New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  •

  Proteus sat in the dim light, reading words. The words were scratched in pen into the book, the logbook, and the notes were fractional, elliptical, as far as he could see, nonsensical, though they were not meant to be. Clearly, Wade had lost his grasp in the previous long hours of his impossible shift. It was either that or the fact that Proteus could scarcely concentrate that was the problem. Coming to terms with the futility of making sense of these notes, he shut the logbook and looked up.

  Where is my soul?

  He asked the question. He asked the question of himself. There was no answer.

  Where is my…?

  Answer not forthcoming. And there was that man again, that round man, the one with the beard, who always smiled. He’d not been here a few days before, Proteus had never seen him, not until he had, and now he was always here, wandering, smiling, talking to himself. He’d not come in for evening meds. Maybe he didn’t need any. But who was he? He stood now, holding a vase with both hands, smiling at the vase, the way he smiled at everything. He didn’t pick the vase up; he didn’t carry the vase. He merely held it, with both of his hands, and beamed. It seemed possible, to Proteus then, this man was a very happy man.

  Proteus picked up his own backpack and dug through it, finding his own spiral-bound notebook – one so similar to the logbook, the same brand, the same color cardboard cover, the same narrow-ruled lines – and pulled it out, found his own pen, uncapped it, and started to write:

  Gerry–

  This letter is to inform you of my

  He picked the pen up and stared at the chicken-scratch of words. This would hardly do. The twice-size bloating of the right hand helped nothing, though it could grasp the pen, however painfully. No – he needed a steady hand (maybe go home and type it first?) but moreover, he needed a clear message. He needed to make his message clear. So he scratched out what he’d written and started again:

  Dear Gerry Wade and Administration of Republic

  Mental Health,

  I regret to inform you

  He scratched that.

  I’m sorry to inform you that

  Was it right to be sorry? Why should he apologize? Damn it, apologies were for wimps! No, be bold, just tell them the way it is…

  May this document serve as my letter of resignation, effective immediately. Right now. I am walking away and never coming back. When you find me in the morning I will not be here. The reasons are because I’m dead, and I am empty, and I am dead, and I’m sorry (scratch out sorry), but I’m dead and empty and my soul has walked away, and for these reasons I can no longer serve this function – as living representative – broken within the sea of the fractured – our worst sin to remain in pieces – and though I am a sea-creature, I fear that I have drowned – and while some will behave as furniture, others will merely scream – and I am sorry (fuck!) that I am not real – I am sorry that I am invisible – I am only just sorry and nothing else. Sorry, sorry sorry sorry…

  He filled the remains of the page with the word sorry in an increasingly fevered and frenzied hand, one that might be considered manic by those in the business. Before he’d gotten even three lines into this work, the word had lost its meaning. The arrangement of letters only seemed wrong somehow. This did not stop him.

  •

  In the basement dining room, the lights were failing. Fluorescent tubes flickered and went dark, lighting half the room while spastically strobing throughout the rest. I sat at one of the little square tables in the middle and rested my hands to the surface in front of me, flat on the scarred formica. The right one was twice the size of the left, mottled white and red. It didn’t hurt, exactly. I wondered for how long it would be this way, and if this were the price for stepping through.

  It was one thing to step through, quite another to touch the other side. Now I knew.

  When the kitchen door slowly opened, it frightened me. I was the only one left in the house who should have had access; the door, at any rate, should have been locked. But it was who stepped through it that both set me at ease and worried me the most.

  “Finch?” I said. It seemed that he had come from deepest memory, a thing erratically functional even in the best of times.

  He looked at me with that same questioning look that I remembered from the dream so long ago, the same what-is-everyone-saying-this-about-me-for? look.

  “You haven’t changed,” I told him. “So many years, and you’re just the same. Twenty-one years old, dead as a doorknob, you’ve no color to you at all… I always knew that kitchen was haunted. But you? What are you doing here?”

