New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “No,” said Proteus, shaking his head – again, a little too vehemently, and for a little while too long, “that won’t work.”

  “It never does…” explained Ig, shrugging. “Nothing ever does.”

  “Ig, you’re not helping.”

  “Who said I was trying to help? You put me here. I think this is funny.”

  “Why don’t,” chimed in OFFICER FRIENDLY, “you just sit down and try a doughnut? They’re really good.”

  “A what?”

  “Just take a moment and think things through. This happens to everyone.”

  Meanwhile, Willy, silently muttering, turned circles over the floor. Widdershins, deasil, whatever.

  Proteus sat again at the table in front of the policeman. “Everyone,” he said numbly, staring down at the orange surface.

  “Sure it does,” the policeman said. “There’s nothing for it but to take a moment, enjoy a nice doughnut and some coffee, and collect your thoughts. You think I haven’t seen this before? I’ve seen this about two hundred times now. Two hundred, what?” He looked toward Ignatius for confirmation.

  “Two hundred fifty,” Ig offered, “give or take.”

  “Give or take. Yes. Everybody has a moment, just like you’re having right now, trying to figure out what’s just happened to them, why they’re here, what they’re going to do about it, now they’re here. Inevitably, I get blamed for their predicament. For some reason. What you need now, more than anything, is a little refreshment, a little balm for the soul. What could be better than a nice doughnut? And let me tell you, these are some of the nicest doughnuts you’ll find anywhere, in all of greater Los Angeles. Jun-suh…” the officer pointed back toward the kitchen, where the dark-haired Korean man fussed about with his back to them, “really knows what he’s doing. He’s like the philosopher king of doughnuts. ‘Consider its shape’, he told me once, ‘toroidal, like the Earth’s own magnetosphere, like the accretion-ring surrounding a collapsed star’. The man could’ve been an astrophysicist. He could’ve been a Zen monk. But he’s –”

  “A what?” interrupted Proteus, his face gone pale.

  “He’s a doughnut maker. He makes doughnuts. Here, try one of mine.” OFFICER FRIENDLY pushed his own paper plate forward, the simple, raised pastry speckled with sugar sitting within a slight filminess of oil that soaked into the paper, rendering it somewhat translucent. “He gives them to me fresh,” boasted Friendly.

  “He… gives them…” Proteus reached a hand toward it. Carefully, gingerly, he touched the surface. It dented slightly under the pressure. He drew his fingers back and studied their tips, now also sugary. “He… gives… them?”

  “Well, he sells them, really. But since I’m a cop…”

  “The man is an authority on doughnuts,” heckled Ignatius, “and he knows what he is talking about!”

  “Oh, be quiet, you… horrible man…”

  Yet coming from behind him, Proteus by degrees had grown aware of another voice, a third voice, and one that he realized he’d been hearing now for quite a while – only that it was so soft its repetitions barely made any impression, and he’d not noticed it until now. He twisted around in his metal seat toward circling Willy, who muttered only just barely audibly and had been all the while. Standing – his legs grown rubbery beneath him – Proteus lifted himself up using the chair’s back for leverage, then moved awkwardly toward where the stick of a man turned in his tight, short radius, his eyes staring forward, his face as slack and limp as the wreck of a hat that remained on his head. Proteus moved in as closely as he could get without being walked over and cocked his head to listen: “He eats the doughnut. He doesn’t leave. He eats the doughnut. He doesn’t leave…” Willy’s rough voice modulated through the open space, growing moderately louder with each pass as he faced forward, and slightly quieter each time he turned away.

  “Go on and try one,” Ignatius called to him. “You know you’d like a nice treat! It is like he says. These doughnuts are the best. They are amazing!”

  “Thanks, but…” he looked back toward where the policeman sat, looking up at him, blinking, suspicious, yes, but something else, “I think that… I think that I…” But his feet had already started to take him towards the door, without his really thinking about it, without his really knowing it. His feet possibly already understood what would be necessary to save him. To save… me, he thought, as if there were or could be any saving me. Because he knew that, for one thing, his soul was lost. He knew that. At least, it wasn’t with him, where he was right now, but somewhere else… “I should… probably… be…” Well yes, there was that, a soul that was lost, or at any rate no longer his own. It was in another place. While he was…

  The radio the policeman wore blapped and sputtered, its tinny, small voice calling, “That’s right, probably best you get a move on. There’ll be plenty of time to catch up later. We’ll be seeing you, Proteus.” And with that, it fizzled off again.

  “My… name isn’t…” Though what use could such protestations be?

  Yes, it was time to be going. If he was ever to be going. Now. He needed to go now. He lurched toward the door, his legs less helpful now than he’d like. When his hand hit the glass of the door (he’d aimed for the metal handle) –

  “Take care, then. If you should find yourself back again…” the policeman wished him well.

  “I won’t. I’m never…”

  “There’s a community of refugees out in the woods. Like yourself. They’ve learned to make do.”

  “Thanks, but –”

  “Take care of my coffeehouse!” shouted Ignatius. “And remember what I said!”

  He’d already forgotten.

