New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “Yes, well…” She turned, smiling a little, holding out the hem of her dress. “Nice to know I can still do this. Nice to know I can make, you know, an impression. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance or much excuse to dress up.” She gave a spin. It was a deceptively simple-seeming thing she wore, by turns both modest and revealing: a short dress, silky, with deep, plunging neckline, cream-colored by a shade slightly darker than her skin, and nothing about it flashy or overdone – it was all quite clean and straight-ahead – yet at the same time impossible not to notice. But it was Amanda inside the dress that made it all into something, and she was, in a word, a stunner.

  “Em. Er. Wow.”

  “Articulate as ever. Which I’ve always found charming, by the way. It’s good to see you. Are you ready? Is that what you’re wearing?”

  “Why? What?” He turned around as if to inspect himself, but appeared more like a dog chasing its own tail. “Is there something wrong with this? I’m no, er… but it… it’s the best I’ve got?”

  “No, no, of course there’s nothing wrong with your clothes. You look fine. You look good. I was just hoping, I suppose, you might be wearing… well, you’ve got them right there with you, why not put them on?”

  “What, no, these? Are you kidding?”

  “Oh, hardly.”

  “But if I…”

  “I think it lends a certain, what, gravitas.”

  He scowled at his feet. “You know I don’t hold the office anymore. I’ve stepped down. I’m not… eh…”

  “So you say. Only you are, don’t you see? You think this is something you can shrug off so easily? In that case you don’t understand the law at all.”

  “This is my point exactly.” The two had stepped from porch to pavement and now strode in slow, gliding footsteps in the direction of downtown, toward the Infinite Eye, not quite visible from here, and as often seemed the case these days, the feeling of rain held just at bay suffused the air with the threat of wetness and a cold, clear smell of its incipience. They passed under streetlights and were washed in pools of pale yellow, shadow-cut glare. “I was,” he said, “for one week, the worst sheriff this town has ever seen. You said it yourself.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. But all that notwithstanding, it doesn’t make you not the sheriff. Not now, not ever does it make you not the sheriff. This is not a choice you made.”

  “What is it, in that case?”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “A condition.”

  “While I was the sheriff, people disappeared and they never came back.”

  And there she was with another of her looks. “People disappeared by the dozens long before you were even here. Not one of them has come back. And now one old man who can’t park his car right vanishes, so you hold yourself responsible. That’s not reasonable, Proteus.”

  “And… and Ignatius too, don’t forget him!”

  “Okay, maybe that was your fault. Still, my point being that by those standards, Sheriff Friendly would’ve been the worst by far. And but then he was a pretty good sheriff. Do you know why? Because he understood the law, and despite himself he knew that he was born to it. He never tried to escape it.”

  “If that’s so, then why’d he leave?”

  “Because the law required it of him. Just the same as it requires this of you.” He wondered what she meant exactly by this. “Please,” she begged, “just put the magic on. For me. I think it makes you very attractive.”

  He looked at her suspiciously. “I don’t understand your angle on this at all. Why is it so important?”

  She surprised him by wrapping her arms around him and pressing her body tight against his. “You don’t need to understand me. Just do it for me. Okay? I want to be escorted by the sheriff of Cleric to the opening night of his photography exhibit. Isn’t that enough?”

  Another scowl in the lamplight. “I don’t think,” he relented, “I can ever say no to you and mean it. Not for long.”

  She smiled and kissed him, lightly.

