New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  It was like this: I’d put the camera up in front of my face and found in the viewfinder, framed square and center, a very tall, Nordic-looking androgyne, large and muscular and solid, but neither clearly a man nor a woman. Her/his uniform all but glowed a perfect and unsullied dark blue. He or she stared directly down at me with the most complexly-featured face I thought I’d ever seen – hot and cold and cruel and gentle and sharp and soft, all at once. The face seemed to hold everything in it. And the sun, at that moment, had just chased off a cloud and its light revealed a bright halo about the head and neck of fine hairs, over-lit, and somewhat, slightly back-lit, and the hairs extended the light; they were themselves a subtle light, a finer framing of the golden-white glow, and I stood slackjawed, through the glass entrance… until the androgyne swung his/her large hand – a blur entering from frame right, and at the same moment I clicked the shutter – and slapped me in the side of the head, and hard, like the hand was a wooden beam. I went straight down without a wobble. The camera, launched out of my hands, flew through the air.

  “Oof!” I said as my face hit the dirt. My ears rang.

  “Oi!” chorused a group nearby who’d seen the whole thing.

  My camera, though I didn’t know it yet, had been caught mid-air by a nearby Japanese meter maid.

  “Fotografieren ist nicht erlaubt!” barked an angry voice, high and melodic, though clipped in barely restrained fury, and once I’d got my face from the dirt again and looked up through watery tears, I saw that the androgyne, wavering above me, was its source.

  He/she looked ready to crush me.

  “Ent… entschuldigung… bitte,” I sputtered, spitting dirt from my teeth.

  “Es ist verboten,” the blond androgyne said, more calmly now. He/she hovered a moment, then turned to those who stood around gaping, and said, either in warning or by way of explanation, “Keine Fotos…!” and stalked away.

  I’d not considered yet what may’ve happened to the camera as I rolled into a crouch, picking myself up from the dirt by slow degrees. It was all I could manage just to kneel there, wheezing in labored breaths, until the young meter maid brought it to me, crouching down to my level. “Very nice camera,” she said in halting English. “Old. Nikon F. 1965, I think. Yes? Very good shape.” She handed my Nikon back to me with a polite bow. I took the camera from her small hands and looked over the body and lens – all undamaged – then looked up at her. She seemed quite young. She smiled shyly.

  “My father is a collector of old cameras,” she said. “He has… one hundred or more. All work. If they don’t work, he fixes them. It is an uncommon thing.”

  “Yes. Thank you,” I said, wheezing. “I don’t know… how… old it is. My father… You’re probably right. 1960s… Thereabouts.” I spat blood onto the dirt. “Old as me. Older.”

  She nodded. “You can’t blame them for their distrust of you,” she said. “They know you are not like them.”

  I looked up. “I’m not police.”

  “Nobody thinks you are police,” she said. “You are not like them.”

  I was confused. I couldn’t follow her meaning.

  She must’ve seen this on my face, because she explained, “You were… not called, like them.”

  “But… but I was.”

  “Not like them,” she said, and shook her head quick. Her short, dark bangs fanned back and forth over her forehead. She reached up, laid a gentle hand on my shoulder, and said again, “Not like them.” She then handed me a small slip of paper, stood, and bowed again. Then she left. I watched her go. Her uniform seemed to overwhelm her small, slight body, but she moved with a slow and easy grace, all the same, and glanced once back over her shoulder, giving me a curious look. Then she vanished into the dispersing crowd of onlookers. I unfolded and looked at the paper. It was a ticket, written up in Japanese. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed she’d written me up for blocking a thoroughfare.

  It was after this that the permanent grin got stuck to my face. I knew it was there; I knew my face was like this now. I’d felt my lips stretch back and stay that way, but couldn’t do anything about it. I smiled at everything and everyone I saw, though what I felt was something very different. Not smiley. I stumbled about in the dust while the sun traveled slowly overhead, careful now to ask permission through my weirdly gritted teeth before snapping any pictures. Usually, the officers were happy enough to comply. It was all in good fun, and they may’ve taken my smile for friendliness. Or something. And I was also careful, unless saying either “please” or “thank you,” to say nothing at all. This may have lent me a certain air of legitimacy, which I would settle for if I could not achieve the invisibility I preferred.

