New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Hm. Dunno. You must really be in pieces. But I suppose these people might even manage to do you some little bit of good, even so. But I can tell you this: you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

  “Where… uh, where’s that?” I asked. “The mountain?”

  “The mountain?” It, he, laughed. “Sure, the mountain, why not? How the hell should I know? Just not here. We’ll let you and the rest of these clowns stay the night, but no longer.”

  The form blew away like smoke. There was hollowness in its place.

  •

  The woman who cut the bone was lean and tough. She worked beside the fire. Its orange and flickering light was bested by her fire-bright red hair, which I could even see from here, and it licked her leather-lean skin and set her features in deep relief. Though she wasn’t old, the lines that webbed her face fanned many and deep, out from the corners of her eyes and from her firm-set mouth, like she’d weathered in the sun and dry wind for years. She hacked at the large bone with a large, curved knife, removing bits of sinew and meat that still tenaciously clung to it. I floated in closer to watch. I could do that, since I didn’t seem to have a body.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked.

  She looked up, but not directly at me, since she couldn’t see me there. “Making a trumpet,” she said.

  “What, out of that bone?”

  “Yep.”

  I watched her work. There was much that she could do with the knife, fine and delicate work, and with a blade so large. It was impressive to see. “That’s kind of a… big bone.”

  “It’s a thigh bone,” she explained, not looking up. “Thigh bone’s the biggest. It makes the best tone.”

  “Best tone. Huh. It seems like I’ve heard of this.” “Maybe.”

  “Do you play?”

  “Me? Nah, I don’t play ’em. I just make ’em.”

  “I see. I see… Who among you does, in that case?”

  “Who?” She looked up. Again, she didn’t meet my eye, since I didn’t seem to have any, but otherwise she no doubt would’ve. She said, “You do. This one’s yours, see? But don’t worry – I’ll put it back when I’m done.”

  I blew apart in the wind.

  •

  My eyes were stuck together by earthy grit, and to pry them open took a moment’s effort upon waking up. I’d not been aware of falling asleep. Of everything that had happened, or had seemed to happen, sleeping fit nowhere into it. But now that my eyes, with effort, had opened, I saw the sun and the chilly sky, uninterrupted by any blemish of cloud, spread out blue and deeper blue above. There was the jagged horizon of mountainous peaks distantly surrounding us, and the tall rock at the center of camp near where I lay, and I found that someone had been kind enough to wrap me in my own jacket and to rest my head on my pack. I lay on top of a blue tarp that wasn’t mine, which I was thankful for. When I moved my arms and legs was when I realized that I had them; in fact, my entire body was there. This did not add up with events as I’d remembered them, but I was relieved to find it so. Elbows, wrists, and fingers, knees, ankle joints, toes – everything bent as it was supposed to; everything was there and it worked. Before I’d had a chance to worry over these discontinuities, I saw what it was that had woken me.

  There was a fantail of dust driven up the near distance by the approach of a speck down the road. As it sped the length of narrow highway to its end, the speck grew bigger and resolved. A tan-colored Jeep Cherokee with the word SHERIFF on its side pulled up to our encampment, not with its lights flashing and not sounding its siren either, but with a certain urgency nonetheless, and when it rolled to a stop, I watched the tall, stooped, and hair-fringed figure of Zedekiah stand to approach it. A short distance behind him followed one of his wives. I watched the driver’s door open and a figure step out, box-shouldered and over-large. Even from this distance, I could see that his dark hair was cropped somehow too neatly, that his jaw was entirely too square. This sheriff, or whatever, couldn’t possibly be real, but was some kind of posable action figure. A doll. Or a cartoon. Whatever he was, he wasn’t real. He couldn’t be.

  •

  “Yeah, but he really is that way,” Amanda interrupted. “I found him, what? Magnetic. He had that thing about him, that charisma. You couldn’t ignore the man if you tried to.”

  “So you’ve figured it out, that this was the same Sheriff Friendly, the man that I’d come here to see?” asked Proteus.

  “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

  “I immediately disliked him.”

  “You sound… envious. What, maybe jealous even?”