  And the noise he’d not until then paid much attention to, though it had grown steadily louder over these past few minutes, now overtook them both in its sudden crescendo and blotted all else out as the elegantly blue-black insect shape of a private helicopter flew directly overhead, its lights blinking, the downdraft of its rotors shaking the barren branches of trees and scrub all around, upsetting all the dust and dirt and the bits and pieces of papers not too soggy and street-stuck from previous downpours, sending these debris all aflutter into the surrounding air as a particulate cloud, throwing Amanda’s hair into whorl-patterns, throwing his jacket’s short tails to whips, so that they both looked up and squinted, startled, and he shouted, “Oh you must be joking…” which Amanda couldn’t hear.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Fake City

  [Outside Time]

  I’d chosen the apartment for the view. That was the thing that did it. I had to watch, I had to sit for as long as I could and watch, watch it out the window as it sat – no, not sat – as it hung there (because that is what one does when one is in the sky), its burnished surface in the distance hazed by the air that was between us; air, or what that was, the air, the smog, the smoke…

  So I settled in my folding chair and sipped at the tea (it tasted like dust) and simply watched. Because that’s what people do when they’ve lost something, when they’ve lost the thing they look at. They look and look; they watch it. There is a hunger in them, a longing, a sadness – if you call it sadness (I don’t know I’d call it sadness) – maybe call it something else. They stare out the window and they watch with that thing, what you call it, while what they watch does what it does while it does nothing, or it just hangs there.

  You see, that… that is not nothing. That would be wrong to call it nothing, what it does. Because it hangs there, yes, it does that. In the sky, the metal sphere that is not the sun and not the moon but somehow both these things; it does what it does, it is there, it is hanging, it is doing something, and that… that is something and not nothing.

  In the gray dark of the gathering night, I sat with my tea at the window and watched through the dust- and bug-specked glass out toward the din of the street, with its sparkling if colorless streetlights, and its headlights, and its taillights, and stoplights and signposts and signals and lights in the windows, and those in the doors of apartments and stores that were still open at the hour (whatever the hour), and all those buildings in the distance, those half-lit or dark, some short, others tall, and a flat place off in the distance somewhere behind. There was a flatness to the sky. There was a flatness to the distant landscape scarce imagined.

  Steam rose from the chipped ceramic cup that I raised to my lips, but the tea had a flavor like dust.

  There’s more to the thing than that. I mean, the thing – give it a name, call it Mosquito, other things have names too (like sadness), I know that I do, and both its and mine are wrong – there’s more to it, to what it does than it just hangs there, it simply hanging there… there’s a thing about it, a thing about the thing, it’s a… it’s…

  If I were given to imagine that Mosquito were inside me, I might describe the sense like a buzzing, like a buzzing inside me, one not heard but felt, like with the bones, in the bones. In there. It had a chilled buzzing-ness to it. There was something very quick about it, quick and cold – you could sense this, if not see it move – though that didn’t mean it wasn’t. It was moving very quick while hanging very still, but its stillness was a ruse. The stillness wasn’t real. But the stillness, to all appearances, was absolute. It never ever moved from that one spot (that was why I’d got this place, so I could see it always, with nothing in the way). It never shimmered, never jumped, never wobbled, much less drifted in the sky like a moon. The feeling of motion and why I called it quick was something else, another thing, this thing you felt like a buzzing in your bones, and I knew it was a mind. Not that it had a mind; it was a mind. It was thinking. Or it was a quality of
thought. It was the thinking mind that was quick, and cold, that moved, that moved quick, that made me think that, to compare it, I was stuck in mud. My thoughts were slow and fuzzy – they were like that anyhow – but next to it, they weren’t even thoughts at all. They were more like the moss that was grown to the side of a rock. It was as fast as thought itself. It was like a lightning bolt, over and done before you ever saw it. Except that it kept going like that all the time. And it was cold, and it was…

  Here, with my tea, though the tea had the flavor of dust, and it steamed less now, and was less like tea with every passing minute, I knew, though I had lost this thing I called Mosquito, I could still study it, I could study it through my window. That was why I’d got this place. I could stare out my window in hunger and in sadness (and though I would not call it sadness, I would call it hunger) and with this longing for the thing that I’d lost. In losing it, I now at least could see it. It was there – it hung there – and I could see, and I could study it, watch it all the night as it did what it did, as it did nothing – or if not nothing, as it hung there – thinking, thinking quick, thinking quick and cold, while I, all fuzzy now and slow, struggled along to catch up, feeling sadness (no, not sadness, hunger), reaching deep into the hole it had left there when I lost it.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The World

  [Winter, 2006]

  The helicopter, polished and gleaming in the artificial lights of Cleric’s illumined downtown, set down, almost, atop a flat-roofed building.

