New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Finch?” I said, though I wasn’t heard.

  The older fella nodded as he walked alongside, keeping step with the younger one, Finch. “Oh yes, son, I do,” he said. “And you are absolutely right about time. Well, time, now… it will specialize there. More even than it does in this place. You see, there is more than one way to be dead!” And with that he looked to me, past dazed Finch, right into my eyes, and smiled.

  TEN

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  In the dim, interior, baffling dark, Proteus stared at where the spotlight cast its small and spectral cone of lumens directly onto the faceplate of the roasting drum, where the metal sign was welded on that said PROBAT, like that was its name. The letters were in relief, as blunt and solid as the word itself, as heavy as the whole machine. As if that explained everything.

  “I might think to tell you,” Ignatius told him, “that you’ve not exactly been yourself lately. Except that you never have. And I wouldn’t likely know you if I saw you. In the street, anywhere. Whatever it is you do in there, inside your head, wherever you are, I don’t know I want to know. It’s your business, isn’t it? I’m not one to pry, but… please… come back to here. Please do your work?”

  “You’re the poet of the dime-store novel,” said Proteus.

  The dog was again at the door.

  “I’ve got a business. It’s little. It’s maybe not much, but.” He went to shoo the dog away, whose golden fur flashed in the sunlight. He turned back and said to the man, who still stood as if transfixed, “Have you ever considered talking to a professional?”

  “About what?”

  “Things. You know.”

  “Professional things.”

  “Help you find your soul.”

  “Meanwhile…” His eyes had never left the machine nor its name.

  “The air grows thin and cold, boys, thinner and colder by the day.” This from Albert, who’d come in off the street, his way made clear by the loping dog, its days grown long in memory. “The summer is distinctively over.”

  “Has been for a while, Albert. What can I make you?”

  “Young again.”

  “Everyone asks the impossible. They say that strength is wasted on the strong, but that youth itself grows perpetually younger. And more stupid. Some things cannot be helped. But really.”

  “Café du Monde?”

  “That I can do. Or he can. Proteus, what we were just talking about.”

  “Really, Inigo. ‘Off with their heads.’ All that.”

  “His eyes are plastered to his head, and he is always staring straight ahead.”

  “‘Let them eat cake’? What.”

  “The cake. His head is plastered to his face, and he is always somewhere off in space.”

  “Jesus, Ignatz. What are you saying? You don’t even speak English.”

  “In this case, I don’t need to. I pay you to do it for me. Now make the man his drink.”

  “Someday you will disappear and I will make you do that.”

  “Oh sweet Mother of God!”

  “Alright! I’m on it.” But Proteus only stared at the coffee-roasting apparatus, thinking for certain the thing should start belching smoke and rattle away, chugging down parallel tracks toward some distant, brown horizon at any moment.

  “Er…?” harrumphed the silver-haired octogenarian.

  “Sorry,” Proteus apologized, “I’ve not slept. It was my first night in my new home in the hills, and I swear I’ve been visited.”

  “The spirits, sir,” said Albert, as Proteus took his position behind the espresso machine and knocked around at it, “are everywhere, in all things, and I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I guess I’m not either. It seems I have some relation to the dead.” Proteus talked as he worked, adjusting the grind, attempting a few failed shots before getting it right. “All night, I’m hearing footsteps coming down the stairs. Only there aren’t any stairs. I’d set the bed out onto the floor in the middle of the big, open room, and I swear, the ghost, or whatever it was, came and sat on me.”

  “Yes,” nodded Albert absently, looking off toward the front door, through which Ignatius had just exited with a plastic sack of garbage, “I would expect so.”

  “I’m lying on the mattress. I hear footsteps. The footsteps come down the stairs, only there are no stairs. There used to be stairs, maybe, a long time ago, but the stairs never led to anywhere.” Confident now that he could replicate the espresso shot, given the ambient humidity – somewhat higher today than usual – Proteus started in on the milk. “They went straight into the ceiling. So from the ceiling come these footsteps, down the stairs that aren’t there. Step, step, step… They’re in no hurry. They have time. Eventually, they reach the floor. But they don’t stop there.”

