New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

The golden retriever at the door stared inside, started forward but paused at the threshold, its mouth hung open and panting, eyes glistening.

  “When I once went bodiless…”

  “Son, son, why have you turned white?”

  “Professor, I…”

  “You mustn’t crowd him in like that.”

  “…And like this, I could float.” This from that furthest table back.

  “Yes, you were in the air?” From a table near the front, called across the space.

  “We decided it would be that way.”

  “And I just needed… to see. It was something I had to do. So I left my body and went up.”

  “My soul,” said Proteus, in whiteness, “is somewhere else. I… Professor? My soul?”

  “That would explain, son, the reason for the whiteness. And the paper thinness. And why it seems, even if it’s not so, that we can see right through you. But do you know where you are, my boy? And do you know why you’ve come to this place?”

  “To find…”

  “Because you’re the same as they were. These unfinished men, these men and these women. You should have seen them, all with the same look, the same hunger, their eyes staring, over-wide and vibrating from days and days on the road, just like you, just as you were. Yes, ‘Where is the sheriff?’ they’d ask, their voices helium-pitched, the same as yours was. ‘Where is the sheriff?’ Hopping about, looking from side to side. Of course the word had gotten around by then. They knew what was happening. We all did. Why else come this far? Why come for him? They weren’t looking for grace, but for easy transit – to some new and more accommodating, maybe less impossible world, a world, they thought, that was for themselves, as it came on the heels of their own, personal, eternally recurrent day of reckoning. Forget salvation, forget these dreams of rapture, they just couldn’t stand it where they were anymore. Yes, he found them. It never took long because he knew where to look. And he accepted this role that he’d been assigned, to a point. The sheriff understood what all these unfinished people needed and why. All it required of him was a touch of his finger, if even that; that much was easy. But what he struggled with, and ultimately could never believe in, was his responsibility for this agency. As if he’d ever had a choice.”

  “No, no, Professor, that’s not why… I think he has something of mine.”

  “Has something…? Has it, yes…?”

  “Is it your soul, young man?” asked Albert, who was himself a very high-albedo person: skin white, hair bright white, pale eyes, leaning close. “Would it be your soul? Because your soul… has gone to the Devil. It is most certainly in Hell. Let me assure you.”

  And Ignatius emerged from yet another room and one more doorway, his shirt entirely soaked and dripping, wrinkled as if wrung out, which it had been, smelling of chocolate and soap, decidedly unhappy. He stepped through the tables that were clustered and scattered like so many dots across the floor, stepping through the conversations of those persons who were at them and speaking across space, an interrupter of many things, of significant looks between parties, who stepped over outstretched legs and ankles, who wove, not quite falling. He chased the dog from the door with a yelled “SCAT!” and a wide kick (the dog glanced back with a disappointed look as it trotted off across the street), approaching the counter at last, the Professor at one side, old Albert at the other, Proteus behind it and pale, and he said, “So what is it wrong with you now?”

  •

  “So what is it wrong with you now?”

  Proteus was pale and faint. He looked weak. He leaned on his arms and his elbows. He leaned his weight on the counter.

  “You’re the one who’s asking?” asked Albert, octogenarian.

  “And the whiteness? Such whiteness, in a place like this… this is nowhere for light.” Such was the Professor’s opinion.

  “And yet he glows.”

  “I’m not the one who left the chocolate sauce opened on the top shelf. Unless I was. But what is it wrong with him now?”

  “Mostly what you’d expect.”

  “He looks like he saw a ghost.”

  “He is seeing the ghost right now.”

  “Proteus, must now to pull the self together. Is it are you sick?”

  “There are spirits that simply won’t leave the boy alone. They trouble him, these phantoms, these visions.”

  “It’s this altitude…”

  “Which altitude is it?”

  “The child has misplaced his vital member.”

  “Please, I’m not a…”

  “Perhaps there is a witch who has stolen it.”

  “I don’t think they actually do that.”

  “Not that, not that.”

  “No, they were always the oracles, when I was a boy. Not in the city, in the hills. At least the good ones.”

  “Those from the East. Yes.”

  “Are you telling me that he can see the future?” Ignatius asked of the two older men, pillaring to the flanks of their charge.

  “No, that isn’t what he said.”

  “That isn’t what I said.”

  “So tell me what happens. In that case. Tell me the future.” A seemingly innocent question, but not.

  It was Ignatius who then turned much too white.

  “Why, what is it? You look as though you’re bleached.”

  “What is it wrong with you now? Eh?”

  “It must have been the child. He has changed his shape again.”

  “From a fish to a pheasant!”

  “Please, I’m hardly a…” But no one listened to Proteus.

  “He’s transformed himself!”

  “Good God!”

  “He’s a lizard! Now he’s a log!”

  “I thought so. Now he’s a dog!”

  “But he’s none of these things.”

  The shop owner looked, in fact, sick.

  “All this, just to avoid…”

  “Yes, he’s avoidant! You see him there.”

  “I do not.”

  “He’s the worst. The most desperate kind.”

