New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  Where was Amanda?

  •

  Not that he wanted to be there, but the Tooth Or Claw was the only place left open. It was just that he didn’t want to go home quite yet. But then, he didn’t want to be out either. He didn’t want to be with people, and he didn’t want to be alone. The night was still… if not young, at least not entirely spent, and he felt a terrible restlessness, an anxiety he couldn’t put a name to. The shaking had at least subsided by now – it was still there, a little, but nowhere near so bad – and Proteus had some idea that his “date” might – might – be waiting for him here.

  Some date. She’d off and vanished. If he’d wanted to be anywhere, it was with her.

  But she wasn’t at the Tooth Or Claw. The place was dark, the music scarcely loud enough to hear, and only two customers lazed about in the ambient disquiet and near-stasis – a fishbowl-state the Tooth Or Claw now lay in – apart from Last Man Tunker, the barkeep. Someone he didn’t recognize at one far, dark side of the room darkly, lazily threw dark darts at a board on the wall, while the sculptor Sarfatti leaned heavily against the maple, allowing his beard to be soaked and spotted with suds, all by his own self and, it seemed, without his knowing he’d done it.

  Tunker saw Proteus enter. “Coffee?” the bartender asked, holding up a handy mug, to which Proteus nodded.

  He came and stood near him at the bar. Proteus didn’t know what else to do. Without Amanda, he wanted nothing here. He didn’t want a drink. He didn’t want coffee either, but there it was, and so he accepted the mug held out to him, now full, and feigned gratitude.

  “Your show,” said Tunker.

  “Yes.” Proteus nodded and drank from the cup. Acrid, bitter; not cold, but burnt.

  “I hear that…” Tunker either could not finish the thought, or that was all there was to it.

  “Yes.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” He took another sip. Acrid, bitter: burnt.

  Proteus looked toward Sarfatti, who was watching, in turn, himself. The man hid a mocking smile, or something like one, within his tangled brush of beard, abstractedly amused. Proteus turned away.

  “She left with him, you know,” said Tunker.

  “She… what?” He imagined Amanda going home with the large sculptor, who was now already done with her and come back for a nightcap.

  “You were asking me about Fishkill last you were in here,” Tunker explained, “about their show in the summer? The singer, that dark-haired girl, with all the legs and everything? She’s a friend of yours, did you say?”

  Vivianne. “Oh yes,” he said, “Vivianne.” He pictured Viv and Sarfatti the sculptor together, then screwed up his face in confusion because it made no sense – because he imagined that Sarfatti, for some reason, once Viv had removed all his clothes, would be made entirely of plastic, with hinged joints, like an action-figure doll, only life-sized.

  “She went,” Tunker continued, “with the sheriff.”

  “But I’m the sheriff.”

  “No, not you. Friendly – the other one.”

  But that only confused him all the worse. “Oh right,” he said, and, “She what?”

  “She went,” said Tunker, “with the sheriff. Your friend the singer, she left with the sheriff. Almost everyone else in here was vanished on the spot, the way he made them do that. The rest of us who were left, we couldn’t say. We didn’t know. You know. I barely managed to… not… go also… I was one of the few. I hid back here behind the bar. But you know that she just… she just took his arm. Took his arm. She did. Like they knew each another from somewhere – like wherever they’d been before, the two of them – and they walked off, the two of them, him and her, like they had to go catch a boat somewhere. Only they were in no hurry. Do you know? They knew each other. They were in no hurry. But she didn’t disappear. Not like that. Not at first, anyhow.”

  “No,” said Proteus, “she wouldn’t. Not like that. Not at first.”

  “The drummer kid, you know, he disappeared like that. But not at first either. But that’s because he’d gone out back. I don’t know. For a cigarette or something.”

  “And then after that.” Proteus supplied.

  “Right. After that he did. He disappeared like that exactly.”

  Proteus looked again at Sarfatti, who’d been glowering and watching him this whole while, in some vaguely menacing way, with some implied threat or another.

  “And then she…?” Proteus said, turning again to the barkeep.

  “Then she disappeared,” he explained, “after that. Exactly like that.”

  “Yes. Yes, she would.” He nodded. He sipped his burnt coffee and nodded.

  “Your show.” This from Sarfatti, who, with his gruff voice, interrupted.

  Proteus turned yet again toward Sarfatti, who glowered and grinned with amused menace.

  “Your show…” the large man said again, only different this time.

  Proteus sipped his coffee – acrid, burnt – and nodded.

  “Your show?”

  “Yes,” Proteus said, and nodded.

  “It’s good work. I’ll give it that. I have to respect that.”

  “Mm-hm. Thanks.”

  The sculptor Sarfatti shook his head slowly, disdainfully. “Your work. Your show? Tell me,” he said, moving in closer, his beer breath fogging Proteus’s face, killing any flies that were near it, “your name… is Proteus? What sort of name is Proteus? That’s no name for a man.”

  “My name…” said Proteus.

  Sarfatti, in disdain, in amused though abstracted menace, looked him up slowly, looked him down, looked him up and down, then looked directly into his eyes, searching out the lie – yes, yes, just so, just as I thought, his searching look seemed to say – as if this thing, the thing he saw, whatever it was, proved his point exactly.