  “Of that oversized boy scout? Please.”

  “But he really had that something. Good-looking, sure. But there was something.” She got this dreamy look.

  Proteus rolled his eyes.

  •

  So Zedekiah, elder of the Ceres clan, approached the sheriff, his hand outstretched in greeting, as it had been to me the afternoon previous, while this pressed baboon of a policeman stood there beside his car, imperious, authoritarian to his core. He held one hand forward, not in greeting – I could tell that much – but as a warning, it was true. This did not stop Zed’s friendly advance one iota. No, not one bit. I wondered what sort of trouble was to follow, and didn’t have long to wait. As Zedekiah came within a foot or two of the officer, he disappeared. Just vanished. Like smoke, only faster than smoke. He was simply gone.

  First Wife Shulamit, who’d followed behind him, knew enough to stop right there in her tracks and come no closer. She stared in shock at the empty space where her husband had been, stared at the empty ground ahead, and I could see that awe had taken her. She was in a spell. She looked up to the sheriff then, looked up with her mouth open, gaping, the fear in her eyes, obvious to me even from this distance. The officer said something to her. I couldn’t hear what. She said something back. I watched as he removed certain articles from his person: first his policeman’s badge, then next his shiny gun, then finally his wide-brimmed sheriff’s hat. Each of these items he laid out onto the ground in front of him, explaining softly to the woman as he did just what it was that he was doing. His eyes never left her, and hers never left him. She nodded at whatever it was that he said, her jaw still hung open and mouth all agape, by now no doubt tasting the dust that still hovered in the air.

  When, in this stillness, in this near silence, the sheriff slowly turned to me, and looked without hesitation straight at me, and then for fuck’s sake pointed at me too, my heart shuddered and fell. Of course, I still didn’t know who this was, that this was exactly the person that I’d come all this way to find. I just thought that I was in trouble. In fact, I was in trouble. I just didn’t understand yet what kind.

  Shulamit looked over at me then too. I could see the recognition cross her face as she understood. She turned again to the officer and nodded her assent. And he… he, leaving these sacred objects on the ground where he’d set them, he… got back into his damn car and drove away. The fantail of dust turned and followed after.

  •

  I stared at the objects. Hat, gun, badge. Badge, gun, hat. However I looked at them, I didn’t understand and still don’t. Shulamit crouched beside me in the dirt. “He said these were for you,” she told me. “He said you would understand.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “And what about Zedekiah?”

  “Gone,” she said, looking up, though not too wistfully, “to the Celestial Kingdom, no doubt. There to prepare our home, where we don’t need wander no more. You saw how it was the angel sent him away. Zedekiah, for all his human frailties, he was a righteous man, and I expect I’ll meet him there soon. But you’ve been given this text to translate. Not golden plates, true, but they’ll do. You’ve got your seer-stone. You’ve got visions. Heavenly Father has work for you.”

  “I’ve… oh…” Yes, I was drooling, a little. “I’ve got a body. What happened? What was in that drink?”

  “Drink?”

  “You gave
me some cocoa.”

  “That was cocoa,” she said. “What did you think it was?”

  “Oh.”

  But the entire clan had already begun to mobilize, breaking down their camp, packing their saddlebags with practiced efficiency. Odd looks were thrown my way by some, it was true, but I would have expected that in any case. Given the cost to their tribe, and that I apparently had been some part of exacting it, I would’ve expected far chillier a farewell. Yet these people didn’t seem to harbor any particular grudge. They simply went about their business while paying me little mind, and before I could say “dumbstruck” they were on their way, rumbling in furious unison back in the direction they’d come, down the straight highway and off into its vanishing point. I did notice a particular face amongst the group as it was leaving, in a frame of red hair that was leveled by a small helmet skull-cap, she from her fire-red bike with its raised handlebars and fringe-hangings of bells and leather adornments, and I knew in that moment as our eyes met that it was the woman I’d spoken with, so briefly by the fire the night before – when I was a bodiless ghost – and who’d carved, as she at least had said, for me, a new thighbone trumpet, presumably now replaced to where it belonged.

