New People of The Flat Earth

At the Belltown office of Persun, Progress & Persun that Monday morning, when I’d come to present them with the photos I’d taken, I found the brothers, off to the far back corner of the large studio space, one with the other in a headlock on the floor, the other punching the first as best as he could in the kidney. Rick paced the open space looking worried and annoyed, though when he saw me step in from the street, these changed to surprise. He paused a beat… “Well, you’re in the right place, from looks of you.”

“Huh? Oh, right,” I said, once it dawned on me what he meant, “I just got beat up by this… by this big Indian…” watching the brothers Persun scrabble across the floor as they knocked over a torchier lamp, which shattered against the cement floor. “Is everything okay…? I should maybe come back later?”

“Forget it,” Rick said resignedly, “this is normal. Let’s go over here, out of their way, maybe we can talk.” Once he’d sat me at a table in another room, he got a look, as though he’d been rehearsing how he would tell me this.

“Look, I probably should have called you on the road, but really, by the time we knew about it, it was already too late.”

“There’s been a mix-up,” he said. “A colossal fucking… I don’t even know where to start. I guess, first, just understand, this is nothing that you’ve done wrong. You’ve done everything we asked, perfectly in fact.”

Something heavy scraped over the floor in the studio and I could hear a voice – I couldn’t tell which – going, “Uh… uh… UH… uh…” And then, “Mother… fucker…” followed by weeping.

“The website’s been cancelled. It turns out that somehow there is no Board of Tourism. There hasn’t been for a whole year. Perhaps longer.”

I thought about this, doing calculations in my head. “But you’ve been working on this for… for how long?” I asked.

“And they’ve been telling you, all this time, what they want and how to do it?”

“Right… well, they have and they haven’t. There was some sort of budget allocation confusion the fiscal year before, not to mention a lack of communication all around, and the Board never actually got the message they’d been defunded and shut down. Since their paychecks were still cashing, they thought they still existed. Part of the reason they never got the message was because the head of the office hadn’t been in to work for such a long time that the rest of the Board all but forgot they even had one, though it was from this same, empty office that various mandates – including the coordinates for these locations you’ve been scouting out – were all issued.”

“In this empty office was a computer that had never been shut off, that continued to send out emails on some kind of automated schedule. The head of the Tourism Board must have set it up before he disappeared. Or she. Really, no one had been in the office for so long, they couldn’t remember if it was a man or a woman who was supposed to be their boss. It explains a lot, really.”

“I suppose,” I said, “except, well, it doesn’t… because, in that case, where –”

“Don’t worry. We’re going to pay you, just like we agreed. If those clowns out there have stopped fighting long enough…” Rick looked over his shoulder, through a window to see the brothers, who were now exhausted, looking remorsefully over the damage they’d caused. “Right. I’ll get Arthur to print you up a check. We’ve been paid thus far, so we can pay you. I mean, we’d pay you anyhow – that’s not the issue – but at least we can cover it and we’re not operating at a loss.”

I pulled the flash drive containing the photos from my pocket, along with travel receipts. “Do you want this?”

“I guess. Why not? I’m curious to see what you made of that weird doughnut thing at the end. And holy shit, what happened to your hand?”

“That bizarre monument, the one at the end of your list?” He inserted the USB device into his laptop. “I’ve actually been there. It’s called ‘The Metal Tears –’”

“‘– of St Stephen’, yes. I’ve wondered about that. But, it’s no doughnut. A doughnut hole maybe, but not… not a…”

“Here it is.” He’d found the relevant files and opened them. “Yeah, see? I don’t understand it at all, but it’s hilarious. I love it.” He turned the laptop so that I could see the photographs that I myself had taken. And he was right: there was no sphere. It was not as I’d remembered it. Instead, I’d shot all these pictures of a huge doughnut, its surface pitted and rusted, the paint in places flaked off. Maybe thirty-feet high, it stood on its side in the middle of the field. I’d shot the thing from all sorts of angles. Quite clearly. Almost as if I’d known what I was looking at.

