by Brian Short
The figure in the courtyard stood straight out from his window, several yards back, close enough to be noticed in some detail, far enough away to be mistaken as insignificant to someone not watching so carefully as Proteus. The figure stared up toward him, gaze fixed, twisting his long, thin body back and forth, this way and that. He let his arms flap out centrifugally and wrap around himself, then turned to twist in the other direction, windmilling, doing it again. And again.
“Davis,” Proteus said aloud, fogging the window with his breath. He waited for it to clear away, then said, “You don’t belong here,” and fogged the glass up once more. The twisting, tall figure blurred through the self-made mist.
Proteus dropped the curtain, blocking the courtyard out. He stood for a moment, staring into the orange pleats, then he pulled the curtain aside again.
The tall man was still in the courtyard, exactly where he’d been. He twisted this way, then that. His arms flapped, fell, flapped, etc. Not enough light from the nearest lamp reached his face to illumine it in any detail, though Proteus still could see, enough at least, the self-standing spikes at the top of the man’s head the brush of his short-shorn hair made.
“If you’re here,” Proteus said, fogging the glass again, “I know enough to not ask…” he wiped the pane clear, “why you’ve come. When you have not come, you’re simply here. This is good. What you expect of me… I’ve only two cigarettes left, and you can’t have them. I will smoke them myself.”
The figure twisted and watched.
Proteus let go the curtain and it again fell shut.
•
From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly
“What about me makes you think of her?” she’d asked.
“I suppose it’s the hair,” I told her, “the dark hair. The long, dark hair.”
“My hair’s not long anymore. I’ve cut it.” She ran her own fingers through it. “You’ve not seen it long.”
“Still,” I said. “When I first met her, hers was short too. Then she grew it long. And she played guitar, and sang. Like you. The blues. But it was a long time ago. In Los Angeles.”
“I never liked LA,” she said, and took a long pull on her cigarette.
Normally, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone smoking in my bedroom, or in my house at all. But I let her do this. That is, I didn’t try to stop her. “But you’ve been?” I asked.
“I wasn’t there for very long. It didn’t work out. I just never took to the place.”
“I lived there for a number of years,” I said, “but I never took to it either. Nothing ever quite seemed real…”
Vivianne pulled another long drag from her cigarette. It smelled wretched to me, and I wondered that the stink would ever leave the sheets. But I’d never seen anyone enjoy a smoke so much as she did right then. Except…
“Did she…” She turned onto her side to face me. “Did she have a metal plate in her head too? Like I do?” She knocked her knuckles against her skull.
I thought about what to say. “Yes,” I told her finally, “she did. A metal plate. Just like you.”
Satisfied by that, she lay back again and looked toward the ceiling. I ran my finger along her thigh: soft, but muscled, lean and tan.
“Maybe it was me,” Vivianne sighed, resignedly.
“But you don’t remember any of that.”
“Nope.”
For her, it hadn’t happened yet. So what I said was, “It was a long time ago. Ten years. It probably wasn’t you. You just remind me a lot of her.” But what I was thinking, what I was so desperate to find out – and maybe somehow to prevent – was why she hadn’t disappeared, like all the others. Maybe it was the metal plate.
Vivianne got up from the bed and walked over to the window, pulled the curtain aside and looked out. A warm square of streetlight found its way across her breast and belly. She said, “I’ve been in some empty rooms before, but this…” The cigarette in her hand glowed redly as she took another pull.
“This is really empty. I know. I meant for it to be that way.”
“I’ve been in some rooms…” She looked out at something far away, and I couldn’t believe that anything was really out there.
“Let me get you something to use as an ashtray.” I stood and went to the kitchen, moving a little awkwardly for being naked. In a cupboard there was a small dish, one I didn’t use much, and once I got back to the bedroom, she was gone. The smell of tobacco still hung in the air. The curtain at the window where she’d stood swung slightly in the light breeze. Her clothes were still strewn about the hardwood floor toward the corner where she’d left them, but Vivianne was decidedly gone. Just to make certain, I checked the bathroom, which was off the hallway, but it was empty, its door open and dark inside.
