New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  TWO

  The World

  [Late Winter, 2006]

  Finding and restitching my soul back into the body wasn’t something so easily or so simply done, and didn’t all happen at once. This will require some explaining: it was still some several days back, and the same man who’d stumbled, weird-eyed and muttering, out from the Korean Air jet plane and into Chinggis Khaan International, just outside the city of Ulaanbaatar, was at best only one-half a person, an empty person, half-cracked and haggard, the shell of a person, a man who did not, nor would he ever, have a name like Proteus – yet that is precisely what he would call himself, and what others, if they should refer to him at all, would call him too. He was at least a little bit like the man who, when approaching Dalanzadgad and the febrile desert, learned of the essential sameness of all things. Ten thousand things, all the same. But there was a basic difference between them, though they shared, however tenuously, a name, features, and an objective: the latter was me (for what this is worth), while the former was a thing in parts and pieces, a thing without a self, a man (for what that’s worth) with a hole in the middle.

  I also have a hole. The hole is in the middle of me too. Just the same. But. The difference is that I am myself, and that man was no one, that man was no one…

  I can say these things now because I have come around. I belong to somewhere, sometime, something. I am someone.

  Here? Now? This?

  No. The here-now-this are things to which I’ve come unattached.

  Me? Yes. I am the here-now-me-now.

  And I can reach out and I can touch the ten thousand things. My fingers sweep the dust, like that. There are objects, and I am one of the objects: a thing with them. I begin with a grain of sand. The sand here is blown in my face. When I recover and can open my eyes again, I stare forward and see the shifting patterns cast from the sun. I stare forward and am shot by degrees of perfect awe with the slant of cloud-formed shadows hung heavy out of the sky. I stare at the ground and see that those two bone-and-meat things clad in funk-dust shoes are feet – those right there – and they are mine, my feet, and near my feet, not three inches away, a tiny white-gray-green lizard pumps itself up and down on forelegs even shorter than my toe. It’s doing pushups, tiny little pushups. I find this hilarious. The whole little creature could fit into my finger: it is finger-size. I feel lucky (and this funny little lizard, barely knowing it, is far luckier still) because I’ve not stepped on the thing and crushed it. I haven’t found what I need yet – aside from this landscape, this creature, and the fragile wrappings of the heart that beats so sorely in my chest – but I am at least myself. He – he, Proteus (never mind that we share a name) – and he (looking to the past now), he was no one. He (empty and without a self), he had nothing. He was barely even there. People could see right into him, just look into his skin, like a sheer curtain, the sun shining through. He had no squishy thing at the middle; nope. There was only the hole, and everyone knew it, because it was obvious.

  I will tell you now about the hole (you, please, listen…): it’s big, it’s bigger than anything, it knows everything, it knows about the ten thousand things and it knows even more than that. It’s like the bleary, blasted sun, only turned way, way down and made into something cold. So it isn’t like the sun that way, but still, it knows. It brings vision, sight, and the queerest sort of relatability. A person can relate to it; I can relate to it. (Me, me, me.) I think it made me see the future.

  The future.

  No, wait, that’s not the hole itself, but the thing that made the hole. And now that thing is gone, and I believe that is what broke Proteus. It broke him into pieces. When the thing left that big hole in Proteus, it broke him, and he couldn’t be a person anymore, not like he once was, and his soul left – it just wandered off somewhere – and he, Proteus, he also wandered off. He wandered the Earth, trying to find that thing again, while now looking also for his soul. That’s maybe also part of how he got stuck with the weird name.

