New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  •

  “Who left this here? Did you?”

  “Me? How could I? I just got here.”

  “You know you don’t leave these here.”

  “Okay, but –”

  “You wash them and you put them away. Don’t send them to the dishwashers; they won’t put them away. You do it. You wash them, you put them away. Understand?”

  “I know that, but –”

  “This one smells like garlic. Where did you get it from?”

  “I didn’t. It wasn’t –”

  “Did you get it from here?”

  “No, listen, I –”

  “If you get this one from here, you don’t use it with garlic. These ones aren’t for use with garlic. Do you know why?”

  “Because they smell like garlic after?”

  “That’s right. So if you’re going to use it with garlic, don’t get it from here, get it from over there. And then what?”

  “And then what what?”

  “And then what do you do with it?”

  “Wash it and put it away?”

  “That’s right. That’s what you do.”

  “But I didn’t –”

  “I know you didn’t, so that’s why I’m telling you. Look, drop whatever it is you are doing, I need you to take an order upstairs.”

  “I just got here. I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “I don’t care. The delivery girl didn’t show, so I need you to take these sandwiches upstairs. It’s important. They’re for one of our best customers, and this needs to go right now. If there’s anything wrong with their order, if we’re late, if you screw this up, they’ll drop us straightaway and find somewhere else for their lunches. So don’t screw this up.”

  “I… won’t. I will.”

  “Won’t, will, what?”

  “I won’t screw it up. I’ll take it right now.”

  “So get going already.”

  •

  But I’d never actually seen anybody eat in Fake City.

  I mean, I couldn’t. I could neither sleep nor eat, yet seemed none the worse for it. Yes, I was always tired and hungry, even desperately so, yet these things like all the other things were part of the landscape, like buildings and traffic and smog, and I found they did little to affect the constancy of life, or death, as I’d come to know it. How other people managed to get by, I couldn’t be certain. And whatever became of these boxed lunches was someone else’s problem too. At least I was working.

  The elevator took me up into the sky. 102nd floor, 103rd… My destination was on floor 129, the BOX Group, some kind of banking or investment firm, I didn’t know what. When the silent elevator at last stopped, the brass doors slid open and let me out into an immaculate lobby of polished, black flooring and live bamboo arrangements in wooden planter boxes. A long desk ahead of me accommodated three receptionists, two of whom were busy on the telephone, so I went to the third and stated my business, holding up the several plastic bags of lunch as explanation. I couldn’t have physically carried any more.

  “Yes, good,” the prim young woman at the desk said. “Just set them up in the boardroom over there, will you?” She pointed. I nodded and went to where I was told.

  The boardroom, partitioned off the lobby by a glass wall, held a large, ovoid table, also made of glass, surrounded by a number of plush chairs on rollers. The space was impressive, intimidating in its display of wealth. But most striking about it was the view out the window from this height. All of Fake City – or at least the half that could be seen from this side of the tower – lay stretched out far below, looking like nothing so much as a gray and brown patchwork tapestry, and save for a few very tall buildings close in, nothing was near as tall as this. And we weren’t even on the top floor. I took a moment to search for the neighborhood I’d just walked from, where I lived; there it was, to the… what was that? North? Northwest? To the left in any event. The area didn’t look like much from up here, but then it didn’t look like much from street level either. And that would be the building where I lived. And from the back of it, where my room was, from where I could look up and out, through the window, toward…

  Yes, there: in the bleak and featureless sky, not nearly so high as I would’ve thought it was, and not nearly so large either, there hung my friend the metal orb. It was still higher than the floor this office was on, but not by so much. From here, it looked even kind of little, more like a balloon than anything. I knew it wasn’t any sort of balloon, but still, I never would’ve imagined…

  And looking past that, I could see even beyond the city limits, past which… my god…

  “Excuse me, but who are you?”

  Startled, I turned away from the window so fast my neck twinged. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just setting up your box lunches. Came to deliver them was all. I was told to put them in here.” I’d started taking them out of their bags to set them one at each chair. One per chair, each got a box, marked “BOX,” with one lunch in it. So I figured.

  “That’s quite enough. We won’t be needing them now.” The man stepped forward. The dark cloth of his suit flashed its hidden, fine textures with reflected light, but only at certain angles. From his hairless scalp also, washes of slippery highlight blurred, then faded back to skin tones in shadow as he moved. But his eyes were cold and piercing and absolutely colorless beneath the severity of his brow.

  I started to pick the boxes back up to pack them again into their bags: BOX, BOX, BOX…

  “Never mind about that,” the man said. “You may go now. Please.”

  “Yes, sir.” I let the armload drop back down onto the ovoid table and scuttled out.

  •

  No doubt I’d hear about it downstairs, I thought as I rubbed at the neck muscle I’d pulled. It didn’t hurt, so long as I didn’t try to turn my head.

  On the elevator ride back down, I rehearsed my story of how I’d only done what I’d been asked to, never mind that it was the wrong thing. What else was I supposed to do? The boss would be annoyed, no doubt. I’d just have to wait and take it when the trouble all came back.

