could see over the desk was the rippled aperture of his pants opening out on the small of his back, cinched by a flimsy belt.

  “Is there any way I could be allowed to have her street address, a speech bead number, something?”

  “Gantry,” the admiral said from beneath the desk, “this is not the first time we have been through something like this.”

  “Those other times, okay, I will admit I was a bit frivolous. I admit that I wasted your time with the petitions, the demonstrations.”

  “You faked your own death.”

  “I faked my death and if it were something I could take back, you know, I would be holding it here in my arms right now as I speak to you. But what I’m telling you is that this is an emergency. This is the kind of thing they’ll be making a documentary of later, after the dust settles, after the bodies are recovered. The camera crew will want your perspective. Do you want to be a part of that documentary?”

  “No.”

  “Great. So if I could get a phone number.”

  “I can give you a made-up phone number. Would that help?” “Yes. Thanks. Also, I think Mr. Cushing is going to kill me when he gets out of jail again.”

  Shelf was not in the phone book. There were seven different entries for “Shelf,” but none of them was the right Shelf. Gantry knew this because he called each one, asking, “Are you alone?” before hanging up. It was late. Conrad and his mother were in her bedroom, talking softly and moving furniture. They were trying to make a child together. “The real way,” Conrad had said once, and when Gantry’s mother had given Conrad a shocked, hurt look he put his hand up over his mouth and never said anything about it again, but there it was, hanging in the air in their living room, casting out a rude, penetrating light.

  He sat down on the living room couch, taking slow, contemplative bites from a withered stick of beef. On the television, two men were beating each other with clubs in slow motion. The thing to do, thought Gantry to himself, the only other option that he could drum up, was to ride around town on his three-wheeler, going up and down every street until he found her.

  It was hot out. The sky was low and wide, scalding everything with furious white rays. Gantry sweat through his face mask. He yanked it off and stuffed it in his pants pocket, pedaling hard. The houses were aggressively identical. He would know her house when he saw it, though. It would resonate somehow — didn’t elephants return to the place they were born in order to die? It would be something like that, Gantry thought. A knowledge beyond knowledge.

  He turned onto the street with the restaurant. Maybe the girl was there — maybe she would give him another cake.

  “You,” she said from behind the counter. She was not as awful-looking as he’d remembered. Or maybe he’d just gotten used to the way she looked.

  “Can I have another of those cakes?” “No. I got in trouble the last time.” “Want to help me find someone?”

  The place was packed, simmering with customers. She looked around, leaning over the counter to peer into the prep kitchen. Two short men were working with diced beef, hurriedly chucking handfuls into a chrome bowl. “Meet me out back,” she whispered.

  He parked his three-wheeler in the bushes and leaned on one of the high, green Dumpsters, constantly readjusting his pose for an imagined audience that he felt followed him everywhere, even into sleep. His dreams, he suspected, were always under intense scrutiny. The girl opened up the window to the prep kitchen and stuck out a bare leg. Her body was powerful, stocky. He thought about the naked pictures he had found in Conrad’s toolbox, how for years he had known what intercourse looked like but not that there was any movement involved, so that his idea of sex involved nothing more than a sustained pose, held perhaps for hours. This image was so vivid in his head that what actually happened, when it had happened last summer with Katrina Boda out underneath the Trusty House of Flavor, was a crushing, humiliating disappointment.

  The girl rushed up toward him.

  “What can I call you?” Gantry asked. “Otherwise, I’m just calling you ‘the girl.’”

  “I keep forgetting my name,” she said, looking down at her tag. “It’s Elle.”

  “Like the letter?”

  “Like the magazine.”

  “Anyway, I’m trying to find my mother. You could ride on back.”

  Elle walked over to the three-wheeler. She spread her hand out on the seat. Her face lost its shape. “I don’t know. I don’t like mothers.”

  “Why not?”

  “They spend the first part of their lives trying to get something out of them, and then they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back inside.”