  •

  “I found my way out of Utah again,” Proteus explained, “and it was within a day’s ride that I reached here. I’ve already explained how it was that I wound the twisting highway up the side of Charles Mountain in the deepening light. You remember it yourself, if it made any impression, how it was when I arrived, because you were right there,” he pointed at the low wall beside them, “with your cone of pink ice cream. You saw everything.”

  “It’s true,” Amanda said. “I sit on that wall and I watch. I see everything that comes and goes from Cleric. It’s my job. I’m it.”

  “You found your way to this work?”

  “It was assigned to me.”

  “By who?”

  “I can’t speak of them.”

  “Naturally,” said Proteus, reaching for a sip of his coffee, which earlier had grown cold, but now was entirely gone, as he saw when he raised the cup to his mouth. “Urgh. I won’t ask about it again, in that case. But I suppose you knew this Sheriff Friendly pretty well.”

  “You could say that. But you’ve never explained to me why you needed so badly to talk with him that you came all the way out here on your… broken-down little motorcycle.”

  He crushed out his cigarette in irritation. “It isn’t broken-down! It’s just a little rusty. And kind of bent.”

  “And it makes that noise.”

  “The sound it makes is normal. It runs well.”

  “And what,” she asked, poking at the sheriff’s crumpled hat, “happened to this?”

  “It got smashed up when I put it in my saddlebags. It’s not like I had much room for this stuff. Listen, I missed the sheriff by a day. That wasn’t a mistake. If the events of that morning happened as I remember them, he knew that I was coming. He left here just in time. He went to meet me, gave me these, and disappeared. I don’t know why, or what he intends I should do with this junk. But he’s always been a step ahead of me, and apparently doesn’t intend to sit down for a chat. I guess I don’t blame him. It may not have even been for his sake that I came here. We just have something in common, is all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Right. But it’s complicated, this thing.”

  “Give me another cigarette.”

  “You’re chain smoking now?”

  “Yes, with your cigarettes.”

  He reached out his pack and gave her one, got another for himself as well. The dusky evening light had faded, gone crepuscular, the air turned cold.

  “What is it?” she said, exhaling smoke, shaking out her match.

  “It?”

  “This thing.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Yes, but what is it?”

  Proteus stared off to the side, stared at the cement with a look on his face. “You’d know it if you saw it.”

  “And he did?”

  “He who? What?”

  “The sheriff. He saw it.”

  “Yes. Precisely. The sheriff saw it.”

  •

  Ignatius, the owner and, until Proteus’s arrival, sole employee of Ignatius! Coffee! Co!, Cleric’s premier artisanal coffee roaster and espresso bar (in fact it’s the only one), allowed Proteus relief for the evening from his usual closing duties, in order for him to walk his pretty friend Amanda up the hill. They ambled in loping, long-legged slow steps up the all-but-vertical grades of the town’s abbreviated streets, past the old shopfronts with their wooden facades, and past equally as many empty, open holes where shops had once stood, or, unnervingly, slid some ways back down the hill and crumbled, leaving broken bits of foundations and fragments of walls along the way, or even entire storefronts of buildings still intact, if uninhabitable, for the lack of anything that remained behind. The town looked as if it had been bombed.

  What in fact had happened was that repeated blasting in the copper mines, over which Cleric had been built more than a century before, long ago undid the deep ground, destabilizing rock, liquefying its foundations, allowing gravity its due. In a few cases whole buildings yet stood, though not quite where they’d been constructed. This hadn’t developed all at once, but over years, over decades – and was even still, if rarely, from time to time, felt, as if a rumbling, deeply in-mountain resonant, still rattled its offense, specific, if not exactly dormant, and might still target one property, for whatever reasons it had, while sparing another directly beside it. No one knew when any particular building might detach itself from its earth-moorings, which lent a special air of risk to being anyplace in Cleric, at any time. For this reason, it was not the sort of town where just anyone would think to settle. Proteus had quickly found this out.

  “You seem to be doing alright for someone who’s been torn to pieces,” remarked Amanda.

