New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  FOUR

  The World

  [2005]

  The day. The night. The sky is heavy when it grows dark. What’s the smell? A year ago. Almost, today? No, more than that. More: May to June to mid-June, a year and a month and then more still, a week, a day. The smell, I think, is, are, leaves, and they are burning. Cannot see the smoke, but know that it is there. And hot metal. And something else. The loose step underneath of gravel underfoot, the false foot of gravel and glass on pavement. Makes a grinding on the ground, foot to ground, through pavement, on pavement, never meant to be such a certain thing, perhaps, and sometimes slips the step. Slip up. Step around, if you can. Sound the word, hold it on your tongue hold it there: Hollow. The sound is hollow. They pressed a hollow inside him, and that was it, and it was there. It was. No? They? No, no, I did that. The sound itself is hollow and the thing in the middle is hollow, in the mids-part, it’s missing, is all. Is all that, just not there, is all. Good. God.

  Up the hill. Hate the Hill. No, don’t hate. No use to that. Just there, only is. Still, I’ve never liked this part of it. The noise and something fearful. Desperate people. See there is the Round One, very large, all that. Who pays for that? Somebody does, not me. Rather go without.

  The air was warm and still and thick. The cloud cover, lit gently from beneath by a density of city lights, hid all the stars from view, masking the sky, all flat and bland and mottled, and as I rounded the corner from Madison to the avenue, there was tall Davis at the sidewalk, waving his arms like a windmill, feet planted solid on the ground and unmoving while his upper body pivoted lazily left then right, stop, right then left, stop, arms and hands aflap. I looked up in surprise. He moved so seldom beyond the front porch.

  “Hello, Davis,” I said, making my voice bright and I hoped not falsely so. He stared warily at me but said nothing, kept flapping his arms; left, stop, right, stop. He might not have recognized me, for all I could tell. I, too, was out of context.

  As I crossed the yard to the porch, the distorted sound of overdriven Christian hymnals, and sound not much improved through the peak, blared out from one single speaker of an ancient tape recorder kept tucked under the bench along the wall, where above it sat Henry, the cassette machine’s owner (who I would, soon enough, need to ask to turn it down) – an aging black man with crystal-white kinks of hair above a scarred face. I noticed he had a bandage wrapped tightly around one hand, his left: today, part-mummy. Willy stood to one end, putting distance between himself and the others; or rather, not stood, he walked his tight circles, turning widdershins, again and again. Or was it deasil? I could never remember which was which. His jaw hung loosely to one side, like an extension of the brim of his sagging hat, an overall gesture of looseness. Mary occupied the front steps, a cloud of cigarette smoke trailing out of her head, her eyes locked forward and staring in mute, numb terror. Hers met mine as I passed in front of her.

  “Hello, Mary,” I greeted her, again, as brightly as I could manage. She looked directly ahead as I climbed past her and she said nothing. My voice was a no-impact thing.

  Through the front door, the office was immediately on the left, where inside I found Vivianne, a bright yellow boa being dragged slowly across her shoulders by her girlfriend, blonde boa-wielding Marg, who stood over and behind her and slightly to one side. The bright-dyed feathers sprung silkily from out of the spill of Vivianne’s dark hair behind her neck, over her back, one by one by one, each feather in turn, while she paid it or Marg little mind. “Viv. Marg,” I said, resigned. Marg flashed her eyes at me, half-menace, the rest disinterest. Vivianne, at the desk, leaned into the spiral-bound logbook before her, scribbling at its open page with a ballpoint pen. I stepped around them, over the open case with its red velvet inner lining and Viv’s guitar, like eviscerated guts, propped up beside it, E string missing. I set my knapsack onto the unused back desk and lowered myself into its plastic chair to wait. My shift didn’t start until eleven, but I’d hoped I might find Vivianne alone. No such luck.