  Ignatius poked his head back in through the front door and said, “Albert? Did you mean to park this way? There’s three wheels of that electric car of yours popped up on the sidewalk. Which you’ve blocked, by the way. Any further and you’d’ve hit the wall, maybe gone through it, over the edge, down the cliff. You didn’t mean to do that, I don’t think?”

  Albert said nothing, looked down at his expensive boots, smiling.

  “And so the footsteps, they don’t stop there. They walk. They walk along the floor, coming, I realized, straight for me, for where I’ve put the mattress, in the middle of the floor. They get closer and closer, and then what happens? They stop, and the mattress, the one I’m already lying on, is depressed in the center with the weight of a body that’s not there. The ghost has sat right on me. Right. On. Me.”

  “You’re lucky we’ve no law in this land, Albert,” Ignatius told the old man, committing to step back in through the doorway, minus trash bag, while Albert now assiduously ignored all such input, the center of his attention grown vague and inward, “or – or you’d be given a ticket for sure. For parking that way.”

  “Oh no, I can do that,” announced Proteus helpfully. “I’ve got everything I need. Here’s your drink, Albert. That’s four dollars. And I can write you up that parking ticket too, just let me find something…” looking around, not finding it… “or, okay, I’ll have to write it up later, the book’s likely still up at the station. But I’ve got all the other stuff: hat, badge…”

  “Gun,” offered Amanda, backlit in the doorway, filling the space not long before taken by the proprietor. Hers was a form much lighter, smaller, distinctively more feminine. Her blond hair caught the sunlight, haloing her silhouette.

  “Yes, that’s right. Gun.”

  “All the elements of transcendence,” offered the Professor, appearing from nowhere at all, now to stand at the counter before Proteus, “and tools of exploration, present, numinous in their aspect – discrete objects, however foreign they seem. We may at times trust in things, Proteus, if not in ourselves.”

  “Jesus. God.” Such was Proteus’s distress.

  Albert would likely also have been taken aback, had he noticed anything, had he not been fumbling instead with the return of his change in the form of several small bills that would not seem to fit back into his wallet.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  “It’s less what I do than what you do not. Young lady,” said the Professor, turning to bow to Amanda and remove his flop-eared, flannel aviator hat with chivalrous flourish, revealing a terrible, tangled frizz of gray-white hair and pink scalp.

  “Professor,” she nodded. “You’ve returned to haunt my friend some more?”

  “Any self-respecting ghost must do what he sees that he can.”

  “Funny choice of words, there, Amanda,” stammered Proteus. “I mean, funny you should say. Because I just… I, uh…”

  “Boy.” The Professor pressed forward and would not let him finish – even if he could – but talked into and, it seemed, right through him. “You’ve seen the light of the body in this, the shimmering tide. Your air is the air of the wavering sun. Its feelers stretch towar
d you. Understand: it calls you out. This is the morning, son – it quivers. The clear light is your skin. Don’t you see it now? Because you’re staring into the ring’d sun; you see it both wears and is its own halo. And you may count these concentricities as you may count each and all its rings, each arrayed, one level to the next – these are the levels of the sun, boy – and this is what you do as you do what you do: you stare, you stare for any period of time whatever, you stare, son, directly at it. You learn in this way how the sun is not burning golden, no, but silvery dark. You learn this is your metal self, the hole within your hollow self, the perforations between the self and all worlds. Most can’t see this, but you can. You have eyes. You see, I know from where you’ve come, that you’re a creature of prophecy who’s come out of the sea! I know this! Tell me, was it true that your lungs grew, immediate and entire, once you’d dropped the gills you’d used before? No – don’t answer that, because I know, I know. And these people… these people are the fish. Watch: the fish are turning. They move in schools; they know to do this. You see how they flash when they move all as one, reflecting this shallow water sunlight. They hypnotize you into making you forget all these things. You’ve considered, perhaps, that I might be one of them also? Don’t answer that, son; I know – you’ve yet to admit any of this, not to us who can see you, much less to your febrile self. And what about here? What about this place, right here? This is where all the many worlds are torn straight through. The hole in your side, your deepest fenestration, is the hole through them as well. They betray their same self to you, to us, to all unmoving things. That’s right, their very same self, isn’t it? Because their self is the same. Isn’t it? You will be the one to tell us these things one day.”

