by Brian Short
I walked. I kept walking. I walked for hours. Leaving the city was getting to be more complicated than I’d thought.
•
Somewhere at the outskirts, I hit a difficult patch. There weren’t so many streetlights working in this, what seemed like a really sketchy neighborhood, full of the sketchiest sort of people. They scarcely even looked like people at all, but only the vague shapes and outlines of people, shapes in the darkness made of a deeper darkness, lurking at the edges, flowing with the shadows, moving shiftily about in tight groupings. Amidst vague lots of demolished buildings and broken concrete, through breaks in the wire fences and burnt, brick windows, they moved first this way and then the other, as if with a single mind, turning, grouping, flashing in the faint reflected light from their eyes. As best I could tell, there were only eyes. Their shapes and forms were just suggestions, if even that, like whispers at the edges of hearing, or fleeting phantoms at the limits of sight. Without detail or focus, two moved out from these illdefined spaces and into the open, circling around like they were made of smoke and falling into step to either side, where I walked as calmly as I could manage down the center of the street.
“Some hat, there, buddy,” said a voice, wispy-soft, from my right. “I like it. Real fashionable. Are you a cop? How’s your head? It looks like you’ve taken a bump there. Can I see it? I want to see your head.”
“Aw, Laz,” said the one to my left, also soft, if rather more gruff, “the man’s not gonna show you his head. And obviously he’s a cop. Look at the badge. Look at that there gun at his hip. The hat’s a cop’s hat, and my guess is he’s out on some law business. That, or up to see a lady. Which is it, pal? You’re up to visit a lady? You sure do seem serious about it, whatever it is. I’ll bet you’re one of the neutral angels, is that it?”
“Nah, he ain’t neutral. Just look at his head.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with his head! That’s his hat’s all messed up – the two are separate. You see, friend,” addressing me, “I think you’re neutral… never took a side, running in between. I am, frankly, curious to hear your story. This lady, innit, she’s got you on a string?”
“Nothing neutral about this one. You can always tell with his type, Abe. They got a funny walk, see, like something’s broken.”
“But look at him! He walks with purpose. Sure, he limps a bit, but it isn’t funny. Such gravity with every step. He walks with light, don’t you know. It’s the clear light of the law, and the law don’t take no side but the side of the law. I think it’s his lady friend up there ahead, and she’s got something she wants to tell him, something gonna swing him one way or the other.”
“That don’t mean it ain’t broken.”
“No, it don’t. But it don’t mean anything else, either. Maybe he’s just lost. As in, you know, unfamiliar.” Turning back to me, “Hey, buddy, you do know where you’re going, don’t you?”
I said nothing.
“I think we ought to watch this one very closely, Abe. See where he goes, and what he gets up to once he’s there. I don’t trust him.”
“He’s a stranger in our midst, Laz. I can’t deny that. Very unfamiliar.”
“The hat don’t fit his head. It makes me think there’s something wrong with the mechanism inside. You know how I am about mechanisms, Abe… I like to see them work.”
“We’ve discussed this, Laz, the man’s not going to show you his head. He’s got better things to get on with. The head is no concern of yours. The hat just sits askew, is all.”
“What’s my concern is my concern, Abe. He walks funny.”
“Funny? He walks with purpose. It’s just a limp, is all. I’m more curious about his lady friend. Maybe she’s what gave him the limp! She must really be something, send a fellow off like this through the trials by night, see where he’s gotten by the edge of the day. That’s motivation. Say, friend, why don’t you tell us about your girl? What’s she like? She’s got the magic to make the grass grow green? To make the season of spring come alive? Tell us something about her, just one little fact. A quality, like.”
“I’ll bet she speaks with a lilt.”
“No, the lady speaks direct, says what she means in a clear voice.”
“Nah, her voice is like the dew that covers the morning. It’s like the mist descending. She’ll talk around a thing, so as you see it every way.”
“Hardly! There’s a dry heat to her. She’s like the sun, all force and fire. Magnetic. Stereoscopic.”
“I think she’s misty-dewy, always a little sad when she smiles. The sort of girl that makes you think, then think again.”
“Well, she’s definitely got something. Our friend here, he’s not saying, won’t stop for nothing. Just keeps walkin’ on, and don’t that just speak volumes?”
“I still want to see his head.”
“Why?”
“For the way it ticks and clicks. Guy’s determined like a bug! See, my thing is, I enjoy watching the clockworks turn, the spring unwinding, just so. I figure this one’s wound up real tight. Also to check for possible brain damage.”
“Laz, you’re relentless. But I must say, convincing. Our friend though, he seems the type to keep his thoughts to himself. Not very forthcoming, like. The police can be that way.”
“Well… isn’t all sharing’s done willingly, as you well know. Seems this one’d share nothing with us at all, if he could help it.”
“But can he? Can he help it? That’s the question. One of them, anyhow.”
“You said it yourself: he is determined.”
“Almost to a fault. What do you think it’s gonna take to crack this nut, make him spill a little of his brain-meat out, damaged or no?”
“We might enter in through the mouth…”
“We might. Gotta open the mouth up first. Wouldn’t it be easier through the eyes?”
