New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  The round man was at the table. He talked into his cup of water. I stepped past him, carefully, carefully.

  Back in the kitchen again, and the yellow plate of doughnuts, wrecked and smeared and stale and hard as plaster. There couldn’t be any worse than these: THE WORST DOUGHNUTS IN THE WORLD. A circle of five arranged about the rim of the yellow plate, and a sixth one in the center, a crushed old-fashioned, with a sweaty crust of chocolate fondant, and speckled with little sugary flecks.

  A sixth?

  The kitchen was still. I knew that it was haunted. Radio voices floated tinny through the small space.

  No, that was wrong. Six was wrong.

  And out to the dining room again: the round man with the beard was in the chair. He had his styrofoam cup half-full of water that he talked to. A dirty spoon sat beside it on a napkin. Spoon? Napkin? His cup sat in the middle of a slowly spreading puddle of water that formed into rivulets at the table’s edge, where it would soon spill over and onto the floor. I leaned in close to listen: “…I’d spoken with him before,” he said quietly, “though my Japanese was not good…” His breath hung stale in the air. He did not seem to notice me.

  Carefully climbing the stairs with as little noise as I could possibly make, I lay my feet down flat and dampened their sound, and noticed for the first time that the walls of the stairwell were blue, an institutionally calming blue. Had I really never noticed that before?

  Upstairs, Willy’s blue shoes rested at the end of the hallway, but there was no Willy in them. The shoes were exactly where his feet had been, though the man himself was gone. I approached slowly, vaguely anxious, aware of each step I took, of how my feet landed on the carpet – heel, then ball, then toes; heel, ball, toes. When I reached the shoes at last, I knelt down onto my knees and looked closely, then sniffed. He’d not worn them long enough to acquire foot-stink. They still had their new-shoe smell.

  I left them where they were. I didn’t touch them.

  •

  And every sound that lingers, and every mote of dust that falls, and every voice, however muffled, is a presence, another ghost, the stuff of memory or the intent to become memory, this turning from something and into something else again; and again, the presence moves beside me, perhaps it lives within me, and is lost but doesn’t know it. It doesn’t know that it is there. It doesn’t know where it has gone.

  •

  Everything hurt, a little: every sound was too loud, and every light a piercing through the sheer membrane of my eye. I’d hardly slept, for all the shouting from the next apartment all afternoon. And once the sun had set, and I’d gotten some food down my throat, I set out on foot, hiked through the darkened neighborhood, through its back streets and up the hill again, and though I found Davis once more at the top of Madison, doing the windmill thing with his arms and upper torso, I did not bother to greet him this time, just as he gave no recognition of me, though our eyes met warily in passing for a moment.

  At the house, I stepped past Mary on the stoop, whose eyes flicked toward me once as I walked through her cloud, and the gathering of several flies now present just above her head, weaving strategies through each other’s paths, ebbed for a moment to one side as I shimmied through their occupations toward the door. Just inside, at the office threshold, I stopped in my tracks as though hitting a wall.

  “Marg, hi,” I said.

  Her eyes glanced up at me through the tangle of blond curls at her brow. After a moment, she looked back down at the logbook, having effectively blotted me from her mind.

  “Um.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to step into the office somehow. “I thought Vivianne was working tonight.”

  The eyes rolled up again, slowly. “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  Back on the porch I lit a cigarette and coughed. The chill from the night before had passed, though it had made its point: now summer was winding to a close, and however long it might take to do it, it was for certain collecting its scattered things with intent to be moving along.

  Willy did not occupy any corner, anywhere.

  I sat down onto the bench to wait out the fifteen minutes that I’d arrived early and looked down at my shoes. My gray sneakers were in tatters, flapping apart at their cheap seams, the heel of my left sole loose as the tongue of some enormous, happy dog. Spent, crushed cigarette butts littered the deck in loose array, the crust of ashes laid thick over the paint. When I looked up, Eugene bounded his girth up the steps two at a time, all but knocking Mary over in his enthusiasm, his eyes wide, white, and fixed on mine: “I – I HAD PEPSI – DIET PEPSI AND PANCAKES WITH THE BACON INSIDE AND PANCAKES – WITH THE BLUEBERRIES INSIDE – AND SAUSAGE – AND TOAST – I HAD TOAST –”

  ELEVEN

  The Ultraworld!

