New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  The woman cocked her head to one side and raised an eyebrow, reminding me of someone. She was pretty. That thought came to me from somewhere, as if dropped into my head, and in those words: She Is Pretty. It was not untrue. But that thought, in those words, and the fact of her prettiness were two separate things, and did not otherwise seem related.

  “Do you know,” I asked her, “that I was two people before? I’m not now – I’m no one now – and everything is so much better. Listen! I feel alive! Unsteady? Well, sort of, yes, but alive! The difference is between the one thing and the other thing. It always is. You must know something about that, yourself. A woman, a woman – one who is pretty, yes, like they say – you must know something of that. I’ll bet that you do! But can you understand why it is that I need to get to the desert? Where there is only the one thing and not the other? Can you see that it must be this way? Why I have no choice?”

  She blinked. Her eyes, unusually large, or so they seemed, held little but the curiosity of one thinking creature for another, of what or how they might think. Otherwise, her face remained impassive. She may have understood me entirely, or she may have understood me not at all. I couldn’t tell.

  “I have nothing,” I explained.

  As if in acceptance, she nodded slowly. Her straight, dark hair slid from behind an ear, and she brushed it back with the graceful sweep of a hand.

  “I have nothing,” I repeated, “but I am as wide, and as empty, as any room. I have been studying, and studying greatly, and have acquainted myself with the fundaments of law. Were I a worthy law man, I may be a better man, but my career was short-lived, and in all honesty I was never well-suited to the station. And yet I find myself again so bedecked, adorned, and suitably decorated, and you are witness – these articles: those belonging to a police man, a law man. A man…” I felt myself grasped by strong hands from either arm and pulled back, away from the counter. The ticket agent’s eyes remained on mine. She looked into me, not coldly, not without compassion – yet these things may have been hard to read – but with that same curiosity, however abstract, of one creature for another creature of a different kind; one whose threat, if ever real, had been neutralized. “A man…” I continued, as I was pulled away, “of some, or any sort?”

  The guards carried machine rifles and wore bulletproof jackets. They held me tightly enough that I could not move either arm at all, neither could I move myself in any direction but where they led me. But I had no inclination to struggle; I simply went where I was taken, and there was nothing besides this I wanted anyhow. The day was long, and as long was the day, it was full of wonders.

  •

  The room where they took me was as long as it was wide, its floor tiled, lit by fluorescents, and cold; coldly unfurnished except for a few cold folding chairs and a cheaply-constructed folding table with false wood grain, where a grim-looking official sat, his face dour, his complexion sour, his eyes dark, flat, watery pools of indifference. I was pressed down to sit in the chair opposite him, where the two of us faced one another, and for a time, said nothing.

  The two security men with their rifles stood back near to the door, remaining in the room to either side of me. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there.

  The official at the table scowled at me, lips downturned, brow furrowed. He seemed very unhappy.

  I smiled a small, shy smile.

  His expression did not change.

  My smile faltered.

  Since he was a small man, rather smaller than myself, to look into my eyes, for him, meant to look up slightly. His eyeballs showed more white beneath the iris than above. As if to compensate for this disadvantage of height, his blue uniform – I couldn’t tell if it was a police uniform or an army officer’s uniform, or what, really – was loaded down with medals and colored tags and flags and ornamental shiny things, official-looking things. It was quite impressive, in fact.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed. I tried to smile again, but found that I was unsure what my face might actually be doing. I’d become so self-conscious that my lips only seemed to stretch into a tight grimace, and that was not what I wanted at all. So I relaxed my face and let it go slack, as utterly expressionless as I could manage, and once I’d gotten it as blank as I could – and rested my face that way for a moment or two – I tried the smile again. Now it was only worse. My lips twitched spasmodically at either end into what I was sure was not in the least bit a smile, not even a little. I couldn’t say what it was. But not that.

  The official, without moving anything in his face at all, darkened. This fascinated me. I’d never seen anything like it, and wondered how he’d done it. I was by now, I think, openly staring at him.

