New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  Wait, I thought.

  What to do?

  Should I wake up?

  I wasn’t sleeping.

  Right, then, that makes it simple: don’t wake up, wasn’t sleeping, already awake. Nice nice.

  I sat up in bed, pushed aside the sheet, and swung my two feet down. My toes in their thin socks touched, then curled against the old worn wood of the floor. Divots, splinters, slats, all painted over in gray. When had the day arrived? Had I missed it? Perhaps I had slept. It would’ve been a first. But already, it was time for work. I had to get going. I levered myself off the mattress and made to the window, where the light burned through sheer curtains. Up there, in daytime as in night, hung silent and still Mosquito, watching over us.

  “Watching us?” I asked aloud of no one.

  The orb only hung there.

  Why should I think that? But what else could it be doing?

  It must’ve been some kind of eye.

  Opposing arguments of why this was and was not the case spiraled around each other in my mind before spending themselves and sputtering out, leaving me where I’d started. This was useless. I got myself dressed and ready, and up and out the door I went.

  •

  The bustle of Fake City grew most egregious at its center, more hectic the more closely condensed everything was; the traffic heavier and ever slower, the frenzied sense of urgency proportionally greater, while likewise, the smog gathered thickest in the air, obscuring towers’ rooflines and confusing the horizon with the sky. It was hard to see from ground level how much the building where I worked had grown, but it had. The block itself had widened to accommodate its new, extra girth, and I was sure it had added several stories of extra height as well since yesterday. All that was lost in the yellow-gray-brown-gray haze that hung over us, and when I entered the kitchen through the service entrance, it seemed the space inside had instead gotten smaller – I was in fact convinced that it had – as if the kitchen’s dimensions had been pilfered to add more volume to the rest. With the available workspace as much as halved, but the same number of cooks, cashiers, bakers, and baristas all crammed together in the small space, they collided, confused, and tripped each other up with every baffled move.

  “There you are!” Roskind surprised me. She stood only inches away and all but shouted in my ear, emerged as if by miracle from the melee.

  “Yes,” I said, recovering myself.

  “Why are you here now?”

  “To… work? I was scheduled. You scheduled me.”

  “When are you scheduled for?” Her face screwed up in perplexity.

  “Now?” I said.

  “Then why are you just standing here? Get your uniform, get to work. There’s no time for this. And… and you’ve been asked to take the BOX Group their lunches again today. They asked for you. For some reason. I don’t know why. You must be really good at carrying lunch.”

  “I’m okay.”

  She looked at me dubiously.

  “I’ll take them up right now,” I said. I was, by now, expecting as much, and this would give me an excuse to get out of the kitchen. I dreaded already the thought of the day to come, spent in that overcrowded space, and hoped tomorrow it might get bigger again.

  •

  The elevator was a muffled space, a deadened space, and any sounds I tried to make or made by the machine were flattened to dull thuds and thumps before they got much past their source. I stood alone in the compartment, staring at my reflections (twice) in the shiny brass doors, listening to the whump-whump of my own heartbeat in my ear as the numbers on the lighted display above ticked past. I was right; the building had grown taller in the night. Much taller, in fact. The BOX Group now occupied floor 163, almost thirty stories above yesterday. The vast array of plastic bags I carried hung in looped layers by their handles over my wrists and hands and forearms, and was today actually a bit more than I could carry, threatening to pull my arms from their sockets and staggering my legs with the weight. It was all I could do to fit inside the elevator. The order had been larger this morning, as the BOX Group itself must have expanded in the night, proving that such rapid development wasn’t limited to buildings alone.