  As the sun moved, the low mountains grew shadowy and defined. In midday, with the sun directly overhead, they just seemed like a bunch of plain, dull rocks. But in the side-light, they became cold and mysterious and held secrets, even more secrets than regular mountains. It was clear, just from looking at them, that they must. At the peak of that small mountain closest among us – largely, I realized, around which the whole camp was constructed and to where I stole a look now and then – the lone figure stood and watched from within his cordon of yellow tape. By far too distant for me to tell, in truth, he still always seemed to be looking straight at me. This would’ve unnerved me, except that everyone did this wherever I went, so in the balance it seemed normal. I looked away. I looked again. I lifted the camera, guessed my adjustments, and clicked off a shot. Then I took another, widening the stop, and another, widening again by one more. The day was fading. The light was thin. The figure looked down on me, side-lit, low-lit, getting swallowed in the shadows and growing dim.

  “I know you,” I whispered, lowering the camera again.

  The figure watched from high up, holding a hand between his eye and the lowering sun.

  I looked around myself from side to side, then back up at the figure. I took a deep, painful breath and shouted, “I KNOW YOU!!” The words tore at my throat.

  The air had grown cold and a wind started blowing. On the mountain, the yellow tape flapped in a stronger breeze than this. I looked around myself again and found that everyone nearby had stopped to stare at me. Damn their eyes, I thought, it’s not any of them, it’s him.

  •

  Near the central cookfire was where the goats stayed penned behind a rough, square fence. There was a good flock of them – or was it a herd? Twenty or more. I supposed it must be a herd. They stayed mostly content, they ate both what was given them and what wasn’t, and made sad bleating noises every now and again, owing to some internal prompt they had, however inexplicable. They seemed sometimes almost to be talking, in human voices. Almost. Trying to. As if they wished to, but couldn’t quite muster it.

  Khenbish kept the animals, tended to them, talked to them in human words (perhaps to teach them some they could use later, when they finally got the voice). It might be said he loved them, though in loving them, he could still be brutal as needed without so much as a flinch. I learned this. I watched as he, with his horribly scarred arm, stroked the head of one of the bony animals, speaking to it softly, a whisper in its floppy ear, a tender gaze into its slotted eye, a soothing hand upon its nervous flank. Yes, he loved these creatures well.

  I’d taken a spot to the side of the clearing, leaned myself against a post in the ground, and lowered to sit for a time. My legs were sore from walking the whole day long, and my neck hurt from always looking side to side. I set the camera into the dry dirt, with care. Here the heat from the fire could reach me, and it was welcome. Since the sun had dropped away, now the night was truly cold. Maybe not so near to freezing, not quite, but cold enough still to chill the bones. From where I sat I stared into the fire, with its twisting, short flames, and I stole long looks towards the tender Khenbish as he talked to his special goat, singled out and separated from the fold.

  This one got unique attention.

  He tethered it by the neck with a rope and led it from t
he herd, out a gate from the pen and some distance away. I watched him walk with the animal. Both seemed happy enough. Content to be as they were, going slowly along. Curious to see what the man had in mind, I got up and followed, keeping the camera at the ready. I’d been shooting, however conservatively, all day, and didn’t know that I had much film left – in fact I was certain the roll must be almost done, but all the same, I knew I had at least this frame presently advanced. Following, I didn’t try to stay hidden – there was no sense in that – but I did keep my distance and reasonable stealth, if only not to disturb his concentration.