  She said to me, without looking up, “Just a sec, Proteus, I’m almost done,” and scribbled some more, and as she did, Marg collected her accessories from Vivianne’s body and moved away, a languid doll. In a moment, Vivianne had finished with the pen and dropped it, sat back, exchanged a quick look with Marg, then turned to me. “There was an incident,” she said, “today with Davis at dinner. You can read about it in the log, but I’ll tell you. He went after Henry with a fork.” Davis and Henry were roommates.

  “He thought what, that Henry was meat?”

  “Funny. I had to give Davis a formal warning, and there’s plenty of documentation. As you might imagine. Said documents are available for your perusal, at your leisure. But you should read them.” She tapped the logbook, its ragged cardboard cover now shut.

  “I’m going now,” announced Marg. “I will see you later.” This last part she said to Vivianne, but she did manage a hostile look toward me as she left.

  Viv called after, “I’ll come by in a little while, right after my shift.” Marg worked at another house in the Republic system, three blocks away.

  “I just saw the two of them out front,” I said uselessly. “Davis was doing that windmill thing with his arms. Henry’s on the porch. Was anybody hurt?”

  “You saw Henry’s bandage. It’s not bad, but you’ll want to check it later and make sure there’s no infection. People made a lot of noise when it happened and were upset, but it didn’t get any worse than that. I think they’ve all forgotten about it by now. Still, you’ll want to make sure there isn’t any trouble in their room tonight. I’d say that if Davis wants to sleep on the couch, go ahead and let him.”

  Davis usually did sleep on the couch in the TV room, and I always let him, but I didn’t want to tell her that. “I’ve never known Davis to get violent,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve even seen him angry. Do you know how it started?”

  Vivianne shrugged.

  I stared into the space between us and blinked. Something somewhere shifted.

  “Do you know…?” Vivianne began, but then seemed to lose the thought. She looked at me with her eyes wide and round.

  Did I know that she was a sea creature? I thought.

  I blinked again, and for the first time, I felt like we were in the room together. My fingers worried at a loose bit at the edge of the folding desk.

  She went on finally, “I’ve never quite understood what that was about. I mean, when I first met you.”

  My heart jumped, and I started, “What do you mean?”

  “At the monastery, do you remember? I mean…” She searched for something. “…What the ritual was about.”

  I calmed, though deflated. My heart returned to a normal pulse, more or less.

  “I never asked anyone at the time because it… didn’t seem important, in a way. What anything actually meant. I was just there, and that was what I was doing. I had to go there, and be there, and… But now I want to know. What is a hungry ghost, for instance? And how do you feed it?”

  The loose bit of plastic peeled further away from the table’s edge as I pulled it. I had to force myself to stop. “There’s no one answer to that,” I told her. After thinking for a moment, I continued. “Think of it this way. Have you ever seen a ghost?”

  “I think so. Have you?”

  I nodded. “When I was younger, when I was in college, I knew this guy – he wasn’t exactly a friend, just someone I knew and was friendly enough with, except he was a terrible mooch. His name was Finch, and he was another student, or at least he had been – he maybe dropped out after a while, but he still hung around, and he never had any money. Whenever any of us saw him at the tavern where we frequented, the first thing out of his mouth was to ask for a cigarette. Then if you gave him a cigarette, he’d ask you to buy him a beer. Every time. It got so you knew that if you saw him, he’d ask you for something, and so after a while, it got really annoying. He was a nice enough guy, except that he always… well, you u
nderstand. We dreaded running across him. Once my roommate Alan and I were walking up the street to the bar, and there we saw Finch at the entrance, talking with some other people out on the sidewalk. We were still half a block away when he looked up and he saw us, and there was that look in his eyes, like he’d flashed on some new targets, or suckers, or whatever, and Alan and I, we turned right around and we left. It was totally spontaneous, and I don’t think we either of us even said anything. We were poor too, and we just didn’t want to deal with him. So we went somewhere else, across town.

  “It was maybe the next week that we came back to that same tavern again and somebody told us that Finch had died. He’d been living on somebody’s couch, in a house with a bunch of people, and in the morning they found him like that, overdosed on heroin, and cold and dead as dead gets. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Finch was normally into at all, needles and serious drugs like that, so they thought it was likely that he’d meant to kill himself. But of course, nobody really knew. He’d not left any note to explain himself.”