  Whoever that bald man had been, he hadn’t wanted me in there. But why? I’d not interrupted anything. There’d been no sensitive materials out for me to see; no papers, no company secrets, whatever. Just a big glass table in an ostentatious meeting room. So what? All that I’d seen had been the view out the window…

  And that’s what he’d not wanted me to see. The view.

  It didn’t make any sense, but I felt, with certainty, that had to be it. It was the only thing. The bald man hadn’t wanted me to see the view from this high up.

  Of what? Mosquito? Should that be a problem? Who didn’t see that? The thing was visible from just about every point in the city. It wasn’t exactly a secret. Not that anyone ever mentioned it either. Not that anyone ever… much seemed to notice it at all… now that I thought of it…

  No, not Mosquito – it was what lay beyond the city limits: the city surrounded by a yellow-gray and level desert, its whole blasted expanse… I hadn’t seen that before, I never knew the city was in the middle of that.

  I shook my head and rubbed my hands over my face. The pinched nerve in my neck shot stabs of complaint. I was reading too much into this whole thing. The guy in the suit – he’d just wanted to mess with someone smaller than himself. I was there, I wore a uniform, I was obviously a monkey of no importance. It was fun to see me jump, that was all. Well, fuck the guy. I guessed that by now he would’ve called to complain. I’d see if I still had a job when I got back to the kitchen.

  •

  But there’d been no complaint. Nothing waited for me downstairs but the rest of the day’s routine work. Roskind, the kitchen manager, who normally wouldn’t have sent kitchen help like myself out on a service call, had nothing to say on the matter when I got back; so as far as she was aware, everything had gone just fine. I was relieved to not get fired – granted, it was a lousy job, but still a job – and so I buried m
yself in little tasks. One of these, at the end of the day, after we’d sold all the lunches we were going to, was to stamp the word “BOX” onto all the little boxes that we delivered our lunches in.

  FOUR

  From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  If I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself. What stares back – what seems to stare back at me – may be any number of things, but it is not myself, not quite. It is surprising how quickly one can get used to this. I might almost say I take comfort in the unfamiliarity.

  There might be something just a little off about some detail: I know, for instance, that my eyebrows were not that brushy thick just yesterday morning; or that old acne scar is now on the wrong side of my forehead. Perhaps my eyes are a different color, gray instead of blue; or gray-blue instead of only gray, or whatever. Perhaps a much older man is there, gaping back at me, what few wisps of hair remaining scalpside turned so utterly white, nose and inner ears inexplicably shaggy, while his tired eyes stare sadly, knowingly back through wrinkled flesh, bruisedlooking augen sacks so far exaggerated from my current-aged state. I would not know that hollow face; I would not know those bones, nor yet that degree of sorrow. I can believe it, both, and not believe it. Sometimes an entirely different person is there, bearing no resemblance to me at all. I smile, and the red-haired woman in nurse’s smock behind the specked glass grins back, after a twitch – confused, a little, perhaps, but pleasant enough. She is the one I may rather myself be than I who am myself; or maybe there is no connection. But there she is. Or I’ll find a raccoon, gleaming feral-eyed, intelligent enough, so far as creatures go. Yet his scrabbling little paws could not hold nor work a pen, for as much as they can hold, and I resent the change. The creature chatters at me and I hiss back, showing him/her/it my teeth.

  These transformations are the result of an interference pattern established The interference pattern established between these differing images – my own (baseline, assumed) and that presented (alterity) in the window mirror glass – can be read as language – moreover, a specific message – what the space between the two, their meanings implied or intrinsic, or both, amount to. This is the communication from the object (and why have I never found a name for it?) to the person (self), or through the medium of the person (the self) and directed or intended toward some other, who may or may not also be (the self), etc. –

  FIVE

  The World

  [Late Winter, 2006]

  Proteus set the notebook back near the pile where he’d found it and rubbed two fingers at his eyes. They buzzed and seemed to vibrate in his head. This always happened when he tried to read the books.

  Among the first things he’d done upon settling into the apartment once occupied by the sheriff was to set the plastic chair aright. He’d needed someplace to sit. As uncomfortable as a plastic chair was, at least for any long sitting, it was still better than standing, at least for any long spell of time, and could be alternated with either sitting or lying, in various positions, on the shag-carpet floor. He would need, Proteus determined (reduced at length to the contemplation of minutia), such minimal comfort to read the books in. And it was clear that he should read the books, though they would make his eyes buzz and vibrate in his head.

  The sensation made him think of the Abbey. It had been quite a while since he’d thought of the place at all. And though the Abbey had been the center of his life for ten years – and not so long ago – its grounds and buildings and great Buddha statues had taken, or been shoved into, a back room of his mind, its door seldom opened. The sangha lived there too, though he could scarcely picture their faces. (They may’ve had no faces…) He wondered why that should be. He’d not tried to put them all away. He’d not tried not to think of them. Perhaps he’d not had the requisite emptiness until now. He wondered why the buzzing sensation should be the thing to bring it back. Perhaps this was the sign of the emptiness; its sign and significance. Certainly, he’d felt this way often enough in his other life: the buzzing sensation, the vibration in the eyes, the hollow space at the center of his mind.