  He devoted his attention entirely to the animal, talking to it with gentle care as if to a child. The goat followed at his side willingly, never needing to be urged or pulled or pulling. The two just seemed to be taking a nice walk. After a time, out of sight from the other animals, in a clearing where no one else gathered but still near enough the fire to catch some of its warm light, if not its actual warmth, the two stopped. He knelt down beside the animal. The animal looked up at him, as if in recognition – the coming flood, the necessary return, the blessing – and waited in peace as Khenbish pulled his long knife with the oddly curving blade from its sheath, while with his other arm he enveloped the goat’s head and lifted, lovingly, its chin. With a single stroke the blood began to spray. I clicked the shutter. The animal twitched, groaned, but it did not scream. It bled. It wilted, settled, and by degrees died. As the light slowly fled from its open, gold eyes, Khenbish began the gutting and skinning he was so very good at, working quickly and with no hesitation, using practiced hands.

  “He really is an artist, isn’t he?”

  The voice, so suddenly, and so near to my ear, made me jump and drop the camera. “Dead Tom,” I said, recovering. “Hello. Yes. He is good at what he does. The animal doesn’t seem to suffer.”

  “God help me, I swear he makes them want it in the end. I worry he might do the same to me some day.”

  “You’re afraid of him?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course I’m afraid of him. The flayed flayer? Physician, I say, thanks but I’ll just heal myself. It’s the tenderness, innit? You can see how he really loves the creatures. Not in any weird, sexual kind of way. At least, I don’t think that’s it. But he does understand their spirit. He knows how to speak to them, he understands their innate gentleness.”

  “And he kills them.”

  “Yes. Then he kills them.”

  We watched. The skin was already nearly removed. The viscera lay in a glistening pile. The creature’s eyes stared off in slotted amazement, gazing toward oblivion. What had been a goat now was food, and ready for the fire, a poem made in meat. The once-neat officer’s uniform Khenbish wore was now darkened with blood, and wet stains crossed his bulletproof vest, which he always wore, no matter what.

  “Do you know the story of his arm?” I asked.

  “Aye, a little. The details he’s never been much forthcoming with, but the sense of it is he was grabbed up by the secret police regarding some kind of who-knows-what situation and they thought it prudent to ask some questions of him.”

  I watched the large man work. He was mostly finished, cleaning up, it looked like, a detail here and there.

  “Was he, what, some kind of revolutionary, or counterrevolutionary, or something?”

  “Khenbish? Nah, hardly. He was just there. Looked like he might be good for a laugh, is probably how they saw it. Or maybe they saw some money in it somewhere. I couldn’t say. It could be he was involved in some illegal trade.”

  “Though he was police himself?”

  “Don’t act so surprised. Illegal trade is only trade that hasn’t had the right people bought off, and you can’t always tell who they are to buy them. Sometimes there’s a great long line of ’em. Any number of things might’ve earned him that skinning, or maybe nothing at all.”

  “That’s terrible.” I grew quiet for a moment, considering how the large man could’ve simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and how easy that might be. But if I were to choose someone for a random skinning, it would hardly be Khenbish. “You say the police did this? They will do this to their own.”

  “It’s complicated, no doubt.” Dead Tom sighed. “Actually, it may’ve happened in Kazakhstan. I’m not sure. The man who did this, though – who ordered the flaying, and who questioned him – he is local, though ‘local’ out here can stretch for a rather long way, as you can probably see. He’s since been reassigned to the airport in Ulaanbaatar, I hear. Perhaps as punishment for taking things, from time to time, a little too far. Though a man like him has his uses. As do we all.”

  “As do we all,” I echoed, taking a look down at the skin of my own left arm.

  The animal had meanwhile been mounted onto a spit and handed over for someone else to roast. The cook rubbed the meat in a handful of spices then put it onto a rack over the fire to turn. As further testament to Khenbish’s skills, the pen full of goats to the other side of the fire had not been disturbed by any of this. It was likely fair to say they’d not heard or understood what was going on with their comrade. To consider that they had, and were fine with it, was too horrific a thing to think about.

  “Truth be told,” Dead Tom continued, softly, “I think the whole experience has made the giant rather extraordinarily sensitive, in a particular way.”

  “What way?” I asked.

  “Ah, well. He’s open now, innit. Open to things a person might otherwise not be.”

  “Open?”