  [1994] (Hollywood, CA)

  The smog formed a low haze over Santa Monica Boulevard, yet did nothing to mediate the heat. But within the controlled environment of Dirty D’s Donut Hole, the arid chill of conditioned air lent some relief for the wayfarer from outdoors, or a means to avoid and ignore such realities for those disinclined to face them.

  OFFICER FRIENDLY, sensing the presence that lurked over him, looked up from the game board over which he’d bent to assess this stick-figure person who stood, droop-faced and flop-hatted, denim jacket tatter-hung like a sorry scarecrow – scary, yes, no doubt to some birds – over his frame of bones.

  “I’m only here now,” Willy said.

  “Uh huh. I see. Staying out of trouble, are you?”

  But Willy only stared back, eyes framed in deep hollows.

  “Have the two of you met?” indicating Davis across the board from him, whose arched back and nose held close over the board and its many scattered pieces the policeman, without meaning to, imitated. Davis looked up at Willy, and Willy down at Davis, though the two said nothing.

  Outside, in the street, thick traffic crawled past, in a moment slowing to a stop at the light that had just turned to red. All cars, waiting, spewed extra smog into the air.

  “What happened to your shoes, Willy?”

  The stick-man stood in socks. His arms hung at his sides.

  “The last I saw you, you could hardly stop talking. Now you’ve got nothing to say. Alright then, have a seat if you like. We’re just playing a little… ah…”

  “I’ve moved, now you have to move. I’ve moved the Wailing Song of Soldiers from there to here. Look. You have to move now, it’s your turn, go.”

  “I understand that, Davis. I’m examining my options. Let me think.”

  “You’ve been thinking. You’ve been thinking. Now you have to move, now go.”

  “Fine. I’ll move this…”

  “You can’t move that. That’s the Fulcrum. You know that’s the Fulcrum, I told you, you can’t move that until the Bird hits the window and we’ve both seen it–”

  A deep and hollow bang! sounded and hung a moment, resonant in the drum-struck warp of one large glass panel beside them, and all three turned to look at once at the small flapping thing that fell to the pavement and bounced, once, pathetically to a stop, all except for the one wing, left exposed toward the sky, which for some nerve-purpose continued to pump itself repeatedly, slowly, like a sad, small machine, up at the empty sky and back again against its tiny bird body. It did this for some few seconds, then didn’t.

  Jun-suh, coming to investigate the noise, stood over them and looked as well towards this thing where all eyes were fixed. “I think it’s a finch,” he said, helpfully. “A finch, yes.”

  “Okay, okay, you can move it now. Go.”

  TWELVE

  The World

  [2005]

  These locations of the new list, twice as long as the first, all in the mountains or east of them, out in the plains, the prairies and the farmlands, in the high desert regions of the state, so different from the west, involved at least a day’s travel and another rental car, likely a hotel for a night as well. Which was fine – fine with me, and fine with t
he firm, Rick Progress had said, which would cover these expenses, so long as I kept it all within reason.

  The rental car was a compact Chevrolet shaped like a bullet and the color of iron rust. I started by driving north out of the city and finally east, into the mountains, about an hour south of Canada. The first mark on the supplied map showed a numbered turnoff that looked as though it should lead deeper into the range, perhaps an alternate pass; it was somewhere that I’d never been before, though I’d crossed this summit a number of times previously.

  The turnoff, when I found it, was high up into the mountains, and the road struck me as dubious. It was paved, though unmarked, and ran straight out from the highway at a perpendicular, in utter defiance of the uneven terrain. The only way I could be sure it was the right turnoff was that it was at the indicated mile marker, and I’d driven as far as the next without finding any other. This had to be it.