  He barked.

  The sound startled me. It was a surprisingly forceful sound, and coming from such a small man – I had to remind myself that he wasn’t really that small, but only seemed it – and from nowhere, so all at once, it made me jump and blink with amazement.

  Now his expression had changed. He seemed to be waiting for something from me.

  He barked again, a string of angry sounds, and slammed the table with his fist.

  My eyes opened wide with astonishment. I couldn’t help it. My mouth too. My mouth had fallen open into a wide O when my jaw dropped, and I couldn’t help it.

  The official man was breathing hard. His chest moved in and out, and all the small flags and metals with it. And then he stood so sudden, and with such force, that the chair where he’d been sitting was thrust back with the force and fell over on its side, and I fell back also – so surprised was I that I fell back in my chair and fell over and went, “Guh!” and I think that was the first sound that I’d made in the room. My metal chair clattered and folded up on itself.

  The men with their rifles approached and picked me up by my shoulders, set the folding chair aright and pressed me again into it. One obligingly brushed the dust off my back.

  The official stood glowering, but now something in his face had softened, or so I imagined. I imagined – perhaps that was all – that he even now appeared rather sad. He no longer faced me. He looked down now, down and to the floor at his side, as if embraced in sadness and ruminative with deep thought. Yes, clearly he was contemplating something, considering the angles and sides of something, some idea, something he did not like. Perhaps I only imagined that last part – that he did not like it. Perhaps it only seemed that way.

  He looked up, looked to one of the guards, said something that I didn’t understand, and sent him away with a gesture of his hand which, slight and subtle though it was, was also clear enough: go, go now, do this thing. Do this thing.

  I was utterly amazed by this transaction. The efficiency.

  And though I may have read too much into the weighted silence that followed, it seemed to me this official man was uncomfortable with it. He wouldn’t look at me now. It seemed that he was done with me. He put all of his attention into the spot on the floor where his eyes now rested. He remained where he stood. He stared at the floor. He stared hard at the floor and nothing moved.

  Eventually the door to the room was opened again and the guard came back inside, now with a young woman at his side, slim and tall, wearing a blue suit jacket over a silky, white blouse. She had the same dark hair as everyone. She resembled in some regards the woman I’d met at the ticket desk, especially in the eyes, though as large and wide as the ticket woman’s eyes had been, this woman’s were larger and wider, even more curious, and somewhat more serene. She grabbed a folding chair from a stack leaned up against the wall and set it beside mine, facing mine, and sat herself down into it.

  She looked at me. She did not smile. I saw that her face was white with powder, highlighted with rosy blush, and smooth with youth. She could not have been thirty years old. And she betrayed little emotion beyond a certain detached curiosity as she said, in clear if halting English, “Hello. My name is Byambaa. I will be an interpreter for your interrogation.”

  Byambaa must
have been a rather common name.

  “You do speak English? Do you not?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay.” She looked toward the official man.

  He ignored her, but turned to me now, and spoke a string of angry-sounding words in rapid fire.

  Byambaa blinked her eyes and nodded a little, blinked again and again nodded, just a little, then said, “It is known you are in this country illegally and are likely a spy. You have been watched since your arrival. You have been seen meeting with certain individuals.” With that, she stopped and waited for the official to continue.

  He barked another string of angry words that seemed to continue for a rather long time.

  All the while, the interpreter blinked and nodded, blinked and nodded, and waited for him to finish. When he finally paused, she turned again to me and said, “We expect for you to tell us… who you work for and what sort of information you have stolen from our industrial facilities. We expect you to identify who your contacts in this country are. We already know who these people are and who they report to, so for you to lie to us is… no good. We expect for you to tell us what you know about your foreign agencies in America, Russia, and the European Union. You will tell us also about the UFO contacts made in South America. You… will not lie to us. We already know these things and will know if you are lying…” She waited, and turned again to the official.