  “…is not Proteus.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

  [Late Summer, 2005]

  – the persistence of her image after she’d gone, and the empty feeling it left, even before, even while she was still here, and how I’d known that I’d already lost her when I was only just then with her, when I’d only just then found her, how that was the saddest feeling, though the persistence of her body, the persistence of her self, was in itself a defiance, I don’t know of what, of the thing, the object, of myself, of the fact or the engagement of the object with myself. She was in some sense maybe not here to begin with, and that was how she could persist for as long as she did. She was here and she was not; though no one (were anyone still left to say) could argue that she was not here. She was entirely here. You could not miss her. I did not miss her. She was entirely here. It was perhaps the argument of her engagement with the here, the being here, while at the same time, I persist, she was somewhere significantly else too.

  LAWS OF ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN THE OBJECT AND THE SELF.

  HEAD TRAUMA.

  THE BEING AND THE BODY.

  I did not need to look to know I would not find her again when she’d gone.

  There is a nucleus or yolk within the central sphere, and from the yolk radiate four arms or pseudopodia in four directions: sky, Earth, horizons. They are everywhere the same. The arms burn with fire; they are living arms; they radiate – [the eight lines which follow are so heavily scratched out as to be unreadable, as was no doubt the intention] – is solid, is still, is burnt and cold, is still living, is still living, the hundred-years fire a single thought from start to finish, is never finished, but alive, will touch us, will touch us with –

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The World

  [Winter, 2006]

  Dead dark, the Warehouse waited, still but not silent; no, there was a thrum, some sound deep within. Proteus switched on the lights when he entered. A moment later, they came to life, adding their small hum to the mix.

  Maybe it’s in the pipes, thought Proteus. He pulled the sheriff’s pistol from its holster, where
it had lain hidden underneath his jacket the whole evening, held it before him and looked it carefully over, perhaps for the first time. It was blunt and heavy, but perhaps not an entirely inelegant thing. He didn’t know much about guns; didn’t know what sort of gun this one was, for instance. He didn’t even know if it was loaded.

  No, not pipes, he thought. He’d heard that thrum before, but where?

  He took off his… no, the hat, felt wrong, and put it back on again. But that didn’t seem right either. So he took it off once more, thought better, put it on again, then huffed with annoyance.

  No. Nothing.

  He put the end of the gun into his mouth and pointed it up toward his brain. It tasted like oil and…

  •

  I couldn’t have said what I was waiting for. I couldn’t have said what I wanted. The folding chair that I’d found downstairs was the only piece of furniture I had, aside from the mattress, and so I’d put this up at the window, where I now sat, and sipped, from time to time, at my tea, which had by now grown tepid and tasted like nothing so much as water, with a little chalk. I set the teacup back onto the sill, amongst the many circle-stains left previous in the paint from so many such cups, not all of them mine, and looked out as before, as… as I always had…

  Fake City grew no brighter nor any more dim; no more, and neither less colorful – not for my watching it. Its points and specks of weird, wan light glimmered distantly. Some flickered. And the skyline became murky at night: dark box-shapes against a dark, flat field, floating, upended. Nothing was changed. Nothing was going to change. And had I –

  •

  Proteus took the gun out of his mouth. It still tasted like oil and metal where the barrel had rested on his palate. He looked around the Warehouse, at its dim and empty space: the four walls, soaked in shadows, the roof-beams high above, the large windows, looking out over the spent mine, and the valley beyond that, with its pinpricks of light, little different from the stars above, which flickered through the atmosphere also, where through the cloudbreaks they for a moment showed, and were cold, and regarded him, if they did, in neutral remove.

  How different, he wondered, was this place from the room where his “soul” now lived? He saw now that he could get there from here, if he wanted. The two parts could be rejoined, simply enough; there was that. But was it any improvement if he did? From what he could see, there was damn little to recommend that other place. That couldn’t be the summation of where, if anywhere, he was going. Could it?

  He stuck the gun back in his mouth –

  •

  And I had not noticed the moment of its changing, neither if it had truly changed. And I hadn’t noticed any sun setting – there was no sun to set – only that the sky had taken dark, and no colors shown through; no colors, no persons, none moving, nowhere near or near to me; none but the bodies, the personless bodies, on the street below, moving through the street; who, now, balanced themselves, stayed upright like this. They scuttled… they scuttled quick through the lamplight of Fake City and back into its shadows again, moved from one end down to the next end, down the length of one end. I saw none, also, save for these empty ones, who, though fish, acted as if they were persons, walking upright – perhaps once they were – and though not persons, not now, none of them had the same flash of thought – neither would they look up, not to see the face that watched from the window above. It was as though I were not there. It was as though I were invisible. It was a feeling all too familiar. To go about my work, forget myself in work, forget myself, and forget: what? The fish? The image, the language, the stone or sign or symbol of, that language of, a living language of, as spoken by the ghost; the image or the symbol of, as so unlike these grumblings of the muted dead, as if by some quick or searching glance, however fearful, anyone might by some chance see. Looking up. They won’t. But if they did… save for their hunger, muted, there is nothing to see. They will not find what they need, I know this; not in persons. Hunger is endless, it is never done, and they will look in time to somewhere else – they must – and there is no engagement, not with the dead, not with fish, not while those who in living still linger; not if it is known, if language or image or the living sphere is given, and I will give it a name; or not in naming, or among the sea of living; their hunger is the language of, as are their thoughts reception of…

