New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  There were no clouds here. There never would be. There could never really be anything in this place at all, least of all myself. But if I were something, it was a body in motion, a distant, dusty-blue spot of motorcycle-and-rider buzzing past, as seen perhaps from high above, tracing the bland potential of a straight line from one side of a map to another, making the real things now unreal, simultaneously giving shapes to other things that previously had none.

  I’d left Seattle behind me, abandoned my job, my small studio apartment, and left everything there that I owned, though it wasn’t much. I’d set out with the intention of finding your Sheriff Friendly, though I knew nothing yet of his current state nor the dangers this might involve. Of course, I didn’t understand either that he was, at the same time, looking for me. I’d been riding for four days already, maybe longer, south and east, when I came upon the Ceres family – that is, they ambushed me – after I had, without knowing it, been avoiding them for most of the past two days. That extended family of fundamentalist Mormon bikers who’d forgone, a generation before, their established desert compound and taken to the currents and nomadism of the wide open, asphalt-ribbon road – I’d heard nothing at the time of who they were, not yet; only that some band of biker outlaws had, for all this time, somehow always been just ahead of me, and had always, only hours before, passed through whatever windblown gas station or small town that I stopped at for food, fuel, or rest. Often, I was asked if I traveled with them, though it should have been obvious enough to anyone that I did not. It was the motorcycle, of course, just the fact that I rode one, that made them think I did.

  I’d been riding for most of the day when I took what I thought was a scenic bypass, a spur between two highways, but which then petered out into hard-packed dirt in the middle of the primary-colored desert. I stopped and pulled out my roadmap to reassess, to try and pinpoint where I’d turned wrong, and hopefully find my way out again without having to backtrack too far. After only a few minutes though, I heard a characteristic low-slap rumble break through the silence, carried on wind, faint at first, then louder, growing until, soon, the sound was deafening. It seemed like an entire army on customized Harley Davidsons, which in fact was what it was; dozens of motorcycles, painted black or fire-red, flaring in the sunlight, coming straight out of nowhere and straight towards me, a tremendous yellow-brown fantail of dust scared up in their wake. They raced at where I’d stopped – me alone – in exactly nowhere, having somehow fallen invisibly behind me, but now closing swiftly in. What could I do? The road had just stopped, and there was nowhere left to go. So I waited until they’d come.

  They circled around me, forming into concentric rings, all riding in opposite directions over the hard-packed playa. No doubt their intention was to scare the living ghost right out of me, and it worked. But I wasn’t going to let them see that, not if I could help it. So I stood there, as stoic as I could manage it, though shaking in my boots at the center of all that whooping and hollering and ferocious gut-assaulting rumble, waiting to see what they would do next.

  After making their point, they stopped and all shut off their engines, almost at once, as if by some invisible cue. One rider, who looked to be the oldest, with long, white beard and a grizzled, wind-worn face, deeply etched into smile-lines, laugh-lines, and lines of presumed vision, dismounted and called out to me, “Well, hi there! How are you today, sir?” He removed his opaque glasses and grinned.

  It took me a second to find my voice. “Okay?” I croaked.

  Others had started to take off their helmets, if they wore any, and that was when I noticed how there were far more women than men among them, and what men there were were all quite young, shaking out great lengths of ash-blond hair. Not everyone grinned beaming, high albedo, tooth-flashing grins at me – some were too shy for such extraversions, particularly the smallest children, of which there suddenly seemed hundreds (though in fact there were maybe a dozen) – but many did. And after a moment’s friendly appraisal, the first man came forward, stretched out his hand to shake, and introduced himself as Zedekiah, elder, prophet, priesthood-keeper and revelator of this wild bunch here before me, which was in fact his, the Ceres clan.

  Two boys, near fully grown, rushed out to flank him, eyes wide from pimpled faces. “Do you have a moment you might set aside, sir…” said one, and “…that we could talk to you, sir, about the Godhead?” finished the other.

  “You two settle down!” snapped Zedekiah, then to me, “Sorry about that. We’re not really the missionizing sort, but these two, they’re just a little, well, overeager. What they think they want is to go mainstream, grow up like everybody else, but what they really need…” he leaned in close and whispered conspiratorially, “are a few wives of their own.”

  “A few… wives?” I asked.

  He winked, stepped back again, and introduced these two of his several sons and daughters as Nephi and Laman.

  “Sir.”

  “Sir.”

  •

  After sharing with me their dinner of lime jello casserole and baked yams, there must, I figured, have been an institutional-sized bag of tiny marshmallows stowed in somebody’s saddlebags, as these delectables, which had so generously provided texture (of a sort) to our entrée, now floated in a mound at the top of an orange plastic cup of hot cocoa offered me by Shulamit, the first of Zedekiah’s seven wives. She smiled and returned to the cooking fire tended by the others.

  “A crisis of meaning, you say?” asked Zedekiah (“Please, just call me Zed.”). “That is… how did you put it? An existential crisis?”