  •

  It hit him immediately, the moment Proteus stepped outside: the heat of the day, of midday; the sun, up in its white sky.

  “Three o’clock,” he muttered. “Why is it always three o’clock? Will this sun never move?” But no, it never would. His own feet seemed to know where they were taking him, insofar as they could put one of themselves in front of the other. They took him to the street. He shut his eyes against the sun, which would surely, one day, kill him. His hand tingled – most particularly the fingers of his hand tingled, still sticky with the oil and melted sugar. He wouldn’t lick them, not for anything, however much he wanted to. Their stickiness itself seemed an infection, and who knew what might become of him should he taste it. The dry, hot air of midday was filled by, if not itself producing, a constant hum, the rumble of traffic and its concomitant of angered horns, of stops and starts, its pitched aggregate of motor chorus. He held the hand in front of him to keep it some distance from his body, a gesture which may have been taken by those in the street, in their cars approaching the intersection, as an appeal to stop and wait and to let him pass, which it wasn’t, not explicitly. Though he’d been expecting it at some point, when the sudden drop of the curb revealed an emptiness beneath his next footfall, the extra four-inch gap left him with a gasp, the breath interrupted as it left his lungs, stopped midway in shock. It was only by some miracle of the body’s own mechanism for balance that he did not fall forward and drop to his knees. Still, he kept his eyes closed tightly, against the radiance, against the whiteness, against the wrongness of it. Another horn erupted suddenly, directly beside him, dropping in pitch as it dopplered past and continued, well beyond any warning, into sheer rage. But the machine it came from didn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop. Nothing would.

  Proteus took another step, then another after that, then several more. It seemed right that he should move to the center of all this – or that is where his own feet took him, at any rate, carrying on as they did. To the middle he should go. And once there, he waited. He knew that it would come, and it did. This is where he at last opened his eyes again, seeing first only light and vagueness, a blur in which no particular thing was discriminate. It was a moment still before anything of what he did see resolved, and once at last it was clear, he recognized it for what it wa
s. The flat, front end of a big, blue bus, the marquee above reading DOWNTOWN, and beneath that the wide windshield frame. Within this frame and to the side sat the driver in his elevated seat, behind the overlarge steering wheel. Proteus could see him clearly, the more so the closer that he got. And he could see also, and just as clearly, the determined look on the driver’s face as he turned the wheel slightly, just a little, not to avoid, but to bear down directly on him. Proteus leaned forward, squinting, the interrupted breath still stuck in his throat catching loose at last, leaving. Downtown? he thought. That couldn’t be right. He inhaled, dizzy, craning his neck even further forward, further toward –

  TWENTY-NINE

  The World

  [Winter, 2006]

  “Where have you been?” Amanda asked.

  “Ow…” lurching forward, “my face…” His hands went to his face, pressing together the rubberlike flesh there.

  “Your face is okay,” Amanda reassured him, her arm around his shoulders, urging him along. “Sort of. But where have you been?”

  Proteus, with her help, stumbled uncertainly down the short streets of Cleric, letting go of his own head. “It was the worst place,” he said, “in the world… It was terrible.”

  She scowled.

  “Ow,” he said, “my hand.” He held forward his hand to see it. It – the one – was swollen like a balloon, or like several balloons all stuck together, and mottled, like chopped meat. The other hand was fine.

  “Yes, your hand. Well…” she also studied the appendage. “That’s a bit of a mess. What on Earth happened to you, Proteus? Where have you been?”

  His steps were uncertain, blinking in the daylight. “Me? I was… Where’d you go? I thought we had, like… I thought we were on a… you know, like…”

  “You’ve been gone for more than a week,” she said. “We all wondered. We thought you… we didn’t know what… You’d just gone, see…”

  “No, I…? You’d… you’d just gone, see…”

  “And we thought…”

  “I was…”

  “Where?”

  “There. I was there. But not for a week – just, I don’t know, an hour. Not even that. And I saw him.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s something, in that case. How’s he doing?”

  “What?”

  “Him. How’s he getting on?”

  “Oh, he’s alright, you know. Same as ever, I suppose. I’m told he’s looking better now than he did. Younger.”

  “That’s nice. Good for him.”

  They stopped finally at the site of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! building. Formerly, that is. Where the building should have been, where it did once stand, now there was nothing but a hole and some rubble. The building had been entirely ripped away. The rubble trailed in bits and parts and smaller chunks down the sharp slope toward a mass some distance below.

  “Oh.”

  “This is what I was trying to say,” Amanda explained. “After your show, the next morning, well… the whole building slid. No one was in it, no one else anyhow, but then you were gone, and we all thought… when you didn’t turn up… and no one quite had the stomach to go search through all that…” She pointed at the path of debris.

  “Nope,” he said, “not me. I wasn’t.”

  “Well thank God for that, now I see. But where again…?”

  He sat down suddenly on an outcrop of broken cement – what would’ve once been the front door. She let the question linger, then drop.

  “Hey, you wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

  Proteus searched through his jacket. He still wore the same clothes as the night of his show, though by now they were torn and mottled and covered with all kinds of dust. In one inside pocket he found what he wanted: a crumpled, yellow box of smokes. There were two still inside, one straight and one bent. He gave her the straight one.