  “I was hungry,” he said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Last time…” he came forward, “you gave me doughnuts. Thanks. They were really bad. But thanks. Do you know where you’ve been?”

  I thought about this. “No,” I answered, “but I would ask you the same thing. Is it time to go away now?”

  “I don’t know… what that means.”

  “You know.” I hooked my thumbs together and fluttered the fingers like they were wings, lifting away. “Off into the whatever. Thing.”

  He got this kind of sideways-eyeball, suspicious look. “I’m not so sure about that. Somewhere? Maybe? But not that.”

  “Where, then?”

  He moved a chair and sat down at the table with me. A scared ghost. Confused. But who wouldn’t be, right?

  “I can tell you about this place… where nothing is real.”

  “Great!” I said. “Please, tell me a story!”

  The last of the light feathered out, fluttered off, went dark and died. Away.

  •

  And come the day, with its exigencies and petty tyrannies of sunlight, after some small spot of welcome though less-than-satisfactory sleep, Proteus found his way to the local dealership of two-wheeled, motorized transport, looking over a self-narrowing selection of machines that he could afford.

  “This one?” asked the dealer, standing beside a blue Honda with a dent in its gas tank and rust spots developing across everything chrome. “This is a 1979, with a five hundred cc engine. Shaft-driven, so you won’t be having any issues with a chain or a belt. Very reliable. Don’t let its age and appearance fool you. These things will go forever.”

  Proteus fingered the dent in its tank.

  “It’s been dropped,” the man told him, “but that’s the worst of the damage, right there. Really, its problems are cosmetic. With nineteen thousand miles on it, it has a lot of life still.”

  “Something you might feel confident riding as far as, say, Arizona?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  Proteus stared up into the blue sky. A few tufts of clouds interrupted its surface, which otherwise stretched overhead a perfectly smooth dome. He wondered, with a certain self-disingenuousness, what lay hidden behind its gradients, what structure supported it, or intruded upon it, or, yes, perforated through it; knowing full well what did. Once he’d gotten the contact sheets back from the lab of the rolls of film he’d shot, and saw, there in each and every frame, that same shape, greater or lesser, every time, darker or lighter or barely present, though in none quite so obvious or opaque as to be entirely undeniable as anything but some curiosity of flawed optics, an aberration of the lens, despite what he knew, though no one else could – that these circles were never there originally, not visibly – and despite what he also knew, though few would bother their critical faculties to ask: how a lens flare would show such telltale signs of depth or solidity, as for instance a shadow along its underside, consistent to the direction of the light, or how an object might lay between the varied depth of cloud, some behind, some veiling across it in front; and after studying these small images so closely, again and again, Proteus had some idea what was also there, entirely invisible, though no less present for it.

  “What do you say? Want to take it out for a ride?”

  Proteus blinked, considering again this world at ground level, the salesman with his questioni
ng look. “Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”

  FOURTEEN

  The Ultraworld!

  [1994] (Hollywood, CA)

  In the warm, daylit spectralities of Dirty D’s Donut Hole, both game players, no doubt by now sore from it, their eyes bleary, sat bent close over the game board, to appearances pathologically so, though it could be said that one player was, in his heart, rather less invested than the other.

  “Move,” Davis said. “You have to move now. It’s your move and so that’s what you do.”

  Willy paced the floor some short distance away, in tight, clockwise circles, his jaw fallen slack, mouth open in an O.

  OFFICER FRIENDLY, unruffled with these several, small annoyances, having grown by now a layer of extra thick skin over those particular nerves, considered. “I’m thinking,” he said.

  “Thinking. Thinking.” Davis, tapping the table in agitation.

  “I’ve just moved…”

  “This is the alternating double move. You move and then you move again now. That’s why it’s called that. Double move.”

  “I’ve just moved the Body…”

  “You move the Body, then you move the House. You have to do that. There’s nothing to think about.”

  “That is the Body, right?”

  “If the Body has been moved, then you move the House. It’s how it works.”

  “And that is what that is? Because I’m not sure that’s what that is.”