  “So it was probably an accident,” Vivianne offered.

  “Well, sure, that would be sensible to think. And now I’m almost certain that was the case. But that wasn’t what any of us quite believed at the time.” I looked at the loose plastic edging, sticking out. “It wasn’t hard to imagine that he might be suicidal. Not if he felt he’d backed himself into a corner and couldn’t get out of it. Not if people were starting to respond to him like Alan and I had. I thought it was possible Finch had been a lot more sensitive than I’d given him credit for, and like people do, I felt at least a little responsible.”

  “But you’re not, you know,” said Viv.

  “Well, no, of course not. Not really. But I didn’t understand that then. And what happened a few days later was I had this dream, and in it, I was here, in the city. Or some city, like this one – some kind of generic city, or the… the original city.” I shook my head, as if to clear it. “Anyways, it wasn’t where I lived at the time. At the time, I went to school in Olympia. But in the dream I looked up, and there was Finch, standing on the sidewalk in the city right in front of me, and his face was gray and pasty and he looked kind of sick and confused. He just looked at me and he shrugged a little, slightly standoffish, and when he did that, he was telling me, if not in words, that he didn’t know why people kept saying these things they were saying about him. He couldn’t understand why people talked about him as if he was dead, when here he was, standing right here. I mean, it was all in that gesture, in that look on his face. I knew exactly what he meant. He really didn’t know that he was dead.”

  “And that was really him?” asked Vivianne. “Not just a person in a dream, but his soul?”

  “I’m sure of it. His soul, whatever. Finch was one sort of hungry ghost. He’s not the only kind. He’s the literal kind. But what do you think it might take for him not to be hungry anymore? What does he really need?”

  “I think I get it,” Vivianne decided, nodding slowly. “So what happened to him then?”

  “After that,” I said, “in the dream, we drove around. I had this big, shit-colored Impala, both in the dream and for real. It was in bad shape, but it still ran, and we drove through the city real slow. It was just like any summer’s day in the city, more or less. The sky was thick. The traffic was really bad. It was hot. We were going north, I think, and just talking about this and that as we waited at the lights and slogged through traffic. It seemed kind of aimless, what we were up to, but I remember Finch told me how he would be leaving soon, that he thought he’d found a better place to go, maybe another city somewhere, and he was going to try things out there.”

  “What was this other place, do you think?” Vivianne asked. “Was it heaven?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Not like that, I don’t think,” I told her. “Another body, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe just someplace where he could get a proper meal.”

  •

  “I need to get going. Marg is waiting. Do you want me to leave the radio on or turn it off?” She spoke as she packed her guitar back into its velvety case and gathered up her shapeless cloth bag, her long, slim back bent over the collection on the floor.

  I’d not been aware of the radio until then, though now that she’d mentioned it, there had been a low-level murmuring carrying on for the duration, just behind things. Sibilance from the small deck on a bookshelf drew my ear as I passed it, moving toward the front desk, now vacated.

  “Leave it, that’s fine,” I said, trying not to sound deflated.

  “Are you alright?” She stood, arms and shoulders hung with everything, dangling. Obviously, I’d failed.

  “Hm. Okay.” I managed a little smile.

  She scowled. My heart sank.

  “I’m fine, just tired,” I lied, sort of. “This shift is a hard one on me. I don’t sleep enough in the daytime, and it’s catching up.”

  “There might be something opening up in the daytime. You should ask Wade about it.”

  “I will.” I wouldn’t.

  “Bye!” She glided out the door and I watched her shape pass through the clouded glass of the window to the porch, where streetlights glared, wan and fuzzy, from across the avenue.

  The air in the room shifted, the dim lights settled. I stared at the logbook in front me, its tattered cover shut. From the radio, if I concentrated, I could just make out the words: “…you think, what’s going on down there? What is it our government is not telling us? Is this really evidence of an earlier civilization far in advance of our own, lost now in…?” I looked up to see tall Davis filling the office doorway, silent and darkly silhouetted. How long had he been waiting there?