  Ignatius seemed as though he might fall over, sick.

  “But now he’s gone!”

  “The boy was never there.”

  “Please, I’m not… I’m just… I’m nearly forty. I’m hardly a boy.”

  “Are you invisible?”

  “You think that you’re here, but you’re not here.”

  “Where then? If I’m not here, where am I? What?”

  “In another place. Well, obviously.”

  THREE

  Dead Body State

  [Outside Time]

  “Finch,” I told him, “you’re dead.” And it was true.

  Yet the value of such a truth lay far less in my knowing it than in how it was accepted (or not) by the young man who sat across the table from me. He: Finch, the one who was dead, and did not seem to know it.

  In the flickering light of the fluorescents of Inn House Manor’s basement dining room, at the wobbly table’s scratch-marked surface of old linoleum, he with his hooked nose and pale gray skin and unlikely air of aloof aristocracy (a thing seldom if ever earned, but in the composure of a beggar, a mooch, a thing that didn’t belong at all), and I, with I can scarce say what look I wore, yes, we faced each other. We faced each other staring in a sort of Mexican stand-off of dead-body wits. I wanted to pry his mouth open and make him say something true and factual, or if that didn’t work, I wanted to write it as a note, to wrap the note up and stuff it in there and make him eat it.

  “Look,” he said at last, “I don’t know about that. I don’t know why you’d say that. I don’t know why people, when they look at me at all, they look right through me and say that same thing. At least they used to. But now, like you… or maybe not like you… everyone I know seems to have just forgotten I was ever there. They’ve changed. Everyone has changed. Nobody even sees me now.”

  “That’s because…” There were only so many ways that I could say it.

 
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Finch protested. “And I don’t know what you’re doing here either.”

  Here. That in itself was a dilemma. The dining room was a dismal place, no doubt, with its mismatched collection of tables, some little, some long, and plastic chairs and folding metal chairs arranged around them; its scuffed floors, its sick and seeping yellow walls. One moment, the room was full of bodies, people eating, lost looks on their faces, more or less ignoring one another, the next again, it was empty but for the two of us. Whether it was day or night outside was hard to tell because there were no windows and the light was always the same. The kitchen was open one moment and closed the next, its sliding metal partition at the service window drawn up or down, depending. And if there was someone inside the kitchen, they dispensed the food. And if there wasn’t, they didn’t. But the order of this – open, closed, feeding or not – became blurred, and the difference was ultimately meaningless. We weren’t eating. We couldn’t; we were souls.

  “I’m here,” I said, “I think because I’ve left my body. So far as I know, it’s still up there in the world, walking around, doing stuff without me, who knows what. It may be possible that not everyone who’s dead has exactly died – at least I hope that’s the case, but don’t hold me to it. Maybe I was disappointed once too often, or this single disappointment came too hard and so I’ve given up hope. In any event, despite my obvious limitations, there’s likely no one more qualified to be your guide through the land of the dead than me. If that’s where we are.”

  “So you’ve got a cigarette for me, in that case?” Ever hopeful, his eyes all lit up.

  I ignored the question. “When you overdosed on heroin nineteen years ago, Finch, nobody really knew if it was because you’d meant to kill yourself, or if you’d just blundered into it. Maybe you didn’t know how much of the stuff was too much, or maybe you didn’t care. Either way seemed just as likely. I know that the last time I’d seen you, downtown on the sidewalk in front of that tavern, you’d seen us coming. My friend and I spun on our heels and walked the other way, since we knew you were just going to hit us up for a beer or a smoke, most likely both, and we were sick of it. It wasn’t premeditated – nobody decided to ostracize you for your annoying behavior. The thing was entirely spontaneous. We were fed up with you, Finch. But then I found out a week or so later how you’d died, and I couldn’t help but feel in some small way responsible, and maybe that’s why you’ve stuck to me for all this time. Because I feel guilty for treating you badly, because of how you might’ve taken it. What do you think? Is that why you’ve been following me around? Is that why I’m the one who’s tasked now with showing you how to be dead?”

  “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. But if you give me a cigarette, I’ll tell you that story.”

  “The extent of your incomprehension is staggering to me. You are nothing but empty inside.”

  “I am hungry.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Come on, give us a cigarette.”

  “We can’t smoke in here.”

  “Nobody cares, and besides, they won’t notice. And if they notice, they won’t do anything about it. Come on, give us a smoke, will you? I know you’ve got one, and I know you’ll like this story.”

  Hell. What was it to me? I gave him a smoke from the crumpled pack in my shirt pocket. He took it and lit it from matches in his possession. There was at least that much – he didn’t ask me for a light as well.

  •

  “It’s less a story than a setting for a story, actually,” explained Finch once he’d set the tip to glowing and taken a good long pull. It was clear he relished the smoke; he held it in his lungs and felt the nicotine before pushing it out again in a long stream.

  “I’m already a little disappointed,” I said.

  “Well, just wait, would you? Hear me out before you pass judgement. You may even like this.”