  “You move the House.”

  “Okay, but where? And what is this?” Pointing. “What is this?”

  Davis looked up, then down, then up again, then down. “The Body… The House… You move the House. You have to move the House. Anywhere. Move it now. Go.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you have to. That’s what you do. Go.”

  “But I’m not sure,” OFFICER FRIENDLY drawled, leaning back, eyeing his opponent with suspicion, “that I believe you.”

  Davis got a scared look in his eye – flat, opaque, like a cornered rat. Like, where do I run? Like, what can I chew through? His face drained of blood so that he turned white.

  “Then ask the ghost.” But nobody knew who said that.

  Willy turned around and around. His eyes were vacant and staring. In the kitchen, Jun-suh fussed over rolling out dough. Into nuts.

  “Okay,” the policeman said, “let’s just say that I’m moving…”

  “You move the House.”

  “This. Like this…”

  “Damn it.”

  FIFTEEN

  The World

  [2005]

  And with the evening – and Gerry Wade long past functioning, having slept through more than one alarm and still unconscious, though with at least the good fortune of having finally found not one but two on-call staffers to fill in for him, for the day and through the night ahead at Inn House Manor – the girl in her clown makeup and oversize red shoes, who occupied the office desk and stared in puzzlement into the spiral-bound notebook before her, looked up at the kid with his long beard and beads strung through it, his draping, earth-colored shirts, who, arriving at the doorway, said to her, “Oh, hi. I’m Jim. Nice outfit.”

  “Thanks. Hi.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve been trying to read through this logbook, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Let me see.” He sat down across from her. She passed the notebook to him. “Oh. My. God. I know what this is! It’s not the logbook, it’s that weird guy’s diaries. The guy who worked the nights? I’ve seen this before. He must have left it here by mistake. This shit is whack!”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, see? Here, look at this…” He flipped to a page and pointed, reading aloud:

  Dear Reverend Master…

  “Eh… here’s the part:”

  …for small amounts of money, and that is good. I want for everyone to understand everything, though that will never happen, and that is also good. Good are the many waving arms of the sun. Good is the gentle, chill breath of the moon. I am a small fragment of all these things, and I live the small life of shadows, and grow fearful of how the earth shakes, and the sun shakes, and the spirit in the body shakes also, because this disturbs the dust, and makes us live, and we are ever broken in the word of the Golden Body and are gone.

  “O-or this…” skipping to another spot a little further on, reading in a mock stentorian voice:

  …Dirty D’s Donut Hole was brightly lit inside, though you wouldn’t recognize this for all the natural sunlight that bounced off the… blah blah…

  “Okay, that’s a little boring. But check this out,” flipping through a page or two further:

  “…You want perfection? There is no perfection. There is only the striving, the effort, the inevitable failure. What we arrive at is something in between. We arrive at a place in the mind. You, you, are a place in the mind. You know this, of all things. Also something that you know, you have to wait. To do this, the waiting is necessary. This is about space, OFFICER FRIENDLY, and space is at least in part about time. ‘Space is the place,’ is what immortal Sun Ra tells us. Space is a place in the mind, as are you. Space is therefore in the past, where is also our place. In the mind. So, you wait. Things take their form. I make the doughnuts. Things take their form. This also happens in the mind.”

  “Shit’s fucked up,” Jim proclaimed, slapping the spiral notebook shut. “Dude is off his meds.”

  Outside the office, peering in through the doorway, leaned tall Davis silently, eager for his own meds.

  “I don’t know,” said the girl in clown makeup, her expression wistful. She brought a fist to her eye as if intending to rub at it, then she hesitated, apparently remembering the makeup. She let the fist drop again. “I talked to him a little,” she said. “He didn’t seem crazy, just kind of, I don’t know, sad.”