  •

  – then took it out again, the pressure of the point still there, still felt in the roof of the mouth, the solidity, in the softer flesh in back, the taste of oil really a lingering scent, an image even, a color (cobalt blue), and Proteus set the gun onto the counter; he knew he did not want to go there, to that place, not now, this way. There had to be a better way; a better, different way.

  He didn’t, for instance, even know if the gun was loaded.

  Looking at it on the counter, laying there – he stepped back, hung a cigarette in the corner of his mouth – and the angle of its grip to the barrel, and the glimmering metal, gold and blue (so he imagined, though it was not really) gleaming even in the darkness, reflecting, as he lit the cigarette’s tip, the warm flame of the flare of his match, in its curved, smooth barrel – and he stepped back again – and realized the thing was alive. Yes, that was it: the thing was alive. He watched it. Nothing else moved.

  But he didn’t know if…

  But then…

  But he could pick it up, again, in his hands, just so, and turn it over, and heft its weight and the solidity (and he stepped forward and he did so), and take it with him outside into the night, in with wind (because there was again this wind) and stalk with the gun held forward out onto the street, where nothing but the wind moved the street, and some signs hung in it, above the windows, and some shadows were cast by the light in the street, though the shapes these made were shifting and vague, and the shadows were counter to the shapes they made of the street, in with

  And he stepped forward and he stepped again and something else moved: a shadow – no, a shape, a countershape, something personlike; he put the gun up and held it forward (the way he saw Amanda do, like she knew) at the thing as it slipped away and he fired…

  And the blast of the flame and the gun all but jumped from his hands and his ears went muffled from too much of the sound and they rang, and in an instant a fleck of broken wood splintered exploding from the sign above Lily’s Antiques because his aim was bad, but the sign he’d hit just right by the hook where it hung and now it swung, askew from one side, since he’d winged it.

  The door cracked quietly open and a head peered out: Lily. She looked up and innocently down, blinking like a bird, and saw the shape that was him with the gun down the street. “Oh!” she called out. “Evening, Sheriff!” Her shape waved at his.

  Proteus walked nonchalantly up to where she waited, the ringing still in his ears.

  “Lily, hi. Sorry about your sign. I didn’t really know the gun would go off like that.”

  “That’s quite alright.”

  “Everything is fine now. You’re safe.”

  She watched him, wide-eyed, and blinked, then said, “Thank you, Sheriff! Have a good night!” The head disappeared and the door clattered shut again, a mass of nailed plywood hung in a battered frame, as was the window beside it.

  Sheriff Proteus adjusted the cigarette in his lips, looked in one direction then another, then held up the gun in his hand to look at that. It was still warm. The ringing in his ears made a muffled flattening of all else, though in a moment he could hear something through it: a muffled padding, a thing approaching, a small shape with four legs. The ownerless golden retriever emerged from one mass of shadows and came up to stand at his feet, smiling at him, a black flap of tongue in the dark bouncing rubberlike up and down, in and from its mouth.

  •

  Back at the Warehouse, Proteus removed the articles of magic from himself and set them on the floor, beside the mattress, where he laid himself down and stared upward. He was still clothed in his evening wear, his best, such as i
t was. There was nothing left to do. There was nothing but to continue. He couldn’t sleep; he wouldn’t. His eyes were open and didn’t care to shut, and though fatigued in a deep and bone-weary way, he couldn’t fathom falling off, drifting off, as wound-up as he still was. So he just lay there, staring upwards, until the footsteps came.

  It was the same as every single night before, no different, so he couldn’t have said why he’d not expected it. Yet it was still something he’d not thought of – he never did, not until they came – and when it started, he was, as ever, surprised, if not more so, and sat up in alarm.

  Step, ste-ep, step… down each and every stair that wasn’t there. They progressed; they came closer. The footsteps reached the floor. They advanced; they came nearer. He waited and watched to see what there was, but it was nothing he could see.

  Then nothing sat down. It sat on him. It sat and simply filled him; it fitted him. The thing that was not there fitted just exactly to his skin, like a second, invisible self, and he and it were in that moment in, or maybe were, the same thing. And then he could see them: not the thing itself (since he was it now, and invisible too) but the stairs, the stairs were there, in the spot where the marks they once had made were still, all up the wall, beside the door, angled up (or down, depending), the stairs that filled no purpose he could see. But he could see them, despite the shadowed space, despite the lack of light. He could see them, and they were there.

  What was left now but to climb them? Nothing.

  So he got back up and he went to their foot.

  The stairs led up to the ceiling. There was nothing new about this. There was no hatch, no door, just the ceiling itself, all along as it had been, though now these steps led up and to it.