  And when he stepped off that jet plane and into the airport at Ulaanbaatar, he had nothing to go on but a scrap of paper that he held in his fist, crushed and sweat-soft: an envelope with a return address, sent to him – that is, to the acting sheriff of the mountain town of Cleric, Arizona, which by some consensus he then was – from an apartment in the city. This apartment was presumably where the previous sheriff now lived. The letter he’d sent to Proteus contained some good advice that Proteus had not followed. Proteus still had a little bit of money left, though he’d spent already most of what he’d had to get this far. He’d entertained some idea that the money was important. In fact, it had been important. What he didn’t realize, though, was that the former sheriff, when he’d given Proteus the magic, had given him something that was both better and worse than money. The magic held power. The power would take him where money couldn’t. This was because money was good for certain things, for taking him to certain places, but magic, for other things, for getting to other places, was better. For the moment, however, Proteus didn’t have any magic with him; he’d left that much with me. I was keeping it for him, in Fake City, the land of the dead. All that Proteus had was money, and the money was running out.

  Since the only baggage that Proteus had was the large, green duffel he’d carried onto the plane with him, he went straight from the gate into customs, where men in uniforms with machine-guns slung over their shoulders asked him questions he didn’t understand. They searched his bags, looked closely at his passport, found nothing of interest about any of these things, so let him pass. From the airport he emerged at a taxi stand. Here he found a driver, who was satisfied to study the address written onto the corner of the sweat-soaked and crumpled envelope in Proteus’s fist. It was night. The sky was exceptionally dark. The taxi followed a long road leading straight for several miles through nothing at all. Eventually it approached a whole river of light: the city. The city stretched through a valley. They drove into the city in the valley and entered the swirling lights, into a press of traffic so dense and impossible that Proteus couldn’t see how anything in it could move at all. But everything did move, in fact it moved fast, and the taxi moved fast too. When the taxi emerged from all the swirl of traffic and lights, it soon came to a stop in a flat place, a place somewhere to the side of the city. A complex of buildings stood here, all more squat than tall, looking like nothing so much as giant toy blocks of wood, like they’d been dropped there by some giant monster child in the sand. The sand here was frozen. When he stepped out of the taxi, the air, the wind, bit at his cheeks and face. He was soon to learn how his face could be assailed in so many different ways by wind. In the sky, the distant stars shimmered and shone. The wind did not shake them. There was no moon. Perhaps it had blown off in the wind.

  Proteus gave the driver some American money, which he studied, then accepted. The car drove off and left him there with his duffel in the frozen night, and everything was quiet, except the wind.

  Lights peaked or flickered throughout the windows that surrounded him. The apartment complex itself was a trio of large buildings arranged in a wide U-shape, with an open courtyard at the center – a vast expanse of frozen dirt. Where footsteps or other impacts in the once-damp ground left divots, the water there had frozen into fragile skins. Thousands of these ice skins pocked the open dirt. As he stepped into the cone of light from a single functioning streetlamp, Proteus saw that a whole network of crossed and interconnected cement footpaths webbed through the open space in geometric regularity.

  He looked for the room number on the envelope held crushed in his fist: 2-527 it said, in tiny little numbers. Building two, fifth floor. The small front door of the middle building he found painted in a vivid, if badly scratched, primary blue. It was made entirely of metal, with only a tiny square of a window at eye-level. Above it, a metal placard announced: 2. This was it. Proteus stuck his nose to the glass and looked into the lobby – what there was of one – where yellowish light flickered down
a plain hallway. His breath fogged the glass. He stepped back, tried the door handle.

  It was locked.

  He put his face to the glass again and looked inside. Nobody. When he breathed, he fogged the glass.

  He grabbed the cold handle again and pulled hard. The heavy door popped open.

  •

  Fluorescent lights hummed and fluttered green-yellow through the hallway as Proteus caught the door from slamming shut behind him. He carefully let it click back into a frame that had been forced so often, the metal latch was bent and blunted as though hammered. Inside, television sounds and odd snatches of conversation reached through the hallway, muffled somewhat by the walls and doors. He stopped, pressed his fingers against the wall: yellow walls, sticky to the touch. Thick with an oily residue. Hesitantly, he resumed, putting each foot cautiously forward, toe first, like a cat. Directly back from the entrance, another metal door, this one orange, revealed through its small window a metal cage inside. Elevator. He shut himself inside it and pressed the button. As the cage rattled and dutifully carried him up, he watched the strata of each successive floor drop past, inch by crawling inch.