  “Thanks.”

  “My face hurts,” he said. “So does my hand.” He lit both smokes with his other hand, the one not swollen and mottled, the one that could hold a match.

  She sat down beside him, swung her legs out over the void and looked at the pile of wreckage below. After a drag on her cigarette, she said, “I’m sorry I left you like that. That night.”

  “Where did you go?” he asked.

  “Something happened. I had to go away.”

  “…Oh. I see.”

  “But will you meet me tonight? I’ll explain it to you. Come to my work. Come to the diner and meet me tonight. I need to show you something. I’ll bring you pancakes. I know you like pancakes.”

  “I like pancakes. Not the buckwheat kind, but I like pancakes.”

  “Will you come tonight?”

  “Okay.”

  They swung their legs out over the void and puffed on cigarettes, making small clouds for themselves.

  •

  Outside the Infinite Eye gallery, Proteus found the windows and door entirely papered over, the inside hidden. He knocked on the front door. He waited. In time, the door cracked open and Mary Margaret Mary Alice peered out at him. “Proteus! My God! What happened to you?” She looked him over, eyebrows raised. “Everyone,” she said, “thought you were…”

  “No,” he told her. “Not me. I wasn’t.”

  “Where on Earth have you been? You look a mess and your… hand, uh… well, never mind that. Come inside. It was unlocked, you know. The door. But come inside.” So he followed her in, where daylight filtered in through all that kraft paper, scattering and softening what was softened and scattered already by clouds.

  “Where… are all my photographs?” Proteus asked.

  Leading him past the empty walls to her desk in back, she explained, “It was a condition of the sale that I take everything down and never show them again. Not in reproduction, not in any form. I don’t know where they’ve taken them or why it was so important, but they’ve got them somewhere and don’t want anyone to see.”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone.”

  “No, I mean…”

  “Oh, who? Right, I never told you. The Ceres family, of course. They’re the ones who bought the whole lot up. They were pretty excited about it, too. They simply couldn’t wait. That little red-haired spitfire of a wife didn’t want me to even hold the opening party, but, well, we’d already planned all of it and people were on their way, plus our guests of honor, and we’d even bought the lemonade. So, you know, we couldn’t not do it. Of course she was adamant and insisted that the very next day everything be taken down, and that nobody ever see it again. It was profound, she said… or, no, profane… I forget which. They paid in cash. Is there… is there something wrong with your face, Proteus?”

  “My face? It… hurts. I don’t know.”

  “Proteus, where did you go off to? We all thought…”

  “I know. I wasn’t. I went,” he said, “to the Ultraworld.”

  “Is that so? Well. That sounds nice.”

  “…It’s not.”

  She pulled a slip of paper from out of a drawer and handed it across the desk to him. “This is for you.”

  He looked at it and did not understand.

  “The check for the sale of your work. We were lucky to get the price I set for them, you being unknown and all that. The prep work I did helped.”

  “Prep work?”

  “I think it helped. Maybe it didn’t, but no matter. This is your cut, minus my agent’s commission, minus the exhibition fee, minus framing costs, minus the expenses of refreshments and entertainment – that fresh lemonade cost a lot – minus the helicopter hire…”

  “The helicopter! I’m paying for that?”

  “Well, yes. Celebrities don’t come cheaply. You must understand this – check your contract, if you don’t. You’re lucky that’s all they asked for. So this number here is what remains, and that’s yours.” She tapped the check at its sum. It was still kind of staggering.

  He folded the slip of paper up and tucked it away in a jacket pocket
.

  “There is another thing,” Mary Margaret said. “I would’ve told you sooner, but you were… away. Your house. The Warehouse? That sold too, so you’ll need to move out. Immediately. In fact… I’ve already moved you out.”

  “I what? I thought…” he started, then got too confused to finish.

  “What, that it was all tied up? The title and everything?”

  “Right. It was a terrible mess, you said. You said it could take years.”

  “It was. And I said that it could. But that got straightened right out, once the right people started looking into it. Amazing what money can do. Money and a team of attorneys.”

  “So I can, I suppose, in that case, guess…”

  “Right,” she said. “The Ceres family. They’ve bought everything else. They’re settling in.”

  “Do they know the place is haunted?”

  “Honey,” Mary Alice said, “everything in this town is haunted. There is not a building, not a damn stone or a stick or a hole in the ground that doesn’t have at least one, if not several ghosts. Those Ceres people are kind of spooky themselves. I think they can handle it. I’ve got your bag right here.” She reached behind her and pulled his rucksack from the closet. It slid to rest in a lump at his feet.

  He looked at it, then up at her.

  “Yes?” she asked. “Anything else?”

  •

  Amanda set the plate onto the table directly in front of him and smiled. He picked up his fork and poked at the steaming pancakes, piled six high. Blueberries, or some kind of fruit, were cooked inside, dark dots smeared blurrily into the batter. It was an impressive stack of food, truly. He smiled back at her while she hovered beside him. “Can you sit with me?” he asked. It was getting late. Lorelei’s wasn’t busy. He was nearly the only customer in the place.