“Think that’ll get us where we need to go?”
“Seems a more direct approach.”
“Here’s what… you take the eyes, I’ll go through the mouth. We’ll see who gets there first.”
“Done. But…”
“But what?”
“If he is a neutral angel?”
“Your theory, not mine.”
“But what if he is?”
“Then we burn up in fire.”
“That’s what I don’t like, Laz. That’s what I don’t like.”
“But the workings… the mechanism… the little clicks and movements…”
“Your thing, Laz, not mine.”
“Aw, Abe, are you really doing this? You’re gonna let him get away.”
“He walks in the clear light, Laz. He’s got the law, a lady, a purpose…”
“But there’s something wrong with his head. He walks funny. And the hat don’t fit. It don’t fit!”
“He has shown us his credentials.”
“Credentials… You’re letting him get away.”
“Alright, Laz, alright. If we’re gonna do this, let’s do this.”
“No more sitting on the fence?”
“Nope. It’s in with both feet. Total commitment, from here on.”
“Here goes!”
“This is it!”
“AYUP!”
“…”
“…”
“Uh, Laz… What’s this?”
“Where are ya, Abe? What’s… what this?”
“I think… we might’ve made a mistake.”
“I don’t see anything here. Not anything at all.”
“Well I wouldn’t call it not anything. There’s definitely a something. Something…”
“There’s a space.”
“There’s like a hole.”
“There’s a really big space in here, Abe. I’m looking for the mechanism, but I don’t see the mechanism. What I see is a really big space.”
“Is this what a neutral angel looks like?”
“I was kind of expecting… more like a clockwork.”
“More like
fire.”
“More like…”
“The severity of angels, Laz, more like that, and in the clear light of the law – not to flutter, not one bit – that’s what I thought. Maybe. But this?”
“I just thought there’d be more clockworks, is all. Where are ya, Abe? I can’t see you.”
“And I don’t see you, Laz. Neither can I find the way out.”
“We’d go out as we came in, don’t we?”
“Yeah, well, how’d we do that, Laz? Can you see the opening? Can you see anything?”
“I wouldn’t call it anything.”
“What do you see?”
“Not anything.”
“Damn it, Laz…”
“Abe, damn it, we’re stuck. Are we stuck? We’re stuck!”
“Damn it. What do we do?”
“We sit?”
“We wait.”
“We split?”
“We wait.”
“We sink?”
“We… die.”
“We’re dead already, Abe, you fool.”
“Is that what we are? Belly up in the beast!”
“Like fish gone milky-eyed and floating…”
“We may need to make the whole world then, Laz, if we’re to live in it again.”
“Make the world? From this?”
“From anything.”
“I wouldn’t call this anything.”
TEN
The World
[Late Winter, 2006]
Proteus found himself back at the apartment. He didn’t remember how he’d got there. Yet he stood at the window looking out over the courtyard, holding the heavy curtain aside and staring down at the frozen mud. It looked like the moon. At this particular hour, late in the afternoon, coming soon on the evening with all its diminishings, there were few people crossing its width, only some at the far perimeter, distant specks on the horizon, bundled against the cold. The window was also cold. Without touching it, he could feel the warmth of the room sucked out around him. The cold was something that reached out to touch him and laid its fingers deliberately over his face and skin.
“Where…?” he started to say, then stopped abruptly, confused by the sound of his own voice in the flat, unresonant space.
Where’s my soul? he thought. Is it there? He didn’t see it. Is it there? He didn’t see it anywhere. Not walking over the frozen mud, not coming any closer, not hovering nearby. And here he was supposed to have the thing already, or so the old man had said. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see it.
But what did the old man know?
Actually. The old man seemed to know something.
But he didn’t feel the least like he’d gotten his soul back. He still felt divided, diminished, and only a part of himself. Or so he imagined. Really, he didn’t know. He didn’t know how much the part that was missing constituted of the whole of himself. He could scarcely imagine what feeling like the whole of himself might be. He didn’t know that he’d ever been one entire person, much less how exactly the division had come about. But here he was. He was a shadow now. He stood at the window now. He looked out, he stared out, to the courtyard – if a courtyard it could be called – and now witnessed the unfoldment of the frozen ground, its stasis, its bleaching away of colors, its scratch-line of paved diagonals, diminishing into the distance, divisionary lines as much as pathways, and he could see toward the skyline beyond it, the mountains beyond that, the cloud cover above everything, an unbroken distance.
There was this: the person: everything. He was perhaps a ghost.
The walls held a rank and oily smell.
The curtain seemed largely of plastic.
His nose had started to run.
And into the distance: the flat and middle distance. There was that. He dropped the curtain and turned back to the room.
•
Was the part of himself missing truly his soul? He called it that – or others had called it that – as a matter of convenience. It was a piece that was gone. He considered the shape of the space inside him. He considered that volume of dislocated self.