  Gravel crunched and spat out from under the wheels as I drove slowly in, more than once thinking that I’d seen some dark shape move up ahead, to lumber off the roadway and vanish in the brush, where scrub and tall pines lined the shoulder, too dense to see into, to anything beyond their edge. The road continued straight for perhaps two miles before it surrendered its harsh geometry to the requirements of the terrain and started twisting, grading the upward slope. This is where the pavement also ended, giving way to packed and rutted earth, and the road narrowed to a single lane’s width.

  My doubts about the route deepened, although I knew perfectly well there was no other road I could have taken. I stopped the car for a moment to check the map again, reassuring myself that it was for certain the right turnoff. The map’s curving line didn’t reflect the long stretch of straight road I’d followed in. What I seemed to be heading for, according to the photocopied atlas, was a point at the end of the twisting line, circled and highlighted in yellow, though as far as I could tell, this was only a logging road out to nowhere.

  Eventually, the road leveled, then descended. I crawled the rental car through, deeply uncertain, a sick feeling growing in my gut. This model of car had never been meant to follow this terrain, which grew steadily worse. Large, sharp rocks jutted up through the dirt, and rains had washed deep trenches out of the pathway. Moreover, if somebody came in the opposite direction, I would have nowhere to pull over, and there was no place to turn the car around.

  Finally, the road stopped altogether. It didn’t exactly end, but the brush had grown over and across it so thick that nothing could pass. I stopped the car and got out, walked to the furthest edge. From one side to the other, spanning the gap through the trees, hung a spiderweb so thick it looked to be made of string, hung with beads of dew. In the center waited something brown and striped and the size of my entire hand, with what looked like bulbous fangs extended out of its face. When I approached to within a foot of the beast, it twitched suddenly, drawing in its legs, bracing to either run or attack – I couldn’t tell which. I felt a corresponding twitch within my gut, as if my intestines had been plucked. Slowly, I brought my camera up and held it steady, with the spider framed dark in the center, its belly facing me. There was a stillness. I felt the brush of wind. Through some break in the clouds, a momentary brightness washed over us both, and I clicked the shutter. The camera made its noise and the sunbeam passed, and every color in the brush was leeched away again.

  •

  Back in the car, I put the transmission in reverse. There was no option but to back my way out, perhaps as far as ten miles, before reaching pavement again, where the road widened and I could turn the car around. I’d scarcely gone a foot though before something struck me, and I stopped the car. Something… a thought, almost a voice in my head, told me to take out the film camera now, that it was important, that it had to be film – to take it from the cracked and weathered leather carry-case. I hadn’t yet shot anything with this camera, though I’d loaded its transport with film. I’d brought it with me, as well as the little digital thing for work, because a quiet voice alongside mine, like my own but not quite my own, had advised it. This was the same voice that told me I should take it out now; to step back outside of the car again and look up. I did what it said. I stepped out, I looked up.

  The camera’s only lens was the 18mm that had come with it, an angle all but fish-eye wide. Through it, looking directly up, the overcast sky was an arched dome, darkened at the corners of the frame, pushed away, made optically distant. The gradients of tone and feather-edged clouds roiled and rolled, slowly pulling themselves apart. What may have been especially significant about these clouds in this sky, I couldn’t tell, but I was following the voice. Maybe the voice knew. Everything about the old camera was manually controlled, so I set the aperture and shutter speed according to a handheld meter, then clicked the shutter, adjusted the stop again and clicked, then again, one more stop, just to be sure.

  Wind stirred the brush and the trees. It blew across the open stretch where I’d stopped, and the great, long grasses bent and shivered. I sat back down in the driver’s seat and put the camera aside to the passenger floor. Three exposures. Gray sky above. I thought about Vivianne. No, no – I saw her; it was her face, and the sky. There was something in her expression, as if she had just asked a question and now waited for my response. I didn’t know what to tell her. It was really as if she were there. And it occurred to me then that if for these past three nights I’d hoped so badly to see her, why not just call her? I had her phone number.