  “Huh?”

  “I just get sad when I see mothers. They’re always coming into the restaurant. They look at me like I owe them something.”

  “This isn’t the mother that had me. It was my other mother. She left a long time ago and my mother, the first mother, put a restraining order on her.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I don’t know. That’s part of what I want to know.”

  Elle lifted herself up onto the seat. “No thanks.”

  Gantry put his hands in his pockets. He gripped the soaked face mask there. It was like a large, cool raisin. “What do you want to do then?”

  “Just see you with your clothes off.”

  They went to a quarry, where some cars had been abandoned. Gantry held the girl in his arms, tightly, as if she were something to be hauled across a vast expanse of empty road. His shirt was off, stuffed into the glove compartment of a broken station wagon. He looked into her eyes until all he could see was his own burly, misshapen face staring back at him in duplicate. “Kiss me someplace that I’ve never been kissed before,” he said onto her face. She withdrew a little from Gantry to take an inventory of his soft, whitened torso, and then ran a finger cursorily across his chest. The skin there had a translucent quality. Her finger left a red trail of engorged blood vessels across the milky window of his flesh. Gingerly, she took his hand and raised it, upturned, to her lips, which she pressed softly against the smooth flesh of his wrist. The lips made a mark.

  “That was nice,” Gantry said.

  She moved closer to him and cradled his neck in hers. “Actually, though, I had some place specific in mind,” he said into her ear.

  The girl pulled back. “What?” she asked.

  “Do you know where the perineum is?” he said.

  She looked at his neck, at the fierce bobbing of his Adam’s apple. It was almost as if she’d just lost some of the air that was keeping her puffed up, as if she were a parade float being put away for the season. But she knelt down anyway, and unbuckled Gantry’s Velcro belt.

  “Wait a second,” Gantry said, clutching her wrist, because it did not feel right, the whole scenario, with Shelf out there, somewhere, slowly masticating the most pressing secrets about his life. “Tell me if you know. Why do people stay in places they know they’re not supposed to? And how do they know when it’s time to leave?”

  The girl looked down. “Are you not supposed to be here? Say the truth. I can tell if you’re lying and I’ll beat you.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here, but maybe that’s just the part of me that knows I am supposed to be here playing a trick on the other, weaker part. Like you know how they say that one side of the brain is weaker than the other? Maybe that one side is more powerful than we think.”

  “What does your body say?”

  Gantry was tired of the conversation. He fell over, and the girl knelt beside him, gently kissing his bare, heatstroked chest.

  The houses, as he slowly passed them in the falling darkness, didn’t offer the slightest indication of the whereabouts of Shelf. Through the shuttered windows Ga
ntry could see only flickering shadows. What else had he expected to see? A woman kneeling by the window, weeping softly into her hands, keeping a vigil for her son? The absurdity of it all hit him hard in the waist. He pedaled the three-wheeler laboriously, cursing at his own gullibility as he huffed the cool, brittle air. Shelf was far away, as far away as a person could get, and who was she, anyway? She’d been his mother for nearly half his life, but he could remember only the half after she was gone. All he knew about her came from muttered remarks his mom had made to Conrad when they were sure he was asleep. The restraining order — who was that meant to protect? His mom? Conrad? Him? Why had he stuffed himself with Shelf so fully, when he really had not the slightest idea what sort of a person she was? Gantry tried to bring up her face, but all he could muster was a postage-stamp-size portrait, muddied and damp — nothing more, really, than an outline. Meanwhile, he had just run from the girl at the quarry, whose slushy, threadbare presence bore down on him like a private storm cloud. He’d woken up in her arms — after he fell she’d dragged him into the backseat of an old mustard-colored cargo van, and had been stroking him, gently caressing the back of his neck. He pushed her away, fainting again in the process. He fainted a few more times on the way to the three-wheeler, busting open his knee and cutting his face on a rusty exhaust pipe, but each time he came to he saw her, standing in front of the sliding door, one foot propped up on the running board, elbow balanced on her knee, as if to suggest that this was the sort of rejection with which she’d already spent a short lifetime, that she exuded the sort of familiarity that made people comfortable enough with her to leave whenever the thought occurred to them, and knew it.