  “Umf!” I answered, chewing a mouthful of marshmallows.

  “There’s not much discussion of worries like this in the original scriptures. Pretty much, you’re either with God or you’re not. However, I’ve found, scrabbling around here on Earth, Zion or not, and challenged by doubts and worries, our faith is often tested. Once in a while things may not seem so clear. What you need then is a testament from our Heavenly Father, a revelation.”

  I thought that sounded like a good idea.

  Around us, the many children played and laughed, running around the tall rock beside our fire. The adults set about their business of putting up tents and securing their bikes for the night and cleaning up after the meal, as it seemed that the Ceres family had decided to make my misdirected dead-end diversion into their evening’s campsite. I noticed myself being watched by members of the clan, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so, with either mistrust or curiosity, often both at once.

  “It was such a revelation that led us to you.”

  “Me?” I said, incredulous.

  “Of course.”

  We were joined by two more of his wives, both much younger than Shulamit, who sat demurely to either side of my host. They said nothing, but smiled kittenishly. I noticed how their leathers, apparently made by their own hands, managed to cover every inch of skin below the neck.

  I took another sip of my hot chocolate, able to taste this time something beyond the marshmallow island, getting to the brothy substance beneath, which had a distinctly bitter, organic, oily taste that I couldn’t place, though it was nothing like cocoa as I’d ever had it before. I tried not to make a face, reminding myself that their ways were different from my own.

  “We never ride without guidance. We take our cues in the wind, the sky, the animals – especially the animals – whatever presents itself. Heavenly Father is always speaking to us.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. What does he say?”

  “‘Go here’. Or, ‘go there’. What do you think?”

  “But why would he lead you to me?” I forced down another gulp of strange cocoa.

  “Good question.” Zedekiah’s frizz of white hair, wiry and straggled, from the top of his head to the tip of his chin, and at all points in between, I noticed, shot out from his head in every direction, voom! – a radius, a radiance, a halo of silver-white. Yes, he was starting to glow, just a little. “This is what I asked myself,
at least at first. But as you’ve told me about your journey, and the thing that’s gone missing from inside you, and how these many events of your life have become disconnected and meaningless because of it, now I understand. I know, you see. Do you see?”

  “Do I see… what?”

  His flanking two wives’ smiles broadened. The children who played and ran around us, in and out of the gathering shadows, started to take on a, well, distinctly vegetative quality, despite their frenetic movement.

  “Do you see?”

  “No,” I said. It was the only answer I could come up with.

  “It’s become clear to me,” continued Zed, “that your problem is basically not so different from anyone else’s. Your problem is with your soul.”

  “Okay.”

  “But what’s a little different with you, maybe, is that your soul has gone somewhere else.”

  “It has. It has?”

  “Yes. It’s clear to me now.”

  “So… then what?” As the light in the sky grew dimmer, darker, the weird halo, and not just of hair, grew even more shimmery and wavy around Zed’s skull. He beamed. And like the strange, scampering vegetable-children who ran about in circles in the dirt near us, I noticed that he, particularly his bone-structure, and even more particularly, his skull-structure, had the same vegetable quality… because bone was… after all… just another kind of plant? Wasn’t it? And… and… I realized then that I’d not seen anyone else yet drink any of this “hot cocoa.”

  “Now that is the question, isn’t it? ‘So then what?’ I expect…” Zed paused in thought, looking towards the sky, which had very suddenly gone entirely dark – yes, all sunlight gone – yet it also beamed with zillions of clustered and glowing star-spots. The entire Milky Way spread like silky white ribbon out over us, wavering and strobing and subtly shifting as it turned in slow degrees of arc across the sky. “I expect the next thing then is to find it. Yes. We should help you find your soul again. Maybe help pull it back to you. Before Satan gets to it. That’s important. Because out there, just floating around, darn, it’s easy pickings. Yes, by golly! That’s what we’re here for! That’s why we’ve come.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “But where to look? It’s not so easy, is it? A soul can go anywhere. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. I am seeing that now.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  His wives, obscured by the sudden darkness, no more than silhouettes now in the glow of the fire, appeared to have grown into small trees, their arms formed into limbs and grown appendages of shivering leaves. They framed Zed’s radiating self and his glowing head. “Say,” I tried to say, “what was in that, uh, that cocoa that you gave me? After all? I seem to be, uh…” But the sounds that came from my mouth bore little resemblance to these words, or to actual words at all. They turned into something very different and unexpected while trying to leave my head, at the barrier between head and outer space. Wait… outer space? The problem seemed to be with my jaw.