  When the elevator arrived, a small bell rang, though I could barely hear a thing through the rush of my own blood. The floor lurched beneath me, and the doors slid open (swiping out my dumbfounded reflections) and I was let out into the black-floored lobby once again. Bamboo, paper screens, three girls at the desk… nothing looked different. The lobby had neither expanded nor contracted. But because I carried more than I could carry I stumbled forward and lumbered out clumsily, swaying as I went, swinging my overloaded arms in labored inertia. When I came to the reception desk to announce myself and opened my mouth to speak, I could say no more than, “Nurf!” before I fell forward onto my face. The plastic bags collapsed in sorry wing-shaped scatters. Their boxed contents tumbled out: BOX, BOX, BOX, etc. When I was able to stand again, the middle of the three receptionists – the only one to pay me any mind – had such a disgusted look on her face I wondered if I must’ve smelled like sewage, though she still spoke brightly with a client over her telephone headset. Without a break in her conversation, she pointed at the conference room. Clear enough. I nodded, mouthing thank you, though she’d already looked away, determined to act as though I were already gone.

  The oval-shaped table stood blank and empty in the silent meeting room. Even with nothing but glass to divide it from the lobby, this was another environment entirely. Perhaps it came down to the view, this sense of otherness: the wide bank of windows observing the city below and mud-colored haze that hung over it. That view changed everything – especially now, as I noticed, upon glancing out, that I was at the same elevation precisely as Mosquito. Seeing this, I stood transfixed, dumping the whole pile of lunch onto the table. My jaw hung open. I was flummoxed. It wasn’t clear to me why this should make such a difference, just being at this same height, but it did. Mosquito and I stood (that is, I stood, Mosquito hovered) at the same level, face to face. So to speak.

  “Ah, you’ve made it,” came the voice.

  “Yes!” I jumped. My flailing arm scattered boxes of lunch. “Good morning! Thank you!”

  “Isn’t it?” the man said. He stepped forward from the shadowed corner and halfway into the light. His corner was not so near the entrance that he could’ve just slipped in, so he must’ve been waiting there, as far as I could see. Yet this did nothing to diminish his dignity. His bald pate shone. His round glasses gleamed. His slick suit jacket flashed. He stood lightly, birdlike, profoundly still, so entirely unlike me.

  I twitched and tried to set the boxes straight and failed.

  “Our company has grown,” he said as I struggled.

  “I’d noticed,” I said, trying to sound calm, failing. “Congratulations.”

  The man stepped forward once, stopped. “It’s a mixed blessing, of course. Though it does mean that we’re expanding our operations.”

  I didn’t know what their operations could be. I said nothing, flailing.

  “There are advantages, you see,” he explained, “to remaining small. Although we… we never were small.”

  “No,” I said, and, “Yes!” I didn’t know what I was saying: No, you were never small, and, yes, you were always not small? Meanwhile, each box that I set out, centered and straight at every seat, moved slightly, bumped off-kilter the moment I let it go, as if knocked with a stray sleeve. Which it wasn’t. I set it straight again, carefully lifted both hands away, and watched it jerk ajar of itself, over and over, every one. “I’ve always,” I said, “believed…” then paused – “something.”

  “Naturally,” said the small, bald man. “It is often necessary. If only the belief that one exists. The ghost tells us these things, doesn’t it? It’s here with us now. I believe, for instance – in fact I quite know for certain – that it’s time one should find one’s way back.”

  “One should?”

  “Yes.�
��

  “Back?”

  “Exactly.”

  “To what?”

  “Now that is a question.”

  I glanced outside at Mosquito. The orb hung silver in the muddled air. It shimmered. I blinked. I looked again. It seemed to shake. I squinted, uncertain. It was still, and then it shifted, and then, as I watched, it fell.

  My heart lurched forward in my chest.

  Like a little ball bounced off a wall, the sphere jumped from the sky and dropped down toward the ground, following a queer parabola.

  It struck somewhere out of sight.

  “I…” I gasped.

  “Everything is different now, though, isn’t it? One supposes this must be the cost of progress. Though what is it that progresses? That is another question. It must be something observable, if assumed, I imagine. Yet no one ever thinks to ask.”

  I gasped, “I…”

  He waved a hand. “Oh, go see where it’s fallen, why don’t you.”

  I ran to the window.