  He couldn’t shake the girl from his head — where was she on the food chain, one notch above him, or one below? He could not tell.

  The houses started to look different — cheaper and newer, which meant that he’d made it all the way out to the suburbs. There was no easy way home from there, because they wouldn’t let him carry the three-wheeler onto the bus, and the buses had probably shut down for the night anyway.

  “Conrad?” he called from a pay phone outside a Trusty House of Flavor, one that was built in the shape of a gorilla.

  There was static on the line, and the distant sound of furniture being built. “Yes, son?”

  “Oh, Conrad, please don’t call me that.”

  There was a pause. He heard his mother at the other end of the room, asking who was on the phone. “Where are you, buddy?”

  “I am gone. I have no idea. I got myself lost, hugely lost.” Gantry looked out onto the desolate array of chain stores that lined the interminable boulevard. Bathed in the static cadmium light of the streetlamps, emptied of patrons, they looked like the gaping mouths of young animals, eager to consider anything that might happen to fall within their purview. Steadying himself against the glass wall of the phone booth, he described the shape of the building to Conrad, gulping hot mouthfuls of air so that he would not start to sob.

  After a brief, muffled silence, Conrad let out a thin, calculated sigh. “I will see what I can do for you, champ.”

  Mr. Cushing was out of jail by the end of the week. They kept Mr. Felt a week longer because of the laboratory’s worth of chemicals they found in his locker. Without Mr. Felt standing next to him, Mr. Cushing seemed slightly out of focus, his face pixilated and vague. He could sense this, though, and it made him more irritable.

  Gantry was in detention because no one could think of anywhere else to put him. He was putting his toys out on the desk when Mr. Cushing was brought into the detention bay by two armed Orange Jackets. In addition to the blocks and stick, his mother had given him a green marble. “You can pretend this is your little sister,” she’d said, placing the glass sphere in his glistening palm.

  The detention instructor was a substitute and, not knowing what might happen, put Mr. Cushing in the desk directly behind Gantry. Soon enough, Mr. Cushing stuck a pencil in Gantry’s back.

  “Why did you stab me?” Gantry said, trying to reach his arm out behind him to cover the wound.

  “I didn’t stab you.”

  “Why is your pencil totally covered with blood then?” “Your dad is an anal meteorologist.”

  Gantry was not completely sure what that was, and anyway, the thought that his dad could actually be something, actually out there somewhere, and not just the contents of a test tube, as his mom kept telling him, was comforting, enough so that Gantry let Mr. Cushing plunge the pencil into his back again, right in the same spot, and wiggle it there. Gantry leaned into the sharp point, heaving himself up and back, bolstered by the quiet, unnamed hope that the pencil might poke right through the small kernel of his heart.

  Fragment

  Rough hands came at me in the dark. One daughter slept, the other one sat up in bed and watched them lift me by the arms, quietly and efficiently, and carry me out of the shed. She sat motionless, mouth half open.

  The air was fresh, and then stale again. I was in the hull of some boxy trailer. A woman with dim white skin sat next to me. She asked in Russian if she could bury her head in the crook of my arm. I said no but she burrowed there anyway, driving her massive forehead into my chest.

  We drove for hours. Then the vehicle stopped, and we were ushered out into the blue night. They thanked us each for our participation in the world, but that, as in everything else, our time had run out. They began shoving us, one by one, into a deep pool. The woman next to me was motionless, like a tree stump. I was shaking so violently that I thought some vital part of me might snap right off. One of the soldiers, a pretty girl in a floppy canvas jumpsuit, approached the woman, whispered something into her ear, and rammed the butt of her rifle into the woman’s back. The woman folded in half like a hunting knife and slipped, head-first, into the muck.