  “I didn’t know we had a helipad,” said Proteus, astonished.

  “We don’t.” Amanda set about rearranging her hair, or at least getting it out of her face.

  They watched as two figures jumped out of the aircraft, which in fact hovered without touching the rooftop: a man and woman in evening dress, he in a manner of tuxedo and she in something dark and sparkling. They both, Proteus thought, could’ve presented themselves quite well on the Oscars’ red carpet…

  “Hey,” he said, “is that…? That’s not…”

  “It is,” she told him, blasé as could be. “Those two? Yeah. They’ve come to these things before.”

  He fished out a smoke for himself and gave her one also. “Why?” He lit hers, then his from the same match. “What’re they doing here?”

  “You might not expect it of her, but Mary Margaret Mary Alice really knows how to throw an opening-night party. How she gets people like them to come, I have no idea. She’s explained it to me, but I still don’t understand it.”

  “Is there even room for them in the gallery?”

  “Room for them? They’re no bigger than anyone else.”

  “Oh. I guess not. Right. Still, it isn’t a big gallery.”

  “Big enough, I suppose.”

  •

  On the street just outside the Infinite Eye, where local citizens and Ceres newcomers alike, now all in their formals (i.e. long hems, high collars, frills, their girl-shoulders and arms well-covered, legs entirely-hid) mingled in the light amongst and amidst those number of unfamiliar folk, the ones who’d appeared, maybe not so spectacularly as had the famous Hollywood couple, but in what must be their own accustomed style (Proteus noted a scattering of black limousines parked awkwardly around, wherever they fit), Mary Margaret Mary Alice immediately intercepted Proteus as the two approached and she pried him unceremoniously away from Amanda – who stood in neutral observance, the hand which once held his now trailing, and watching the older woman’s manipulations with detached interest. “What are you doing smoking? You shouldn’t be smoking,” the older woman scolded him as she dragged him toward the entrance. “It looks bad. Or maybe you should. It makes you seem aloof, unconcerned about trends, a rebel, who cares what other people think… Okay, good choice, the cigarette, but no smoking inside, so put that out.” She snatched it from his hand and threw it to the curb, hesitated a moment, then stamped it out with her heel. “Good touch with the accessories, by the way; the badge, the, uh… hat. Right. Oh! I had to order several gallons of fresh lemonade to accommodate this new crowd. I hadn’t expected that. There wasn’t anything else here they’d drink. It was kind of expensive, last-minute and everything, but necessary. The right choice in the end, I think you’ll agree. Come here…” She yanked him through the door. A loud, monotonous techno beat struck him as he entered, as much in the solar plexus as in the ears. She stopped him at the display wall that faced the entrance. “What’s this?!” Mary Margaret shouted so that he could hear. She pointed towards one of his photographs, towards the irregular edge of the image frame, exposed beyond the matte. “Why did you do this?!”

  Proteus squinted at it for a moment, trying to understand what she meant. “Oh, that. Why? I liked it that way.”

  Mary Margaret frowned at him. “Well they didn’t. You should’ve run it past me first. I would’ve told you not to do that. It might’ve cost us the sale.”

  They?

  Proteus noticed then the price she’d attached to the piece and bared his teeth at the audacity of it. Beside this number was a smallish green dot, a cheap little sticker affixed to the tag, and he wondered what it meant. But before having a chance to even think of asking her, Mary Margaret pulled him around the false wall and into the gallery, where a disc jockey at two turntables was set up in back. This young man, someone he’d never seen in Cleric until now, had a large set of headphones over his ears, despite the volume of the music from his powered speakers, and seemed more the center of everything than his own work, which covered the inner walls. The room was packed with people, some few who were known and many more not known to Proteus. But the real focus, at least of most everyone’s attention now, was the glamorous couple, who were followed by the popping of flashbulbs and the frenzy of several photographers’ orbits around them. The two had somehow managed to clear at least a short radius for themselves, enough to move comfortably within, beyond which everyone else pressed toward them as if pulled in by magnets.