  “You told me,” I said, “that I definitely would like this. Now you say I might like it? You’re lowering my expectations, now you’ve got what you wanted, because you’ve got nothing. So what’s next? Should I be happy you haven’t simply robbed me?”

  “I want to tell you about a place. I think I saw this place once – I’m not entirely sure. But I’ve carried around ever since the image of the city, the idea of this city. I don’t know that it’s a place that’s either good or bad, only that it isn’t real. There is nothing about it that’s real. A person might have an idea about somewhere like this, in fact they very likely do, about what it’s like; they might think it must be bad if it isn’t real, or it must be good, or something. But the place itself doesn’t tell you that. It is only that way, and not some other way, say what you will of it, good or bad or whatever. The city is an unreal place, where only unreal things happen, and it’s somewhere I want to go. I think I’ll get there. It’s where I might finally get on my feet, you know? Get a good job, find a nice girlfriend with big tits. I call it Fake City. I think the name says everything you need to know about it. I could maybe just as well call it ‘First Place’ or ‘First City’, because it’s the sort of city that came before everything else, before all the other cities. At least that’s how I think of it. I’m pretty sure it’s that way.”

  “That would make it a very old city,” I said as I took out another cigarette for myself. What the hell, I figured. Finch had been right about that much: nobody else was around at the moment, much less offended that we were smoking.

  “No, it wouldn’t. That would make it outside of time completely. We don’t know when the real first cities happened. There’s an awful lot that we don’t know about when everything started. But the idea for the first one, the one that’s unreal, has to come from outside of time, otherwise it won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because otherwise it has to be at some point, at some time, and you have to know that time was the first time, and that would make it real, at least a little bit, and this one isn’t like that. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. It was his story after all.

  “And if I go there, and when I go there, I wanna arrive in style. I don’t want to be stupid about it, just to walk in, get off a train or a bus or something, like any dumbass. I want it to be a parade, with cheering and trumpets and confetti, and girls dancing, and free beer. I think it should be like that.”

  “But why should anything be like that?” I asked him.

  “Nothing there is real, so why shouldn’t it be?”

  “Because you haven’t done anything to deserve it. Why should all these people in this whole city – even if it’s a fake one – why should they be so happy you’re here? Do you see what’s wrong with this?”

  Finch really seemed deflated at that. He slumped in his chair and bent his head forward, looking, if possible, even more pale and lifeless than before.

  But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily. “You’re dead now, Finch, and that’s sad and everything, and you died for a stupid reason, and that’s even more pathetic. But I’m sorry, I don’t think it should win you any prizes, and you shouldn’t get a parade for your merits. For what I can see, you have none. It’s no different from when you were alive. You only took as much as you could from anyone who would give it to you, and it was never enough. That’s why those of us who knew you turned and walked away when we saw you coming. You would just show up and expect that people should give you stuff. But why should anyone give you anything? If they do, it’s because they’re good and charitable people, and they feel sorry for you. But you can’t and you shouldn’t expect that, much less think that it’s somehow owed you. Where did that attitude get you? Did you even pay for that dose that killed you? I’ll bet you didn’t. Maybe you said you’d pay, but dying got you out of that obligation, even bought you a little sympathy.”

  “Man, are you serious all of a sudden. What brought all that on? You’re really kind of an asshole, you know? And
besides, I’m giving you a story…”

  “It’s not even a story, Finch. It’s a setting for a story that doesn’t happen.”

  “Well… you don’t know that. Just because it hasn’t happened yet… that doesn’t mean it’s not going to.”

  “Okay, Finch. I’m sorry, you’re right. So what else can you tell me about this place that isn’t there?”

  With this he seemed to brighten. He straightened up, waving his cigarette dramatically through the air. “Now there’s your first mistake,” he said. “It’s not that it isn’t there, but that it could be, and is, anywhere. Just like Fake City is outside time, Fake City is any place. It could, for instance, be right here, just as much as anywhere. You don’t need to take a bus to get there, you don’t need to take a train or a plane or walk or hitch a ride. Because when you get to Fake City, you’ve always been there, and Fake City is anywhere you are. And I’m going to tell you something else about it. Are you ready to hear this? Because I don’t think you are.”

  “Teach me the wisdom of the dead, Finch.”

  “We are there right now. It is all around us.”

  FOUR

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  “Blink once for yes, twice for no.” Amanda waited. “Or just stare straight ahead, that’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry,” apologized Proteus, aware again of the cigarette in his hand, the gentle, warm wind to his skin, the sight of the valley stretched out some thousands of feet below, beyond the wall where he stood, where all things not geologic in scale were rendered tiny. “I forgot… where… How long have I been standing like this?” He looked to the cigarette, which had burned half down, glow-ball centered in cylinder held erect, half-white, half-gray, its long ash kept delicately aloft up to the moment he noticed, when it dropped.

  “I couldn’t say,” she said. “I just found you here.”

  “I was inside.”

  “Yes. You work inside.”

  “I must’ve come out for a break. I’m sorry,” he said again. “What were you asking me?”

  “I wanted to show you something. It involves walking. Do you have a moment?”