  Eventually the elevator stopped at the fifth floor of seven. Another orange door opened outward with a push, exiting him into a hallway all but identical with the first. He looked first to the left and then to the right, decided left, and counted the numbers as he passed them: 512, 514, 516… It was the opposite side that carried the odd ones. In time he reached 527. There was nothing about this door, save for the number, that distinguished it from any other – no markings, no name plate, no decoration – just a small pinhole lens for one eye to look out and see him there. But this was where, for whatever reasons he’d had, Sheriff Friendly’d chosen to exile himself. Had he thought that Mongolia was safe for him? Or was it maybe somehow safe from him? Was safety even a concern?

  Proteus raised a knuckle and hesitated. He’d not anticipated what he might say when he finally met the man. He didn’t actually know what to do at all.

  So he knocked. Cautiously. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. The door was made of soft and hollow wood, and it did not hurt, but the sound of his knuckles against it was hollow and didn’t resonate. It went no further than the door itself. He did it again – three and three were six – a flat sound, a nothing sound. Nothing happened. Proteus waited and still nothing happened. After a minute of this, he wrapped his hand over the knob and tried to turn it: nope. It shook and wobbled, but did not give.

  He leaned on the door and it popped open.

  “Hello?” into the dark. There was no answer. Outlines of a kitchen – at least a kitchen table – in the shadows. “Hel-lo? Officer?” He stepped inside, felt along the wall for a switch. “Sheriff?” He found it, he flicked it on.

  “Friendly?”

  His voice was as flat here also, as if the air, instead of carrying the sound, deadened it. But he could hear a radio through the wall from the next apartment. That was clear enough. Only he was muffled.

  A simple room – rather, two rooms. There was the kitchen, where he stood. Two gas burners, no oven. An old refrigerator, white and lumbering, that didn’t seem to work. The table, a long table, took up too much space. It had a single wooden chair. On the table, in front of the chair, was a single, bone-china plate, covered with a film of grease. Beside it sat a dirty spoon. Past the kitchen was another room, partitioned by a half-wall and no door. In that room, on a blue shag carpet, an orange plastic chair lay on its side, next to a stack of spiral-bound notebooks. A door off the kitchen gave way to a narrow bathroom with a sink and a toilet at one end and a shower stall at the other. The mirror was broken, smashed.

  Shutting the door behind him, he went into the living space, with its chair and stack of notebooks. There was nothing else but a curtain that shut out the night. Presumably a window lay beyond it. But he was interested in the notebooks. There were several, neatly stacked, and with different-colored covers. Otherwise all the same. The same as those Proteus had recovered from the police station atop Charles Mountain, marked on their covers only by dates – begun and completed – in the same exacting, careful hand. The sheriff’s work. There could be no mistaking it.

  Proteus pushed at the topmost with the toe of his shoe and gave a small bark.

  “Ruff!”

  Then he looked around, self-conscious.

  The dead air swallowed up the sound (it took no time at all).

  He did it again: the blue-covered notebook up top shifted at the prodding of his toe. Then he barked.

  “Ruff!”

  He looked around: nothing, no one.

  THREE

  Fake City

  [Outside Time]

  As the man whose name wasn’t Proteus was finding his way into the capital city of Mongolia, I stepped out of the grim and into the murk of another gray Fake City morning. The skies were an even slate of brownish-gray nothing, without features of any sort. On the sidewalk, I turned around and looked up: there, part-hidden behind the brick building’s corner, near the roofline, hung the halved silver of the familiar metal orb, waiting just as motionless, in exactly the same place, as always. My friend. As often as I’d seen it there (and how often was that?) I still had to stop and stare for a time.

  For a…?

  As unimpressive as it was to see, still, I had to.

  The air was approaching cold; not enough for sweaters or jackets and such, but neither was it warm. In my torn overshirt, I wrapped my arms around myself and twisted gently back and forth, staring up. Not for warmth, but for something else.