  Then the girl came to me. She grasped my collar to steady me (I was tearing up now, stuttering, my lips cold and rubbery, cords of milky drool running down my chin, spoiling my nightshirt) and brought my head up sideways to her mouth. Her breath was sharp and cool against my ear, like an icicle. “It helps to think of the first thing you can remember,” she whispered, but what I heard was “think of the worst thing you can remember,” so that when she punched my back with the gun I thought about the time I’d left the girls by the roadside. They were yelling at each other, and I could not make them stop. I pulled over and turned the car off. “You want me to leave you here, don’t you?” I spat at them from the front seat. They sat straight up in their seats, looking down at their hands, both sets clenched into tight fists. “Get out,” I said. They got out. I gunned the engine and ripped out onto the highway, driving away until they were nothing more than two misshapen specks in the rearview mirror. Then I turned around. When they got back in the car I told them that they would never forget what they’d just learned. Now, though, I am the stationary one, and they are moving swiftly away from me. I feel myself getting smaller, a rough smudge swiftly becoming engulfed by the horizon, slipping out of their perspective forever.

  An Appeal

  My husband, before he disappeared, built a tall, sweeping tent of canvas in our backyard. He cut wide slits at regular intervals along the wall that act as gills, drawing gusts of cool air into the tent, puffing it up like a white lung. We rarely used the tent when he was around, but these days I find myself there on a daily basis, unable to remember exactly how I’ve ended up inside, kneeling, completely still on the braided burlap carpet. On a clear day, after a cloud migration, the only audible sound in the tent is the billowing of its own walls. It is the most peaceful space I have ever had the pleasure to enter, and I believe that my husband knew this even as he built it. He was a diminutive, excessively faulty man, given to fits of rage in which he’d stab himself in the chest to garner pity and affection. I cannot say that I ever loved him in the way that I’d imagined loving another person, but he built things well. Maybe all he was doing in building the tent was padding his chances of being remembered. He wa
nted to carve out a space in my consciousness so deep and intractable that I’d be forever unable to fill it back in with anything else. And he has.

  I have tried my best to render a broad spectrum of experiences from the period outlined in this book. But the translation bunker is packed with samples none of us have yet been able to work with successfully. As you know, a great deal of the behavioral phenomena prevalent in the Super Flat Times has since been banned. Because of comprehensive infringement edicts issued in the first year after the Great Severance, the air pockets in which these thoughts and gestures are housed have been watermarked and are unbearable to touch, causing bleeding, skin ulcers, and cramps. Our hands have not yet developed the sort of calluses necessary to massage these patches accurately, and as a result we have not been able to get at the nucleus in which the memories are kept. As a result, the history presented here is somewhat skewed. Certain events we are sure we witnessed in those times have not shown up at all in the air pockets we’ve been able to manipulate — we can only conclude that this missing data resides in the protected air. We have not yet given up on these troubling passages, however. A group of children known as the Palm Family has volunteered to undergo an intensive twelve-year program to toughen their hands. Each day they train with buckets of hot sand, grains, steel sheets, and burlap, working their palms against the abrasive material until a sturdy mitt of dead skin can accumulate. Additionally, each of them has taken a pledge of delayed adolescence, as the development of adult hormones can have an adverse effect on the translation process. I have lectured at their facility, located on the outskirts of a remote sea-level village in the Northeastern Properties. They are brave children, some of them already in their twentieth year of life. During a tour of the grounds, I had the rare opportunity to assist in a training exercise by firing spiked aluminum spheres at them from a small cannon on the development courts. Watching the unbounded enthusiasm on their faces as they hurled themselves high into the air to catch the projectiles with both enormous hands, I forgot for a moment the great sacrifice they have made in order to bring the remaining prayers to light.