  Mosquito had cleared the city limits by what seemed from here a hair’s breadth, though on the ground it was likely some considerable distance. “A plume of dust has risen from the spot where it landed,” I said, “just past the city’s edge! In the desert!” That was where the wide desert took over. The exact spot was hidden behind the rooflines of the lower outlying buildings, but the drifting plume was like an arrow pointing straight to it, although already it was scattering off in the slow current of wind. “It’s another place entirely,” I said, “but I think I can get there.”

  “Oh, that must be a good idea.”

  “Right. Sorry. Mind if I just… leave these? I mean…”

  Again with the wave of a hand. It didn’t matter about the mess of boxes, and it didn’t matter that I would never be called back. I was done with this, I knew it already. Mosquito could be reached if I could leave the city, and I wondered, trying to search through the muck of memory, why I’d ever come here in the first place. The word Finch came to mind, but I knew that was a bird. Why would I go anywhere for a bird?

  •

  I found Roskind to be less than understanding when I told her I was leaving.

  “Goodbye!” I said, and waved, stepping into the kitchen.

  She looked at me, her face twisted in misapprehension.

  The kitchen had become even smaller since I’d been upstairs. At about half the size it was before, and that was half the size of yesterday, and since it was now approaching lunchtime – the crowd at the counter had grown into a line that spilled out the front door – the other cooks and lunchbox assemblers and everyone were crammed in side-to-side and front-to-back in the inadequate space, unable to do anything. I supposed that I should have felt bad about walking off the job at a time like that, and I probably would have, had any customer actually meant to eat the food they were buying. I wasn’t even sure that it was food, though I had made quite a bit of it myself.

  Roskind’s face turned purple. She grabbed a rag and twisted it. “And where do you think you’re going?”

  “Away,” I said, “to somewhere else?” – feeling for the first time uncertain what it was I actually hoped to accomplish, because in truth I hadn’t thought it through at all. Where was I going? Oh, yes, to the orb. Never mind why.

  “Not if you’re on the schedule, you’re not. You’re staying right here.”

  I had to think that over for a minute, since the logic of it was inescapable. But seeing how the kitchen was so pressed in with bodies, no one could move even the least amount, I said, “I really think you’re better off without me. I mean, I’m not sure there’s room for me at the moment.”

  “No room for you? I’ll show you… no ROOM for you! Come here!” She held the twisted rag pulled tight between her fists. It seemed she meant to strangle me with it, except that she was at one end of the kitchen while I was at the other, and there were easily a dozen people stuck in between us. Roskind pushed against the crowd. I stood nearest the exit. And though a degree of doubt had taken hold of me, making it seem advisable that I wait there to hear her side of it, the force that she brought to bear on her employees in struggling against them displaced their many bodies between us. The more she pushed at them in her fury, the more they were pushed, one after the other, against me, forcing me back, against the exit, and finally popping me out onto the street.

  I looked up and down the alley. The spring on the service entrance door slammed it back shut again and latched it. I was left alone.

  “I suppose that’ll do,” I mumbled, and shuffled toward the avenue.

  Around the corner of the alley and out of the shadows, onto the sidewalk, the line from the front had spread, out the doors and down the street, even around the next corner and who knew how far after that. It was a busy day, after all, and there were just more people. As I walked past, I looked up, one last time, at the sign over the shop’s entrance: BOX LUNCH, it said. Just beyond was the entrance into the office tower’s lobby, the engraving into the stone above that reading, in engraved deco type, BOX, and nothing else. I walked on.

  •

  There seemed not much point in returning to the apartment, until I remembered that I should probably grab the articles of magic and take those with me too. They’d been left in my care by… someone. I couldn’t remember who. How I’d come into them had grown, like everything else, too hazy in memory and more than a little confusing, but I knew it had been someone, and they’d left these things with me for safe keeping, because one day they’d been there when before that they had not. So the magic was my responsibility… and to leave these things behind now would be irresponsible. And I didn’t want that. Because that would be bad.