  For…? (Insert left-handed “m.” Scrawl next to it left-handed “e.”) For a…? (Scratch out same.)

  In Fake City, a place where nothing was real, in a place outside time, matters of time, duration – never mind simultaneity or sequence – were impossibly difficult to pin down. What happened when, what at the same time as when, or for how long… it was impossible. There simply was no before and no after, and the concept of during is most deeply blurred when everything that happens happens everywhere (except here, in Fake City, of course) all at once. It’s effectively the same as if nothing happened at all – it was all just one great massed blur of event, in stasis, muddled together in a lump. And this piece of me, which for narrative convenience I’ll call “me,” understood this relativity of blurring only insofar as it underwent such (which is to say it understood this not at all); forgetting the past, losing the future, and retaining only the this-here-right-now-ness of an undefinable moment. It succumbed, all at once, outside time, to timelessness and not-being. If I’d looked into a mirror, I’d’ve not seen anything. I wouldn’t know myself. It was good that I had no mirror.

  But now it was “time” to get to work. So I tore myself from the sight of my distant orb-friend in the sky and walked on.

  This fragment of me which I’ll still call “me” was no less partial than that shard of a man called Proteus. The two should properly have fit together into a single, self-aware person, but they did not. What “I” had that he did not was a locus of little perspective points, little referents, like so many stretched threads of awareness all intersecting together in more or less one place. “I” was that ill-defined center; the place where the filaments met. “I” could say “I” and mean it, even if I didn’t know what that was, while he… he could exist in the world. Not very well, granted, but he could do it, even if he couldn’t find himself there. He was in fact bumping and knocking around Ulaanbaatar’s nighttime river of lights at that moment, looking for it, looking for himself, getting hurtled about in cars, or feeling his way through a corridor like a blind man – which he wasn’t – stopped (he was so easily confused) by the smell of something odd but not off-putting.

  But here – in Fake City – as the traffic always did, it snuffed and rumbled and occasionally it surged forward (never backward) through the streets, beneath the looming weight of so many tall and colorless buildings. Buildings made of steel, glass, stone, and concrete – at the fi
nancial center of the city, these structures rose beyond sight and seemed to always only get higher, or at least heavier, every day. There was no sense or reason to these towers’ unchecked growth, but since Fake City was unreal, sense and reason could be lost, and such expansion, at least according to that logic of skyscrapers themselves, was inevitable. Cars on the ground, so populous here, were all of an era, one seemingly long past. Their makes were indistinct, having heavy, rounded frames, huge engines, bulbous, white-walled tires, and tailpipes that spit gray smoke out the back behind them. They could’ve been a thing of one mind, and certainly acted as one mind; this traffic was a mass mind of slow and senseless movement that never stopped – each car, its driver, and every passenger too, was a vector of motion’s continuance, individual cells in the city’s sludge-bloodstream of gridlock, the thickest, the slowest, and most impossible at its center. Horns bleated, drivers shouted at one another, all to no effect. All inched along in desperate, slow gasps. Still, no one ever quite entirely stopped.

  It was towards the middle where I headed, though I was out on foot. I had no car, so couldn’t drive. I was not part of the traffic continuum. Lucky again, it seemed, not to be stuck in all that, as it was better to walk. My place of employment was in that tower that was largest and stood over every other; I was at the very center of all of it. But my place was not above, in the heights; it was at street level, at an indistinct if high-rent bakeshop that served bread and butter, soups and coffee, and plain little sandwiches, sold at astounding prices, to those who worked their days up top.

  Off the central avenue, down a narrow alley lined with dumpsters from where the crows scattered at my approach, a service entrance let me into the kitchen – a bustle of vague yet frenetic activity, of moving bodies in white jackets, hair held up in nets, of faces looking up without recognition, glances met and just as quickly broken. I found a jacket for myself from a metal armoire and put a company cap on my head, then clocked in.