The room was also darkening, as it was outside, with the day’s retreat of sunlight, into murk. There was still enough light to see by, though things, in a general way, grew hazy and indistinct, and things that were already that way became more so. It wasn’t much, to be sure. The apartment was little more than a box with some fixtures. There was a long table and a single, wooden chair in the kitchen, and a plate left on the table, covered in a film of grease. A spoon sat beside it, cockeyed. He’d touched neither of these things. The kitchen was empty of actual food. There was the plastic chair with the metal legs in the living room where he stood, which he’d set aright when he’d found it. Beside the chair were stacked a number of Sheriff Friendly’s notebooks, spiral-bound, hand-writ in tiny letters, their covers in so many colors, worn, bent, creased, crushed. The notebooks had been the focus of such intense concentration and effort – first of the sheriff himself in their creation, now of Proteus in their apprehension – that they should have reasonably burst into flames and burned everything, but that did not happen.
Instead, a terrible stillness lay about everything. The air in the apartment was flat and dead, and sound did not carry. When he cleared his throat, when he spoke a word – “When…” he said – but his voice fell mutedly in its flight from his head and went nowhere. It was useless. Gravity itself went wrong.
“When…” he said again, then barked once, then gave up. It was no use. Making sound was of no use.
He put his hand to his face. He had a face. It was right there.
•
From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly
The outblast of radiating mindstuff is a signal, meant as one or not. It is. Blue signal. Blue-white signal, bluered. The transmission of the exploded headparts: brain, bone, facestuff. Blue, white, and red. It goes out, it flies, it signals, this king, to make connection with others of like kind, in sympathetic, or so-thinking. The. Sends to others – others? what what others? – filaments of substance, of like-kind substance, to people. People? What are people? So imagined, so defined: the others who are or might be people. Did I do that? Good question. Did I just blow up? Good. Seems I did, but I don’t think. That was the signal: my FACE. Pieces of it fall splat on the floor. This is the transmission: a picture, spherical, primary, sovereign. It is like a net, it is cast out, cast wide, it flies, it is pulled back in, and it catches and it gathers in its selfsame, like-same substance, i.e. the people, and it winnows by its selfsame self, i.e. people, it winnows off the strands of notwithstanding, the, they, they, the others. The people. I.E. Why, way, why come all the way out here? Might be a question. Seems a reasonable question, reasonably asked. Here away, here of all places, all this way? Otherend dot Oftheworld dot.
This is the place, right? (Never allowed that doubt before, now it’s too late.)
This is the place, has to be, it’s where I’ve come. OtherDotEnd. Dot.
Limping now. Have NO HEAD. Nope. None. They might think dot. They. They might ask dot dot dot questions, any number of questions, but not hear the answer. BECAUSE THE HEAD HAS BLOWN WIDE OPEN BOOM and IT IS A BLOWNOPEN HEAD like that and can’t talk. Ears gone flying, face gone flying, bone, brain BOOM. He has gone into the sky. He is not of the Earth. This kind, this king, he flies away from you. Fall splat onto the floor. But the questions are all blank, the answers are all blank; must, by definition, be. They won’t hear it. Flies away. Because I am or am not here – no, here; no, not here; no – nothing will happen, nothing can. The un-being, BLOWN. I know how this. If I make the call they hear the call. They. They. But if I make it, only I respond, and I am here am not here –
•
Proteus noticed, either despite or because of the gathering darkness in the room, something about the arrangement in the kitchen, awkward as it was, of the long table, the single chair, the greasy plate and spoon beside it. In the dim yellow light. He stood, observing this arrangement. The
re was something about it…
He stood. He shifted a little to the left, looked.
No, he thought, that’s not quite it. Not how it should be.
He moved in closer, put his nose in near the plate and smelled it. It smelled, itself, like nothing, however thickly the aroma of mutton and vinegar had permeated the walls all around. The plate itself had no smell. He moved back, shifted a little to the right.
No, not quite.
He picked up the spoon and tossed it. It clattered against a wall and fell to the linoleum.
There. Now it was right. Almost. But what else? Something…
•
From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly
A PARTIAL LIST OF QUALITIES AND CONDITIONS AS PERTAINING TO THE OBJECT, ITS PRIMACY, ITS EFFICACIOUSNESS, AND ITS SOVEREIGNTY
1. The articulate language of common objects.
2. The variable requirements of visibility, insofar as some objects are visible and some are not.
3. The similarities of one kind of object to another, as related or unrelated to their visibility.
4. The primacy of certain objects, and of the arrangements of certain objects in relation to one another.
5. Persons and the arrangements of persons, and how persons are or may be objects, and are also arranged in relation to other objects, visible or not, or persons.
6. Persons may also be visible.
7. Persons as objects may also be arranged in relation to themselves, as they are to other objects, even if they themselves are not visible, as if they themselves were other objects, though they are not.
•
Once night had fallen and all traces of the day were gone from the sky, lampposts threw their light down in brief cones of sodium-vapor yellow at intervals over the courtyard, and far fewer people scampered about, moving from this side to that or somewhere down the middle. Though there were still some – specks overwhelmed by the indifferent ground. Proteus stood at the window, perched, his nose near the glass, watching the one figure directly outside on the frozen ground. He’d found him there the moment he pulled the curtain aside. Now he watched and waited. He wanted to see what might develop of this.