  But for those who had gathered near to the fire, a full dark was on us. coffee would soon be brewed, and there would be roasted goat as well. From where Dead Tom and I knelt, we could watch the crowd flux. Movement stirred through these bodies. Some turned to stand nearer the flames, or to those they found familiar, of their likeness or like-kind, others to move aside or find some better, more accommodating spot, away from smoke. An agitation stirred at the pen of animals, first there, along subtle currents, answered in nervous bleats and complaints, and it likewise soon troubled the human crowd as well. Heads turned to look toward some approach – an unquiet ghost with appetites and sorrow, perhaps? And soon a voice pierced the murmuring numbers, a weird, wild laugh, followed by a slew of speech. We watched the crowd part, the voice resolving, all allowing passage through of some…

  •

  …some kind of jolly, fearsome, thick woman pushing her way through, appearing at the flame, her dark eyes wide and glimmering in wonder at the sight of this fire, as if she’d never seen any such thing before. The heat, the light…! Her wide mouth hung open. She held her arms out far to her sides, hung thick with loose flesh, as if she meant to grab and encompass someone in them, crushing them to death. She looked around from side to side, her eyes rolling, her neck straining, and she was speaking – yes, she’d been speaking all along, she’d never stopped speaking, even when howling with laughter, the words just kept coming – and this had been what started the goats, since in their animal ways they weren’t stupid – but what she said made no sense. At first, I didn’t recognize any of it. But then I did… at least in bits. She spoke French, she spoke German, she spoke in something, maybe Japanese. Something. Some great mash-up of human language, shifting one to the next in seamless succession, speaking to no one in particular and none of it making more sense than the last, until here, at the edge of the fire, she stopped of a sudden, as if suddenly run out of words of any sort. Her eyes turned again, turned straight ahead, and I think in that moment, through the fire, she saw and recognized me. Her eyes locked on mine and I could hardly look away. And I certainly recognized her, though it took a moment for the pieces to fit together.

  If I did not belong in this place, I was at the very least allowed, if not quite accepted. But her? She would have no pass, no pretense, to people to speak for her sake. But she did – at least she said she did – have her own gold mine.

  “Ayah? It’s good I found you,” she called across the fire. “We ar
e more than one, aren’t we? You, I? But now together. Tell them! Tell them what I told you! About the snake! They won’t listen to me, but you they might. Are you well? Have you succumbed to law? But you were the law, yes, no? I rememberrrr… My escort… wait! My escort…” She stepped forward then, into the pit, over the rock partition surrounding, and directly into the fire. The flames gasped and flared, and flew up around to engulf her, and all the while the others only watched, amazed, staring. Her burning form staggered and stepped forward, her arms, still held stiffly out at her sides, reached and turned, her torso pivoting – but still she struggled, like a woman possessed, taking one difficult step and then another across, and finally entirely through the flames. She emerged at the other side of the pyre, a little darker-singed for her troubles, but otherwise entirely unharmed. Even her clothes remained unscathed, aside from blackening here and there, and some of their substance lost.

  The penful of goats bleated and screamed horribly.

  I didn’t see how the police reacted to this. I could only gape wide-eyed as she came to stand in front of me, that grin now even more wide across her face. My own mouth stretched back of its own accord at this, as if in sympathy, which she mistakenly took for a smile in return. Maybe that was for the best.

  “My escorts…” she said, “are all dead. At least, I can’t find them. They weren’t ready. They didn’t know! They were weak! The… sun? Worms take… take them, yes. And the sun? This sun… the hollow bodies, the groundless, sucking… and an echo fills, takes them… them… They never will, but we, you and I, we can forget. You and I. There’s no need to waste more words between us. I’ve seen things since we last talked. Things, yes…” And then she began babbling in Russian.

  Dead Tom leaned in near to me and said, “Do you want me to kill her? I wouldn’t mind.”

  I looked at him, at her, at him again. “Thanks, but… I don’t know if you can. No offense.”

  “Anyone what lives can be killed and die.”

  “True enough,” I said. “You’d’ve killed me only earlier today. Or so you’d have me think.”