  But Zedekiah wasn’t glowing silver anymore. His aura had turned rudely red, and he stood, precariously tall and streaming red fiery ribbons, all diaphanous, blown billowy by the not-wind, and he loomed, yes, gigantically, right over me, more than a little, all at once, ominous. “And it came to pass that God said unto Amalickiah, yea, for I am God, and there are none other but I and my only begotten, and thus I tell you that I am a wrathful God, and that I, God, who shall harbor no false witness, for all that is not righteous is of the Earth and of Satan, and is of the realm of Satan, the destroyer of souls, the eater of souls, but who is not more terrible than I, who am God, and also a destroyer of souls, and eater of souls, yea, that have wandered and strayed from the paths of righteousness, and I shall STRIKE THEE DOWN WITH TERRIBLE THUNDER, AND WITH FIRE AND THUNDER, AND YE SHALL TREMBLE IN FEAR OF THE WRATH OF THE LORD YOUR GOD, AND IT SHALL COME TO PASS THAT I SHALL TEAR THEE ASUNDER, AND THEE SHALL BE RIVEN, AND BE QUARTERED BY YOUR GOD, AND SHALL GLIMPSE MY TERRIBLE FACE!”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  •

  The details of what happened to me next were something less than coherent. There was too much all at once. Or not enough. And then, also, time went all sideways and didn’t move right. I did not, for instance, exactly remember being taken and thrown onto my back, left staring up helplessly into the blinking lights of the night sky, so unreasonably full of stars. Neither could I specifically remember being tied by my wrists and ankles so that I couldn’t move. But there I was – that was me – my limbs all splayed apart, more or less to the four corners of the compass, and each limb attached by a length of strong rope to the frame of another motorcycle, all four rumbling in rough concert their gut-punch low idle. The entire family stood around me in a circle and stared down, waiting, expectant and curious.

  “This part,” Zedakiah’s face appeared out of stage left, floating in front of the starry void, “will probably hurt.”

  “Yes,” I said, and, “okay.” At least I thought it was me who’d said that, although the more that I thought about it, the more it seemed to have been somebody else. This idea of hurt floated around someplace outside of my head like a soap bubble, bumping up against things but never quite breaking, and when next I heard the click of gears, and the motors all gunned at once, as if on some signal, there was this euphoric moment of the pull. It was only a moment, however, before the sudden rush of dislocation, a lightness, then maybe something like hurt, if hurt were not just a soap bubble. Since my head and torso remained, and I was a sausage, I could watch my now-separate parts all race off in other directions.

  “Did you feel that?” somebody asked, maybe.

  “I think so…”

  “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t exactly know.”

  Because the night itself – the sky, all these stars, the darkness in between them (yes, especially that) – was a living creature. “I’ve seen you before,” she whispered, “haven’t I?”

  “I’ve, you know, been around some.” But to see the stars from this vantage was disconcerting, since they were so awfully close.

  “Oh, it was you. I’m certain of it now. There was a division, so it wasn’t clear to me that you were one person and not two, but I’ve been watching how you get along. Your path is uneven, but now I understand why. At first, I saw a line. That was your vector. Then the line began to waver and oscillate. Then it split into two oscillations that were out of phase.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, that happened.”

  “Now the oscillations are synchronized. Well, more or less. Different amplitudes, yes, but almost the same frequency. Almost. That means you get to exist, at least a little bit, but you’re out of tune.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry. Did you know that if you close your eyes, you can still see them?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The stars.”

  I tried it. She was right.

  •

  I was some distance from the fire, around which the others grouped. They seemed to have gotten hold of some unfortunate animal that they tore into pieces, the bloody fragments then flung into the air in orgiastic abandon. I watched parts, entrails, spattering wet filaments of gore thrown in the shadowy traces of their fire-lit arc, out toward the sky, to fall back down and spatter the ground. These pieces were then set upon by the children who ringed the outer radius, and torn apart to still smaller bits. I was amazed at how quickly these people could move.

  Beyond the firelit group in their frenzy were others, figures who silently ranged in the night. I’d not seen these ones before. They seemed like nothing more than shadows in the moonlight, and I wasn’t sure at first that I really saw them, that is, until one came straight up to me. Even this close, it was still only a shadow. It studied me for a long while, and though I couldn’t see its face, when it finally spoke, it had an old man’s gruff and graveled voice, the strange cadence of its speech strangely i
nflected. It said, “We don’t usually see your kind out here. You must be lost?”

  “These good people told me they’d found me.”

  The shadow-form moved closer still. Electricity seemed to sizzle out from it. I wanted to back away, but couldn’t. Something held me there in place. It seemed to be looking deep inside me, studying something that it found there. When it spoke again, apparently satisfied with what it saw, it said, “Consider yourself a guest. For now. We can’t let you stay for long, though. I suppose these folks mean well, even though they’ve made a mess of it. Is that your soul over there?”

  I looked toward where the shadow-form pointed, which looked like another place altogether. In an aperture I saw inside of some dismal room, full of terrible, sick light and a scattering of small tables, and in a moment, I knew that I recognized the room. It was where the residents all ate, the sad dining room at the house where I’d worked in Seattle, the place where the mental patients lived. And there at the table – that was me at the table, I saw myself there… and I was talking to somebody across from me, somebody I vaguely recognized.

  “I guess,” I said. “But I thought that I was my soul. Why is it over there?”