“Really. Somebody… I don’t know, I guess they got the signage from some old doughnut shop maybe? And hauled it out there? You thought it was a what?”

“Well clearly this means we’re done with the project. We’re backing up everything we’ve put together and shelving it, and there’s nothing more we need from you. We’ll give you a call?”

I walked out onto the street, into the late-morning bustle, with a check in hand, which I didn’t look at the figure printed on it until later. Some might not have been impressed. There was a time maybe I wouldn’t have been impressed. Still, it was more money than I’d held in my hands for near on twelve years.

When I arrived at Inn House Manor, the night of that same Monday, having run the gamut of sentinel ghosts who stood or sat or twisted their bodies in watch outside the building, and while inside everything was sort of whirling, I found Wade, haggard, at the desk. He looked up at me as I entered – something more of a nervous flinch than his characteristically thoughtful assessment – his face gray and hollow and bleak. Since he was also the morning person, usually coming in at seven, that meant he’d probably been at work for nearly sixteen hours.

He didn’t answer at once, but rather stared at me for a moment, as if he were the one surprised to see me. Finally, he said, “What on Earth happened to you? You look like you got the shit kicked out of you.”

“After a manner of speaking, I suppose. Until a couple of days ago, she’d found people to fill in and work her shifts for her. Then she stopped doing even that much, and I’ve not heard anything more. No notice, nothing. She’s just gone, and I’ve been here ever since, trying to find someone to take over her shift. So, yes, it’s safe to say she’s out of a job.”

“You’ll probably be interested to know what’s happening with the case against you.”

“Relax. There is none. The investigation’s already come and gone. You didn’t even have to be here for it, so how do you like that? No, it was clear to the investigative committee, who sent an inspector to look things over, what it was that actually happened, which was nothing. Rose is at the hospital still, under observation, and it’s up in the air whether she’ll be living here again when she gets out. She probably needs a greater level of care than we can give her, which is unfortunate. Or fortunate, depending on which way you look at it. Willy, on the other hand, is still missing and nobody’s seen him.”

“Proteus? What actually happened to you? And what’s wrong with your hand?”

“That isn’t the point. You look like you’re in shock. I mean, granted, I haven’t slept, everything seems a bit twisted to me right now. But you’re fucked up. What happened?”

“I’m alright. I just got bit by a spider. It was a really big spider. But I’m okay.” But when I opened my eyes again, Wade’s face was hovering over mine, pale with concern. “Why am I on the floor?”

“Not now, Davis. Come back later. Proteus, let me get your legs up on this backpack of yours.”

“Mary, Davis, everybody, just get back. Meds will be passed out a little later tonight, okay? Just give us some room. There.” He shut the office door. “Proteus, really. Can you do this? I wouldn’t leave you here. I’d tell you just go home, but I’ve been on for forty-eight hours. I really can’t take any more. I’m starting to hallucinate. Are you hurt? You look like you got hit by a car. What did you say about a spider?”

Yes, tell me about the Indian. But that wasn’t what Wade actually said, was it? His concern had turned professional. A mask of purposeful concentration slid over his pale features, his eyes now clear and focused as he found and laid over me a gray cotton hoodie from the coatrack near the door, one no doubt abandoned by somebody on staff, forgotten after a shift and never reclaimed. Perhaps it was Vivianne’s. I told myself it was so, and thus by proxy, some part of her now reached me, touched me, gave what comfort it could.

“The future is a thing sometimes better not known,” I said. “I think he understands that now. It was his gift. To me, you understand – what he gave to me. The knowledge. My reluctance? It was never for nothing. But if I tell you what will happen, it can only destroy you. Do you see? That’s why I don’t. Or why I say I won’t. But he wasn’t interested in any of that. And mostly, I just don’t want to get involved.”

And so I lifted off the floor. And floated. The jacket draped from me. The magician, a large Indian man, ran a hula hoop down the length of my body, demonstrating to the audience how there were no wires to hold me up, and therefore real magic.