  Besides, the building was not out of the way at all; it lay exactly in the direction I meant to go. Strange how that was.

  But when I arrived and opened the door – lifting out a loose panel from the middle and reaching around inside to twist the knob (I’d either lost or never had a proper key, but this method worked) – the objects waited for me, shining in some pale and unlikely light that hadn’t come through the window, where sat the sick, little plant in the dim, smeary light of outdoors. The light came instead from an invisible source directly above the table where they lay. They glimmered. They waited. They knew.

  “Okay,” I said to them, “okay.”

  I scooped the objects up and considered how best to carry them. In a bag? A box? Dangled from my hands? What if I needed my hands? What then? Yet each piece, when studied carefully, revealed its own function, and within its design, its own convenience. The gun was held in a holster, which fit from a belt around the waist. Good. The badge had a pin on the back, which clipped nicely enough to my shirtfront. It hung a bit heavy, perhaps, but still: good, good. And the hat, yes, well that was obvious enough. Except that it fit badly, and had been badly crumpled through inept treatment. All the same, loose as it sat on the crown of my head, this seemed much better than to carry it in hand.

  There, ready, good.

  I looked around the room a last time. There was nothing else in the room I could care the least about, so I left it all, what there was, knowing I’d never come back.

  •

  Looking to leave the city, I knew the direction to go, but no more. The plume of dust left by the orb’s impact had long since drifted off, but I could recall well enough where it was, keeping the tower’s looming, distant spike behind and my apartment directly lined up with that. The orb would be straight ahead, past Fake City’s limits. So I walked, and kept walking.

  Leaving the city, I reflected, meant just that: I was leaving the city. I didn’t know what I’d been doing there in the first place, but neither did anyone else. The city was a place where souls only circulated endlessly, caught in vacant whimsies, building towers through vague economies, returning endlessly to sleepless rest in an evening’s shallow breath, to forget the day and do the same again. What was the point? Why build a tower in the sky, if not to leave the flat e
arth behind? Wasn’t it good, then, to leave it? I’d seen the vast and alkaline desert spread out all around Fake City, and clearly that was not a place to live. But if I was already dead, what did it matter? One place was as good as the next. To leave a city, I reflected, is to be carried along by something – by a certain optimism. All that is oppressive, as well as all that supports, is left behind. I felt a buoyancy – something was pulling me forward. I would reach Mosquito! And that was everything! Why this should be everything, I couldn’t say, only that it was, and it was necessary, for some reason. It blotted out everything else. I would walk, and I would keep walking, and soon enough, soon enough… well, I didn’t actually know, but dressed as I was in my hat and badge and gun, I felt like nothing could stop me. I was above the law. I was the law. I was in the sky! I was the sheriff, see, and nobody and nothing could make me… not be that!

  The hour grew dim. Prematurely, it seemed, the sky lost its light. Since the sun was well-hid by the clouds and haze and murk of smog, I couldn’t say exactly that it was setting – I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen the sun at all, not once; but there was a lot I couldn’t remember. Still, the sky did fade, and fade fast, grading toward a muddled darkness. The tower was easy enough to find in the gloaming, since it had lights all along, all up and down it, and blinking signal lights on top as well, piercing the murk. But it became harder to keep track of where my low apartment building was. Its roofline was mostly anonymous, and as I walked past others of its sort, the building was easily lost sight of. It helped nothing that the straightforward grid of equal city blocks downtown became, out this far toward the edges, a webwork of turning, bending, slowly twisting avenues, none oriented toward anything but a city planner’s whim or a drunken scrawl. Or perhaps the street plan followed its own internal needs, or its own inherent vice. In fact, I thought that I could see the lane in front of me, once things grew dark enough that it was hard to tell anything for sure, actually pick itself up and lash its whole length, like the tail of a snake, from one side to the other, carrying along with it its rows of townhomes, tenement houses, and all. Since I knew it was in the night that the city accomplished most of its growth and rearrangement, I supposed this sort of thing was to be expected. But it helped nothing.