  He barked a few more angry words, all run together very quickly.

  She looked to me and said, “You will tell us about the future.”

  •

  The one guard remaining who could manage still to function escorted me – and far more gently this time, and with his rifle slung over his shoulder – to the security checkpoint. His face was pale and he seemed rather sick, but he hurried me along with reasonable dispatch and urgency, wanting me on that plane even more than I did. I dropped my rucksack onto the belt to be x-rayed, then into a tub placed my hat, my badge, and firearm in its holster, while I walked through the box-like metal detector.

  The bag was of no interest to the security personnel at all. The objects of magic, on the other hand, aroused their curiosity greatly. Of the two inspectors at the other side of the belt, one picked up the badge, pinched gingerly between two fingers, and stared into it, apparently surprised by his own reflection there, or some quality revealed about it. There was a mocking smile on his face, and he made a joke that I didn’t understand, but I smiled and nodded all the same as I put the fucked-up hat back onto my head. The other inspector pulled the gun out from its holster and studied the thing closely, holding it up, turning it over and back. He found the latch to unlock and swing the cylinder out from the barrel – which was more than I knew about it – and spun the revolving chamber, looking inside.

  He asked me something. I smiled. He asked me it again. I just smiled. I didn’t know what he was saying.

  Pointing to the revolver, he held up five fingers, then pointed to the hole where a sixth round should’ve been loaded, where instead was only a spent casing, nodding and grinning. Understanding at last what he meant, I made a slow pantomime of drawing an imaginary gun from beside my hip, holding it up and firing, saying, “Bang!”

  He laughed at that, and I did also, and he handed the weapon and holster back to me. The other returned my badge with due respect. I looked back to see that the armed guard had already left me behind. I watched his back as he turned quickly toward the nearest restroom to disappear inside. I continued out the gate of the terminal and toward the two-engine turboprop waiting on the tarmac, where the other passengers were already climbing the portable stairway up and through the open hatch, and loped along to catch up.

  THE GOBI

  SIXTEEN

  From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

  [Winter, 2005]

  What gentle shape is sleep for us? What waits there? And what is coming? I ask myself this. Is it the hollow body: the corporate body? Of course. I’ve been aware, dimly, for some small time, of their arrivals. The call went out, the police are responding, all officers of the law and its servants. They leave a wake in their arrivals, each one, some current in the air, some discharge, an imprint, a scent, and I can feel it. They know how to find me. They know not to find me. They know that I will reach them when it’s time. We make, every man, woman, or thing of the law, we make the body, the hollow body, the corporate form of kind. Waiting in sleep, in stone, sand, and scrub, we become the body of the dead or distant gods, and this, to feed our souls back to them, while they in turn feed and are eaten again by us. The eating gods are eating us, as we are eating the gods. God is good.

  SEVENTEEN

  The World

  [Early Spring, 2006]

  I reach out and I can touch the ten thousand things. Yes. My fingers sweep the dust. Yes. There are objects, and I am one: a thing with them. Yes, yes. I begin with a grain of sand.

  Everything is exactly the same. I’ve been told about this, and it is no less true than anything.

  At the edge of the city, where Dalanzadgad ends and merges with the Gobi, the roads are long ruts in the dirt, and a long, straight line of telephone poles without wires follows the road out for some miles into the emptiness. So I walked at a regular pace with my pack slung over my back, the hat on my head, the badge on my chest, and the gun at my hip. The sun was a spot near the wavering horizon, and the further that I walked, the closer the sun grew to that horizon, and if I stopped, the sun stopped also, though the horizon, such as it was, continued its wavering.

  There were hills, mountains, hills.

  The dirt blistered.

  Stopped, still, I watched the sun not move.

  When I resumed walking, the sun dipped suddenly lower, closer to the wavering ground, the hills and mountains, etc. The earth reached forward, up to touch the sun, and started eating it, it started eating the sun, because the sun was red and ripe like a fruit, and big and swollen like a fruit.