  “Come in,” I waved. Enter Davis, bending as he moved. Behind him stood Willy, then Mary, then the others all raggedly forming into a loose and pensive queue. He aligned himself with the plastic chair and sat, without hurry, into it, rubbed his face with his hands, and stared forward expectantly.

  •

  The house gives us its typical arrangement. There is nothing different in this; it is always the same. There are things and there are people, their forms and functions interchangeable, mostly there, one might easily though mistakenly conclude, only to inhabit the space, to conform themselves into these shapes, subjecting themselves to gravity, inertia, laws of thermodynamics, the strong and weak forces, etc., for no reason whatever. Thick atmosphere both contains and permeates them, and thus they are aswim in it. They do not, will not, explain themselves, but they were never meant to.

  The television, on its pedestal at the far end of the room, across a sea of orange carpet, buzzed its distress in fuzz-patterns, tuned half to static and half The Late Show, while in its glass frame Letterman oozed a well-practiced charm as his guest, an actress I only vaguely recognized (and whose name I didn’t recall), brightened in a sleek dress and laughed. I could not hear what they said.

  I counted eight bodies inhabiting the room, spread out before the set in quiescent stasis, filling the chairs and sofas which were all donated and therefore supremely mismatched. Since I am a sea creature myself, I understand well enough the positive attraction held by such shifting lights, aslant as arrows from the wavering surface membrane, which seen at the sea-floor can be mistaken for things of promise and other hopeful phenomena, and can too easily hold one of us in sway, enrapt. It can be useful to see how these things work, both for the helpful corralling of my wandering fellows, and to escape from the harms of hypnotic paralysis myself.

  It happened once, perhaps only a week before, that somebody – it wasn’t me; I don’t know who it was – thought to turn the television off. I walked into the room after the set had already been shut down. Maybe whoever did it meant it as a joke, or perhaps some desperate bid at an uncluttered mind, but it changed nothing. Everyone – much the same crowd then as now – only sat in place, filling the spaces, silent, expectant, staring at the blank screen as though something were still happening on it. Bent and knob
by in the convex screen, their reflections stared back and also waited. In a moment, Mary also shuffled in off the front porch, followed by the cloud of cigarette smoke that clung to her, and sat herself into the only remaining empty chair, her eyes turned wide and numb and flat toward the box, which clicked its intermittent cooling-off noises of glass and electric circuitry, the only sound left in the room. No one said anything. What was there to say? At last, Eugene, his frustration growing obvious, blustered over to the set and turned the thing back on. Relief.

  Now I found Davis spread out over one long sofa, his long self taking up its entirety, fast asleep and snoring. It should perhaps have bothered me that I thought of holding a pillow over his face, just to see him thrash his arms and legs about with it there until he slowed and stopped. No, it really should have bothered me, but instead I simply settled with not doing that and moved on.

  Through the back of the room was an entrance to the house’s addition. A winding rampway led down to the lower floor and its dining room, bypassed by a simple staircase leading also up to the top-floor bedrooms. Part of my job was to make hourly rounds through the house to check on emergency exits, making certain they were shut and locked, to inspect the common bathrooms and chase out any “guests” sleeping in the tub, and generally to make sure no one behaved in any obvious rule-breaking sort of way. I rounded a corner to a plain corridor which led past the ground-floor bedrooms. Most of the residents in these late hours were asleep, and as I walked the hallway, I could hear from behind one or another door the small and squirrelly sounds from radios turned low, electronic voices secret and unintelligible, the signatures of late-night call-in shows, needful of unceasing sources of talk. The stillness of these walkways carried a weight of its own, and the walls were coated in ages-worth of greasy dust that dulled their paint. Tread patterns wore the carpeting bare down the middle, and a similar colorlessness wore darkly over every surface. Nothing but myself moved through here now, the air was still; myself and the flickering lights.