  BOOK TWO

  MOUNTAIN HOME

  ONE

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  On the table in front of him lay the sacred objects arranged: the sheriff’s hat, the sheriff’s badge, the sheriff’s gun. The hat was badly crumpled. It had fared the worst. Now, late in the afternoon, late also in autumn, still, a warm if not blazing sun struck his outdoor table and lit the surface bright, if by a low-angled cast, and the dry, warm, bright air shone and shimmered, and the sacred objects glimmered, and where they were shiny, they glinted and threw the sunlight back at Proteus in bright beams. And he sat staring at the arrangement, triune, more or less equilateral, waiting to see, or perhaps rather to hear, if they could tell him something he did not already know.

  What he knew was nothing.

  “Oh, you’ve got the magic,” softly came a woman’s voice. She approached from behind him. Her footsteps lightly crunched through pebbles on the broken pavement.

  “Is that what this is?” Proteus asked her as she circled round and sat herself across from him. Dishwater blond hair fell in lazy curls to frame her face, and rested over her shoulders. Blue eyes, so bright they were nearly incandescent, peered squarely out at him, then looked down at the objects, then flicked back again up at him.

  “Of course, monk man. Those were his. I recognize them.” She threw a glance out over the low stone wall towards the far valley laid out wide and open below, all browns and yellows and red and distant. “Tell me how you got them.”

  “I will if you buy me coffee.”

  “You get your coffee here free.”

  “So go buy me a free coffee and I’ll tell you.”

  When she came back some few minutes later, with coffees in thick mugs both for him and for herself, she sat and set their cups amongst the sacred objects (because they weren’t so terribly sacred they couldn’t share an inch or two of table space), in fact she brushed them all to one side with her bare forearm and put one of the large, copper-colored metal ashtrays onto the table there instead and said, “Give me a cigarette.” And so he did.

  Shakin
g another from his pack for himself, he told her, “It isn’t just the story of how I found these things. That’s only a small part of it. It’s the story of how the Ceres family tried to restore my soul to me, even though they failed. It ends with me riding up through the valley on that old motorcycle of mine, through the winding road up the side of this mountain, finally to find you up here, at the top, sitting on this wall, this one, right here,” and he patted the wall beside him with his open hand, knocking crumbled mortar loose, “sitting there the way that you do, with one leg up and one dangling, eating that pink bubblegum ice cream that you like so much. You were looking out into the void, looking into the open emptiness, watching everything that happens. I think you even see it before it happens.”

  “I’ve eaten so much pink ice cream I should have diabetes. I should be huge and fat.”

  “Yes, well. By the time I’d got here, he was gone, wasn’t he? We’d met in passing, though I’d not known it. Now I imagine we’ll have to meet again. Because it’s fated, even though I seek it, I couldn’t avoid it if I tried.”

  “That’s the future. That’s your business, not mine.”

  Proteus sighed.

  “I’ll show you as much as I know,” she said, “I’ll tell you what I’ve seen, but first you have to tell me the story.”

  Expelling a breath of cigarette smoke, which the light breeze blew off and made nothing, Proteus acceded, “Fair enough. Now listen…”

  •

  Morning sunlight rendered the hot asphalt in bright tones, different from the scrub and rock of the desert floor, and the highway center stripe blurred past in regular, steady bursts of yellow, like a drumbeat in counterpoint to the even drone of the Honda’s engine as I sped along, humming sometimes my own tune also, closing in on the invisible borders, a day’s ride, between Nevada and Utah, and next between Utah and Arizona, although it was clear – at least, after a manner of speaking – that Nevada had never been simply one thing. Not to me, not to anyone. And far less so was Utah. The border which I now approached cut less between two places than variable states of being: the actual and the ideal, the concrete and the abstract, the definite and nebulous, the ordinary or phantasmagoric. Beyond that was smoke. If crossed, it was not as if I were entering one particular state, having left another, but that there could no longer be any well-defined difference between things, between them or us, the dead or the living, the word or the image, the idea or the flesh, but instead, the recognition of such oscillations at the sacrifice of the definite; this state of having gained or lost anything depended upon which side of the line a person thought they once stood.