I couldn’t say that I was that surprised.
So I took the small dish back to the cupboard where I’d found it, then sat down in the chair at the table, and stared for some time at the table’s wooden surface, at the grain of the wood that showed through large chips and gouges in its paint. After several moments like this, I got an idea. I went back to the cupboard, again took out the dish and put it on the table. I rummaged through Vivianne’s clothes, then remembered her pack of cigarettes was still on the floor beside the bed, where she’d left them. I took one out and looked at it. It was an off-brand that I wasn’t familiar with. I took the cigarette back to the kitchen, realized I hadn’t thought to bring her lighter as well, but decided instead to light it off the gas burner of the stove, almost burning my cheek as I did so. I inhaled and immediately my throat closed down in protest, making me choke and cough. “Jeezus,” I mumbled, “how the fuck do people…” and then crushed the thing out in the dish, still coughing, belching out little puffs of smoke.
I sat back down in the chair, slightly sickened, and after a moment thought, I should put some pants on. But I didn’t get up.
My entire head seemed to smell and taste like smoke, from the inside.
I will sell the bullets from my gun, I thought, I will get money. I will be granted passage. I will float –
•
When he pulled the curtains open again, it was daytime. Wan light spilled through the window, filtered by a thin layer of cloud, and touched his face. He couldn’t see his face. He couldn’t see what sunlight did to it. He couldn’t see the gauntness of his fleshless cheeks, much less understand, with any alarm, the hollow look of his eyes. What he saw was the courtyard (so-called), square, gray, vast, frozen, and the armed, legged dots moving furiously fast across and through it. Perhaps they pumped their little extremities against the cold, or perhaps they only seemed as fast as all that. But the single speck that didn’t rush from one end of the court to the other, the only spot, bright red, that stood straight out from his window, five floors below and looking directly up at him, jumped at the moment it knew it had been seen, raised its arms up in victory V, hello – a red puff, happy.
Byambaa waved at him spiritedly. She jumped again, raising her short arms higher, her hands up into the air. Could Proteus, from this distance, really see the great smile on her face? No. Someone thinking rationally would’ve said, no, that wasn’t possible. To see her smile from so far away. Yet she jumped into the air, again and again, waving, and wasn’t that enough?
Would anything be enough?
He let go the curtain and it fell shut again. He was protected from light.
She seemed enthusiastic. Her confrontation with the future must not have been so bad after all, and she was alright. All was forgiven. But how had she found him? He couldn’t remember ever telling the young woman where he’d stayed.
The magic must be working.
He resumed the experiment.
At the long table in the kitchen, in the chair before the plate, he took again to his position; the place, the plate, the posture, the tableau – as he’d come to call it – that made the whole world. Such acts of creation as these had their traditions of darkened rooms, which was a thing commonl
y known – or only known to him, it may be true. Or perhaps he did not know it either. But acts of creation in darkened rooms were the things he now occupied himself with, as his predecessor had done, as he now must. The narrowing of options had left him to this and this only, and this was the law: all not forbidden was compulsory. Nature had dictated it. His nature. He.
He bent over. He stretched out one arm and leaned his weight against the arm. He crooked the arm and bent the elbow. The elbow deflected the angle of the arm. The forearm bent back. The hand formed a fist. He rested the fist against his face and likewise his face to the fist, and the fist indented the fallow skin of the cheek, and he looked down toward the plate, he faced the plate and waited. He waited for the world to be made.
But there was still something about this not right. Why wasn’t it working? Something wasn’t right. What about this wasn’t right?