  “Oh. Uh. I… I suppose.”

  “Yes. You’ve taken your seed and planted it. You’ve limned the sun.” The Professor waved his arms, as if maybe he were the sun.

  “I…” and there was a comprehension dawning on his face, “… would do it again?” Or something like comprehension, because, most likely, he was in a trance.

  “Ah hah,” he said, poking a single finger forward, into the air, “now we’re talking. You and I.”

  Amanda watched the interchange, grinned a little to herself. She drifted over to where old Albert stood, fuddling. “Albert, is that your car? Parked across the sidewalk? It’s completely blocking. No one can get around.” But the old man said nothing direct or coherent to indicate that he’d heard or, much less, understood, but stood instead breathing in deeply the shampoo scent of her hair.

  A man in brown shorts and shirt appeared now in the doorway, carrying several cardboard tubes. Behind him, on the street, was parked his large brown van. “Delivery for… Proteus?” He seemed unsure of the name.

  Proteus held up an arm.

  The man came forward. He held six such tubes in all, precariously stacked against his chest, and an electronic device for the recipient’s signature in one hand, which Proteus accepted and scribbled his name onto its screen with the blunt, plastic stylus as the delivery man unloaded his several containers onto the counter between them, all proving to be to be rather light, insupportable as a stack, and scattering with a hollow, round sound. “Thanks,” Proteus said to the man, and then to the Professor, by way of explanation, “My large prints. They’ve come back from the lab.”

  The Professor didn’t exactly smile, nor did he say anything in response, though his expression was a play of amusedly aloof indifference, as if to say, if you insist. Yet all of this was only a brief coda, a necessary interruption to his own delivery, as next he asked him, “Where, my good boy, do you think you are right now? You receive. You are right here; of course you receive, but what do you transmit? There is a signal. Always, this. And this is the center of something. The crossover point. Between the many worlds. Where do you think it all started? For him, where do you think it began?”

  But Proteus only halfway paid attention to him, inspecting instead his delivery, opening the end of one tube to find four sheets of large photo paper inside, separated by tissue. “Here?” he answered reflexively. Only then did it dawn on him who the Professor referred to by him. “What?” He looked up. “The sheriff?”

  Albert had walked over to one of the tables, where he sat himself down with his coffee and shook his head, staring into the cup.

  “The sheriff,” the Professor continued. “But you, my boy… you are the sheriff. Don’t you see? Isn’t that clear to you yet? This is why you wear the symbols of the elements and the instruments of ceremony.”

  It was true. Proteus had, earlier, unfurled the damaged, wide-brimmed hat and experimentally put it onto his head, which was much too small for it, and subsequently left it there. The hat floated on his crown, tipping this way and that with each movement, its inertia providing with every turn a lagging, hat-brim commentary, the sort of thing to make whatever he said or did never be taken all that seriously. Being creased and folded and crushed, its caved-in shape held, conveniently, a little more firmly to his skull than it otherwise would. This was in fact all that kept it from covering his eyes or falling off entirely. The badge he’d likewise pinned onto his shirt-front, where it sagged with the weight of the metal. And the gun, in its holster, he’d strapped around his thin waist, its handle protruding from one hip, and that loosely, dutch-angled, the strap with too few holes to cinch up tight.

  “Here,” said the Professor, “it begins for you as well.” “The… disappearing?” Proteus asked.

  “For him, it was the disappearing. For you, something else, I think.”

  “And you know about this?”