  There was a certain buzz. It came from somewhere, approaching.

  Up ahead, I saw a small dot.

  The buzz grew louder, the small dot larger. A trail of dust fanned out behind it.

  A rider on a motorcycle.

  Well, now, what do you know?

  I watched the rider and bike get closer, getting slowly bigger all the way. The buzz seemed more a ripping sound, the closer that it came, as if the air were being steadily, carefully torn open along a seam.

  The rider must have seen me too. He raised an arm up in greeting. I raised my arm up too.

  Not paying attention to my feet, I took a misstep and stumbled.

  The rider, still distant, also faltered. I saw the bike wobble. I saw him recover. The bike straightened.

  I stopped walking. I waited.

  The bike faltered once more and righted.

  I held my hand up to shield my eyes against the sun, directly as it rested at the edge of the earth.

  The bike flipped over in the air.

  The rider flew and tumbled.

  Both fell flat, though not at once, and stopped, and the sound of the rip through the air stopped also, and everything stopped, and I dropped my bag in the dirt behind me and ran panting, barely able to breathe, toward the heap of the man and the bike beside him. But I need not have worried, because in a moment he got up again, dusted off his dirty robe, and walked over to his overturned bike and started kicking it and swearing. I stopped beside him. His face was red. He swore a red streak in Mongolian in pure anger, and his anger was a stream of a pure and perfectstream of a pure and perfect thing. I’d never seen such perfect anger. And then it stopped. Neither he nor I could breathe. We stood panting, not getting enough breath to breathe, and needing air. I noticed that he seemed like a young man, though he may not have been young at all. There was a cut on his face that was bleeding.

  He said something. I said something. No one understood anything.

  He kicked his fallen motorcycle.

  I looked down at the machine l
aying on its side. On the tank was a logo in Russian. The motorcycle seemed indifferent. I looked up at the rider. I shrugged.

  He kicked the bike again and looked to me questioningly.

  I shrugged.

  Looking more closely at me, curious now, he pointed at my hat.

  I shrugged.

  He made a gesture of grabbing a nonexistent hat from his own head and crumpling it up, throwing it onto the ground and stomping on it, then looked up again to me, a question on his face.

  I shrugged.

  He stepped in more closely and looked at the badge pinned to my shirt. He looked up to my face, then down again at the badge. Then he pantomimed, as if he held a cloth in his hand, rubbing the badge to a shine. He looked at me, a question in his eyes.

  I shrugged.

  Unexpectedly, he pounded my chest twice with his flattened hand and looked at me. When I didn’t respond, he did it again and looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  He pointed at the gun in the holster. I took it out.

  He pointed his own hand, as if it were a gun, at the sky.

  I pointed the gun in my hand at the sky.

  He made an imaginary trigger-pulling motion with his finger.

  I pulled the actual trigger with my finger and the gun percussed, the recoil shook my forearm numb, and my ears rang with a high, bright, piercing noise, the right one worse than the left.

  He nodded his approval.

  Something fell and hit the earth. We both turned. The heap of feathers and broken body of a turkey vulture, bloody hole through its side, lay not fifteen feet away.

  I looked again toward the bloody rider. He smiled and nodded his approval.

  •

  Now I made the tear in the subtle substance of the night, though there was no one to hear it. The bike rattled beneath me, and it carried me with it, though the sun had fallen far enough below the ground to leave nothing of itself behind, and the star-parts and little light-specks above, though impressive enough to see and impressively bright, did little, did nothing in fact, to illuminate the dirt ahead. The motorcycle’s headlamp did that, at least for a short ways. I was riding on faith. Mostly, I was riding on faith. I could at least follow the ruts in the road. The ruts were the road. I wasn’t sure about my direction; I’d meant to keep traveling straight, but then the ruts back some distance I think had diverged, and I think I’d followed them very gradually to the left. I wasn’t sure at the time, and had told myself not to worry about it, but it troubled me now.