He couldn’t think. He took a cigarette, one of two remaining, it was an act of desperation, and lit the thing off the electric burner, and sat back down and worried. He looked at the plate. He smoked the cigarette. He smoked and looked at the plate. Its greasy film shown in the electric light, reflecting back a flare of light, the reflection of the bulb, otherwise offering nothing. When the ash had grown long on the cigarette, he flicked the cigarette. The ash fell on the plate. The small pile of ash rested near the rim of the plate, in the midst of its greasiness. It broke the flare’s reflection of the electric light. It seemed near wistful, this. It was a broken light.
He stared at it.
The light needs breaking. At the ends, see? Where it sits. The light needs bending. The interruption of.
He’d found the missing piece.
ELEVEN
Outside Fake City
[Outside Time]
It was morning again, the light just breaking, when I arrived at the limits of Fake City and the edge of the wide sand desert. The change was as abrupt as unlikely, but there it was. At the edge of a furthest suburb, the last brick of the last fallen building, I’d poked my head out across the membrane of the limit and broken face-first through. Where the city stopped, it was absolutely no more. There was nothing of it left. And the scrabble and brush, and the bits of jagged rock, and the distant mountains, and the not-as-distant mountains, and dry dirt and flat hardscrabble, and the snakes and the lizards, and all the hard-shelled bugs, tough as little army tanks, and those far, far-overhead specks, the black and sweeping shapes of buzzards, began. This happened all at once. The sky even was different here, and that too was all of a sudden. Gone was all the massed haze of smog. A bowl of blue heaven wrapped overhead; a gradient sky, the deepest of it the most directly above.
This suited me fine. I was done with the city.
So I scanned the wide horizon – knowing that was what one did in the desert – I scanned the wide horizon for what otherwise did not fit. I looked for my friend. My…
The shiny, shiny – or no, not so shiny… not so…
And there it was: a flash, something glinting, a reflected glare of sunlight. A little bit dully. That would be right. Flickering? Why should it be flickering?
But that would have to be the one. Flickering. Dully.
I’d find my friend. It was there. It wasn’t so far off now. What was once in the sky now wasn’t in the sky. Not anymore. It had leveled, it had attained to the earth, attained gravity, attained solidity. It had… attained.
•
I kept walking, steady, steady… Each foot fell flat and left marks in the earth – shoe marks, like footsteps on the moon – and the tough little bugs went to scurry from my feet, and the little lizards whipped their tails and turned and hid, and overhead, up above, the sunlight – infinite, worried, resolute, a Diaphane of photons, of wind from the sun (the all-source of wind, the all-source of metal and of blood) – these moments, each was captured by a wavered imprint, which otherwise did not speak, and though my legs were heavy I was light, and I hadn’t felt the sun (all-source) for something like… for something like… I had forgotten the sun. Because, being dead, the body was no body, and the creatures, being frightened, scurried further to their dark places, where some found holes in the ground, and the scrub reached out to scratch at me, and I was scratched (body or no), and I felt the sun, and prickle-pear cacti flapped their pods and spent quills and languished.
These were the days of meaning. The personal and the impersonal. These were the days of forgiving, and I was forced to forgive the sun. These were days of forgetting, and I had forgotten everything. The living me, who I was. And there was little, almost nothing of it left, this person – all of it was dispersed, dried off like the morning mist. But that was because I was dead, and it was good to be dead, and there were the smells of dust, and of the body, and of no body, of the… was this the smell of the soul?
Was I a soul?
I figured myself a fragment. All of it, or only some small part; it was the same.
The piece hides the whole, the whole is inside the piece, and as above the pieces, as above, the broken bits. Footprints, fall the earth, the scratching scrub. Why wouldn’t the scratching scrub? I had to ask, why wouldn’t the scratching scrub?
But it wouldn’t, no.
The metal grew closer as I grew closer to it.
I was, wait… a soul?
Perihelion!