  I pulled my cell phone out, but of course there was no signal, not here.

  In reverse, I backed slowly down the mountain road.

  •

  I’d no sooner reached the highway again – after driving in reverse for nearly an hour – and apparently found mobile service also, when my phone rang. I fumbled to pick it up from the console beside me as I drove, hoping it might be Vivianne.

  “Who? No? Rick? Yes?”

  “…Progress I’m just checking in to see how it’s going you are on the road aren’t you any problems?” With his telephone voice I could no longer read the pauses. It took a moment to untangle what he’d said.

  “No, yes, Rick. It’s going fine. I was just at… look, it was a mountain road, a logging road. It didn’t really go anywhere. I took pictures… of the road… all the way back. I don’t know it’s –”

  “That’s fine don’t worry about it I told you just do exactly as it says to the letter don’t worry about what it actually is they’ll figure out what they’ve got when they’ve got it they were very specific on that point.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “It’s only the one, so far. I’ve just barely started, so who knows what –”

  “No pressure but we absolutely need to have these by Monday you can do that can’t you?”

  “Y-yeah, of course, no problem. By Monday, yes. Today is what? I’ll have it –”

  “In the morning give me a call or just come in but make sure by Monday morning I’ll see you then.”

  “Okay, okay, b –” But he’d already hung up.

  Folding the telephone closed, I’d no sooner put it back to the console when it rang again, vibrating against the plastic. Vivianne? I snatched it up.

  “Oh, hello. No? Wade?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you on your day off, but there’s a couple things. You don’t know anything about where Willy has got to, do you? Nobody has seen him for a couple of days, and it isn’t like him to just wander off.”

  “Willy, no, he was there last I saw him. I mean, of course, when I saw him, but he was there the other night when I was working. He had these new shoes. I don’t think they fit, though.”

  “Right, the shoes… Okay, well, I’ve called the police, but I don’t expect they’ll be able to do much… There is another thing, though, that I need to talk to you about.”

  “Mm.”

  “We had to send Rose to the hospital yesterday. She’d gotten pretty worked up, and it seemed best that she have the supervision, you know, and
to keep the rest of the house from falling into chaos. Well… uh, when she got there, she apparently told the admitting psychiatrist that she’d been raped…”

  “By her forces, yes. That’s how she described it to me.”

  “No, Proteus, you see, she told them that she’d been raped by the night staff, here at Inn House Manor.”

  “Oh. What?”

  “Which would be… well, you know who that is.”

  “What?” I scratched at a spot on my inner thigh.

  “You shouldn’t need to worry about any of this. It’s clear to everyone what she’s doing, but because of the protocols involved with this sort of thing…”

  “Uh.” The spot where I’d scratched had begun to itch fiercely.

  “An investigative committee will be looking into the matter. I expect you’ll be called in for questioning.”

  “Oh. I… Uh.”

  “I know, I know. But you really shouldn’t have to worry. Like I said, it’s pretty clear to everyone what’s going on. But when someone uses the word rape there are certain things we have to do. That’s all this is. We can talk more about it later. I just wanted for you to know that’s happening. That’s an issue. It’s going to be alright.”

  “Uh, okay.” I hung up, pulled the car over, and vomited.

  •

  And so I wound down the side of every mountain, through sudden curves at each descent, a snake’s course, cut vertiginous and narrow, as mountain streams ran beside and turned to rapids, leveled out and drained to rivers, where trees grew thick in clusters, their leaves just begun to change from green to orange to rust. The taste of bile, I learned, could be masked with coffee, but the fear could not. My skin crawled with it, my intestines were cold and clenched. Leaves shook in the warm wind.

  If… if Rose said I’d raped her… then had I? I mean, I knew perfectly well that I hadn’t, not really, but… if she said I did…?