  The Ceres wives and their children with them, those who were of age – who had also crammed themselves into the room with everyone else – were the least impressed by all this. The two dark sister wives (and it finally occurred to Proteus that they may in fact be sisters) seemed not to even notice the celebrities in their midst. The tough-looking woman with the fire-red hair (and the only one shameless enough to let some length of her arms’ bare and freckled skin show) studiously ignored the glamorous couple and their entourage while she stared hard at one or another photograph, as if critical of some particular detail, while to the side stood Shulamit, who watched the crowd’s behavior with open disapproval, even contempt. When Proteus realized that Mary Margaret Mary Alice had already abandoned him for someone more important, he sidled over in Shulamit’s direction.

  “What a circus, huh?” he said.

  “WHAT?”

  He shouted toward the ear she’d turned his way, “This is out of hand!”

  “IT’S DECADENT AND CORRUPT,” she shouted back. “WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?”

  He realized that she meant the Hollywood couple, and not, as he’d first thought, the society crowd simultaneously parting and swarming around them. “They’re famous!” Proteus explained loudly, and then added, “They’re in movies!”

  Shulamit nodded gravely as if that explained everything.

  He realized that maybe it did.

  He looked around the room, taking in, first, as best he could, the arrangement of his pictures across three of the four walls (the fourth, the back wall, belonged entirely to the DJ and his system), while opposite this, near the front, stood the all-important refreshment table, with its stacks of clear plastic wine cups, the bottles behind these of mid-range yet respectable reds and whites, two thermoses (or were they thermi he wondered vaguely?) of coffee and of tea – so they were marked – and then two pitchers filled with sweet minted yellow lemon drink and ice. As surreptitiously as he could manage, Proteus tried to gauge how people were responding to his images, though it may n
ot have been the best time to do so. Few seemed now to pay them any notice, the more ephemeral and exciting things being what they were – aside, that is, from the red-haired wife, whose name he still hadn’t learned. In fact, no one else looked at the work at all. When next he looked around, he noticed that most everyone had left the room and it was quite suddenly empty. The famous couple had gone. As fast as they’d descended, they were gone, and they’d taken everyone else with them. He’d not heard the steady chop of the helicopter approaching, which must’ve only circled once or twice, which now – as he went back outside to see – again lifted away from the flat-topped building across the street, presumably with the movie stars back inside. Appearance made, scene made, their work was over and done with.

  He watched the machine float away into the sky, its running lights blinking solemnly. The crowd, who were now mostly out in the street, had become far less coherent in its interest. As he stood staring after the diminishing helicopter, Mary Margaret appeared again beside him and also watched. Its noise receded as the air around them settled again.

  “Well that’s that,” she said after a time.

  “What was that about?” Proteus asked her.

  “Ultimately,” she said, “nothing at all.”

  “Uh huh,” he agreed. “But… why were they here in the first place? Are they collectors or something?”

  “No, they’re not collectors. They’re something though, I think, and they can be induced to show up. The publicity engine works in funny ways, you see. Word gets out about something, some event, somebody says something to somebody. Of course, no one considers it the least bit important to be there. Why would they? But then there’s that segment of the population of the ridiculously famous who know how inconceivably hip it is to be seen where no one else is. By virtue of the fact that they were there, after all, it becomes the place where every lesser celebrity should have been, but wasn’t. This only increases their cache. It doesn’t, in itself, make the scene; it makes them making the scene, even if the event never actually happens. That’s the secret. The scene, as such, is a kind of residue left in their wake after the fact, a thing of memory that people can talk about, as if they’d seen it. More of an idea than anything else, really. The trick… is for them to be seen by all the people who aren’t there.”