  “I suppose I’m okay. I still don’t know what really happened that night.” He awkwardly carried the hat, held upended and out from his body, with the gun and the badge dumped inside, not knowing what else to do with these things.

  “These will make you the sheriff now,” Amanda told him. “That’s part of the magic, I’m sure of it.”

  “What? I’m no sheriff.”

  “Neither was he, truth be told. But clearly he meant for you to have them. Passing the torch, and what.”

  “I make coffee.”

  “You were a monk. Now you make the coffee. Why not be sheriff, too?”

  “I can think of reasons. For instance. For instance. I’ve got no idea how to shoot this gun.”

  “You’re hardly the first man to have that problem. This is a detail. I can show you.”

  “What, now?”

  “No. Silly. Later. You’ll need to see what you shoot.”

  “This is only one of the things I don’t understand. Another? I thought Cleric was doing just fine without any sheriff. So what do you need one for? Really. That’s what most people would say: ‘What do we need one for?’ The town abides.”

  She stared at her shoes as she walked, and so her hair hung like a net. “I think,” Amanda said, “of the community as a body. It is a body. A body needs a head. It needs its heart, its lungs, all of it.”

  “And I would be the head?”

  “You… will be its fingers.”

  “This is not… If I would be… What was he?”

  “He?”

  “You know.”

  She smiled, but he couldn’t see it, not with the hair. “It’s true,” said told him, “that we have our own law here, that it’s pretty much self-enforcing. But if a man can wear the uniform, sit at a desk at the police station, file reports, talk to reporters…” Amanda looked up searchingly at him.

  “So then you do know about that.”

  “Of course I knew about that. Everyone did. We all listened to the broadcast. He got it wrong.”

 
“I called it Mosquito.”

  “Sheriff Friendly still had some idea that what happened to him was private, or that it maybe hadn’t happened before. He didn’t understand the wider impact. He’d forgotten who he was. He’d forgotten where he came from.”

  “Why people were leaving…”

  “They weren’t leaving. They were disappearing. You saw this yourself. There’s a difference.” She kicked a stone with the tip of her shoe. “And he’d forgotten where he came from.”

  “I thought you’d said –”

  “That he was from Los Angeles. Yes, I said that. But what do you think Los Angeles is?”

  “I’ve been there. It destroyed me, but I still don’t know.”

  “Of course not. Nobody does.”

  •

  Proteus had said goodnight to her once they’d reached her house, then walked some few blocks further to the bed and breakfast where he still slept, if uneasily. There was a separate entrance for guests in the lower floor of this converted house, and he crept stealthily down the cement path, lifted the latch to the side gate as carefully and silently as he could, tiptoed the remaining distance past lawn and flowerbeds hidden by night, gently inserted the house-key he’d been lent into the door’s well-oiled mechanism (he’d squirted its workings himself with a liberal dose of WD-40, and greased, also, the key), paused a moment to exhale, then inhale, then twisted the key incrementally, as slow, it seemed, as the minute hand of a clock. The tumbler turned. There was a small click. The door opened and he padded inside, balancing the upturned hat in one hand, careful to catch the screen door behind him before it could swing and slam itself shut.

  Inside, he switched on the light. Burning, the incandescent bulb made a tiny hum in its fixture in the ceiling, barely any louder than the ringing inside his own head, the rush of blood, the tiny squealings of his heart. He found his bedroom, the door left open. He crept into it, gently, gently shut the door, set the hat with objects on the bedside table, exhaled. He was home.

  TWO

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  The Professor said, “Those voices? Those same ones you’ve heard in the mountain winds? Even when there is no wind, when there is nothing at all. You will have asked yourself, and more than once, is it that the hills themselves have learned to speak? They have. You’ve heard them every night, I can see this in your face, knowing the voices are ghosts, knowing also that every element sooner or later of necessity acquires speech. You understand this. You expect this. Unmodified by the mechanisms of the body, ruined by our need for speech to accord the symbols of meaning, these voices have turned your ear, yes, more than you care to admit. And you would try and decipher their prophecy? Would you, do you think, recognize this as prophecy before, or only after, the thing proffered has come to pass?”