  It occurred to him that he’d returned to his monastic life without ever meaning to. Just as he’d left his monastic life without meaning to. Just as he’d found his monastic life, not exactly meaning to.

  That life. The hollow feeling. The buzzing sensation in his eyeballs. He rubbed his eyes with two fingers. He stood and shoved the curtains aside and thin light filled the apartment. Outside, the morning shone overcast. Striations of cloud ribbed across the low sky. From the window, Proteus could see down into the same courtyard of frozen mud he’d crossed the night before. Thousands of tiny puddles of ice pocked the wide, rough surface, which was crossed by intersecting pathways of concrete. People scampered below, over the pathways, all moving – dozens, maybe hundreds of people – in quick purpose, this way and that.

  He had nowhere to go. Or if he did, he didn’t know yet where it was.

  The light was as thin as he was hollow. This was good.

  •

  He made another inspection of the cabinets. He’d done this before, many times. There was nothing new to find, and he knew this, but he did it all the same. There was half a box of stale crackers, some peanut butter, and (thank the gods!) a jar of instant coffee. There were a few ceramic cups, one of them badly cracked, and one small ceramic bowl with a fluted lip. A drawer near the sink held a few basic utensils: a fork, a butter knife, and for some reason, two dozen spoons. He’d counted the spoons. There was also an individual-size packet of mayonnaise, the only thing in one entire cupboard. The printing on the foil package was in English, unlike the coffee or crackers or peanut butter, all of which were labelled in Cyrillic and another script unknown to him, which he guessed was Mongolian. He found his guess that the refrigerator was not working had been correct. He’d opened its door onto a warm compartment filled with nothing, and though he’d not been looking for anything, had not expected to find anything, and finding nothing was much better than finding something – which would’ve long been a spoiled and stinking mess – still, the utter emptiness of the refrigerator struck something in him that was as hard to fathom as it was to endure, and he slammed the door shut. Five minutes later he opened it again, felt that same terrible emptiness, but this time quietly shut the door.

  There was a buzzing sound in the air, and he realized then that there had always been.

  •

  The air outside was predictably cold. Proteus had brought a field jacket and wore it now. His footsteps soon left the network of cement pathways, though for no good reason – he sure didn’t know where he was going – and as he walked across the courtyard of frozen mud between the buildings, his feet crushed the many skins of ice, so thin-stretched and so brittle, of little pools and pockmarks made to the field by so many feet, in warmer times, before his. He really didn’t know where he was going. The gray sky, as any would, loomed above, as always. All the people (there were fewer of them now) went along their own ways, from one end to the other. Sometimes a person here or there would look up at him, notice his difference, then look away again. Men and women. Young, old, neither young nor old. Sometimes there were children. The children watched him. The others always looked away. He didn’t know at all where he was going, but he needed something, and there was nothing in the apartment that he hadn’t already found, and that wasn’t enough, and he still had a little bit of money, if not very much money, but that should be enough, if for what, he didn’t know.

  At some point near the center of the courtyard, he stopped and turned around and looked back at the building where he’d been. It was some kind of big, flat box. Not much more could be said of it, and that much he’d understood when he’d arrived the night before. But he’d not seen the colors. Now, in the day, he saw the colors; there were broad horizontal stripes that ran the length of the building, of each building, by alternating floors. One floor was sided beneath its bank of windows in blue, the next wa
s orange. Orange, blue, orange. Etcetera.

  He turned back around and walked. His feet broke through the crusts of ice like little thin skins with each step. He didn’t know where he was going.

  •

  Soon Proteus reached a busy avenue. He didn’t recognize it, but still he knew it was one the taxi driver had taken him down last night to the apartment complex. Nothing beyond the courtyard looked in the least familiar to him now in daylight. There were more people along these uneven sidewalks – crowds, and automobile traffic sped steadily through all six lanes in both directions. He looked first one way, then the other, chose, and walked on.

  Construction cranes ahead hauled materials up toward a latticework of iron girders taking shape into a building already twelve floors high and still growing. Beneath it, an open square park was ornamented at its center by a statue of a man. The man had a stern look, and his features were not oriental. He looked like he might have been Vladimir Lenin, but Proteus felt certain he was not. The plaque at the statue’s feet was unreadable to him. He walked on.

  Further ahead, directly at the center of the avenue, so that the lanes split apart and circled around it, was a domed arena. Though not especially large, it was at the center of everything and impossible to miss. It seemed, for no obvious reason, to glimmer. Its edges were cut sharper, and its colors less faded than anything around it. It seemed… buoyant; either more or less real than most other things, he wasn’t sure which.

  This particular vividness of the arena confused him. Proteus slowed, grew unsteady, listed slightly to the left, then stopped, staring forward. He was still a few hundred feet from it, but this was as close as he cared to get until… until he understood. Why should the building shimmer? He gawked. People walked around him. He gaped. All thoughts left his head.

  A policeman approached. Proteus saw him through the corner of his eye, but did not react, not until the officer said something directly to him and he had to. Then he turned his head and said, “What?”