The bird-flaps at the top of the sky – something shivered, I felt it flutter, something in air, and I heard words, or no, not words but the small shuddering of a body falling and thump! There near next to me, some lump of meat hit the earth, hollow-bodied, and a small cloud upraised. I turned to look, startled. A splotch of dark feathers, something dead in the dust; a buzzard corpse lay just-fallen from the sun (the all-source of everything!), because everything dies (you know this), everything dies, even the dead, even the eaters of the already dead.
Beyond this, it: Mosquito. I called it that. Near now, metal-bright, prising limits out of nothing. The closer I got, the closer it was. With a semi-reflective sheen, it made, I suspected, a heavy thump also when it fell, or maybe no sound at all. Perihelios, a near-sun, the reflective source of every image. But this was no fragment of anything. This was only itself, this thing. If it grew, it stayed exactly the same. If it shrank, it was no different. It grew heavy. It weighed nothing. The simple explanation was a crash landing. Sometimes objects did that: they crashed. If it was a machine, then I was a machine, pressing footsteps into dirt until I was there.
Mosquito was much smaller than I’d thought.
When I reached the object, it stood barely any taller than I did. Maybe eight or ten feet, altogether, though much was buried in the dirt. The impact crater displaced around it, where Mosquito had stuck the ground, formed the shape of a wave, though one frozen in the earth. But the object itself was whole, and therefore good. Some amount of cactus had got flattened into mulch. This was also good.
I looked up, back toward the city, where it was gray and the air fogged with murk, to see if there were maybe any hole it the sky where it had been. I couldn’t find any hole.
This might be the everlasting source. Is it? A species of dog, or people of the dog, who barked at the hole in the sun (the all-source, the maker of the wind, the sort of thing dogs would bark at). The warp and weft of parting impressed in the filaments of sun’s silky threads, the. Diaphane; two, not more, two within the Diaphane.
This thing of the city. It is of the sun. Where should the city be now? I looked: the.
Fake City stood a rank and heavy thing, all the colors pulled out from it; a skyline, a haze of brown smog, opposing the base purity of the desert beside it. The two were, of course, incommensurate. Never together in the same place at the same time. Fake City, I supposed, must be an image for this to happen. As would be the desert as well. The two. Yet these two things occurred, as image.
The.
The object… (and why would I call it object, when I already knew it had a name?) the object rested heavy in a divot of dirt made with itself, refl
ecting in a baffled way back the sun’s own image, back the light, back the.
The.
The weight and volume. The apparent occurrence of – The it: thing. Object. It may have resisted the name, and that was why.
I reached a hand forward because I wanted… But the closer I…
The.
The more my head expanded to fisheye distance and everything bent, fingers spread, distance contracted, and my flap-arms felt to fit me less.
Bent around every certain space of volume, every volume of space, and though space itself bent around the object, around the it-thing, while the object bent space around, there was also a volume around the object, bending, a certain space.
I pulled my hand back. It returned more or less to a normal hand-shape, unbent. I imagined that the surface of the object would have to be cold. Despite the heat, the surface would be cold, would have to be cold, owing to its nature, being a very cold, cold object. Yes, that was it, wasn’t it? Among the things that I knew, I knew that. I also knew…
If I approach the object. A terrible false distance, bent fisheye, it was true. People of the fish; people of the eye. But that wasn’t the worst of it, because the worst was I myself was bending, that is, my mind – like magnets, the two same ends, pushed together, pushed one another apart. My mind spread open; it was forced to spread open. It was going to break my mind open.
That was okay. What were minds for, after all?
I stepped back, breathing. No wind, only heat, and stillness; the sun, the dirt, the hole in the dirt, the sun.
I looked up: where was the sun?
And so I pressed ahead, and pressed again harder, pressed against the edge of it. I felt my mind stretch wide, felt it shiver (weary in its width, blue above, blue in the center; the jagged distant and the not so distant mountains a gray horizontal scratch; the warm, wide ground; the rock, the cactus reaches, giving quill and shiver; a hole, a stretch, a scratch) and broke.