  “These things I know, I know. So I will ask you again. Boy. I am asking you. Where, exactly, do you imagine that you are?”

  ELEVEN

  Fake City

  [Outside Time]

  “I’m right here?” I said. I looked around myself, confused.

  “Perhaps, perhaps you are…” said the shock-haired old fella with the improbable ensemble. He’d introduced himself to us as “the Professor,” or just Professor. Sitting at the table beside Finch, who’d sat beside me, the Professor took a watered whiskey, as did Finch as well, while I sipped at a mug of burnt coffee and the girl above us spun around the pole, mostly naked now, on the platform directly in front. It seemed a little early to me for this sort of thing, but then this wasn’t my sort of thing at all, and any time whatever may’ve still felt too early. The girl didn’t much mind the hour – she was working – but she looked rather a long ways from particularly enjoying herself. Finch, however, appeared positively miserable, and he was the one who’d wanted dancing girls. Or girl. Go figure. The only one among the four of us (five if you counted the bartender, or six, if the bouncer also) who seemed to wholeheartedly embrace the moment was our new friend, the academician, though in a way that scarcely acknowledged our surrounds. And yet, it was he who led us to this place, a place some short distance’s walk away, and one he acted as though he knew quite well. There weren’t any other patrons to fill out the dark interior of the Golden Body Gentleman’s Club at this hour of the afternoon, to enjoy it or not, and the emptiness of it all gave the place an air both cavernous and close at once.

  “I speak to you of these liminalities, my boys,” said the Professor, his eyes bright and fierce beneath those distressing eyebrows of his that swooped less like anything but the wings of frozen bats, “of the spaces in between the spaces, of these transitions, of the diminutions, one to the next, back to the one, of the gradient whereat all shapes transform to become another, a number, and thus as number to become at last one and themselves.”

  “How’s that?” I asked, not at all sure that I was following him. In fact, I was sure I wasn’t, but I wanted to at least seem engaged.

  All I got in response was a raised eyebrow and querying stare with puckered lips.

  “I don’t know why everybody keeps saying that,” complained Finch, shaking his head woozily and looking down into his ice, responding to
something neither of us had exactly said – so far as I could tell – adding, “I honestly don’t.” Some moments passed in silence between us, barely touched by a scurrilous funk from the sound system.

  “Saying what?” I finally asked.

  “What what?” his eyes glued to his drink.

  “‘Why everybody keeps saying’ what?”

  “That I’m dead!”

  He looked up then, first from side to side in exaggerated slowness, as if more drunk than he could be, taking the both of us in through his heavy, hooded eyes, this Professor and I. Then he settled his gaze blearily up at the woman, who shifted her hips from side to side and ran her hands over her body. After some delay he shouted, “WOO-HOO!” leaned perilously over, and asked me for a dollar. I searched inside my wallet, gave him the crumpled single that I found there, and he fumblingly tucked it into her G-string. She couldn’t exactly manage a smile in return, but at least afforded him a moment’s acknowledgement.

  “Well, Finch,” I started, “since you put it that way –”

  “There now, friend,” the Professor interrupted, “there’s no use bludgeoning a boy about the head with the facts as they stand, facts though they may be, on the face of it – not if he won’t see what stares him squarely, his own eyes gone shifty-shallow, turned round and wide when he looks, and always crossways past a thing. Save your blows for the later hour, and then that just for the joy of it. Meanwhile stifle and suck in your own soul’s breath – I know it’s shallow enough as it is, the lung of the damned, the lay of the word, the infinite aspirations. You’ve your own difficulties about, I can see. You seem, though maybe I imagine it, not so completely dead as all that? You are yourself and no one other? You don’t need to answer that, boy – I already know. But, remember, the way to reach a simple truth through to a thick-skulled ghost is best by the roundabout path. You follow? Round and again – listen – so as to tie him all up in it and leave no escape. It’s what we call ‘spirit wrangling’. Now pay attention. The subtle approach works best.” He turned to Finch. “Son,” he said, “what is the last thing you remember?”