And I rotated up into a standing position, my feet setting gently onto the floor. I held the jacket against my body to stay warm and feel love. Upright now, I saw that he was at the desk, checking over the logs of the day before, squinting his eyes (he should really have brought his glasses) to read the scribbled notes in the inadequate light. Then Proteus carefully shut the notebook and looked up, and seemed to notice me. I may have been mistaken. It was hard to tell if recognition were there concealed within the impassive mask of his face. His eyes at least seemed to linger for a moment at the spot where I stood. Taking a glance throughout the room, I saw that Wade had gone, or at any rate wasn’t there.

The door to the office was open, so I stepped through it and out into the foyer. The round, bearded man, the one I’d never seen before the other night, was there. He stood near an alcove that had a tall vase with plastic flowers in it, and he held the vase with both of his hands and smiled broadly. He didn’t lift the vase, but only held it, as if receiving much-needed energy from it, or perhaps instead giving it some of his. He turned his head as if to look at me, and though he did look in my direction, like Proteus, it was unclear whether he actually saw me. It was possible, I realized then, that I may be invisible.

I walked into the living room, where everyone stared at the television. Its picture swayed and wavered and fuzzed in and out. Davis was stretched asleep over the length of an entire sofa. Every other mismatched chair or broken couch contained a person. All eyes on the television. No one noticed me.

I drift into the hallway. Various small sounds reach me here, but for the most part, you could say this hallway is nearly silent. This is not an unreasonable thing to say. I like this silence, or this near-silence, the gathering cold, the stillness, the sense of age, the lightness – because, yes, finally, this is a lightness, isn’t it? – the floating body-sense of unbeing, the sinking through uncertain gravities. Like when I was underwater. Yes, this is the same. And so I touch the textured walls with my left hand, the one not swollen, and drag the pads of my fingers across them, and sometimes through the vague, oily substances that have seeped from or accumulated over them and gathered dust, and become thick with it, like mud, over the decades. And so I drift into the shadows, the darker they become, and I drift down and in it, down and through and in it, and down, and down, and down, and disappear.

Proteus sat in the dim light, reading words. The words were scratched in pen into the book, the logbook, and the notes were fractional, elliptical, as far as he could see, nonsensical, though they were not meant to be. Clearly, Wade had lost his grasp in the previous long hours of his impossible shift. It was either that or the fact that Proteus could scarcely concentrate that was the problem. Coming to terms with the futility of making sense of these notes, he shut the logbook and looked up.

Answer not forthcoming. And there was that man again, that round man, the one with the beard, who always smiled. He’d not been here a few days before, Proteus had never seen him, not until he had, and now he was always here, wandering, smiling, talking to himself. He’d not come in for evening meds. Maybe he didn’t need any. But who was he? He stood now, holding a vase with both hands, smiling at the vase, the way he smiled at everything. He didn’t pick the vase up; he didn’t carry the vase. He merely held it, with both of his hands, and beamed. It seemed possible, to Proteus then, this man was a very happy man.

Proteus picked up his own backpack and dug through it, finding his own spiral-bound notebook – one so similar to the logbook, the same brand, the same color cardboard cover, the same narrow-ruled lines – and pulled it out, found his own pen, uncapped it, and started to write:

Gerry–
This letter is to inform you of my

He picked the pen up and stared at the chicken-scratch of words. This would hardly do. The twice-size bloating of the right hand helped nothing, though it could grasp the pen, however painfully. No – he needed a steady hand (maybe go home and type it first?) but moreover, he needed a clear message. He needed to make his message clear. So he scratched out what he’d written and started again:

Dear Gerry Wade and Administration of Republic
Mental Health,
I regret to inform you

He scratched that.

I’m sorry to inform you that

Was it right to be sorry? Why should he apologize? Damn it, apologies were for wimps! No, be bold, just tell them the way it is…

May this document serve as my letter of resignation, effective immediately. Right now. I am walking away and never coming back. When you find me in the morning I will not be here. The reasons are because I’m dead, and I am empty, and I am dead, and I’m sorry (scratch out sorry), but I’m dead and empty and my soul has walked away, and for these reasons I can no longer serve this function – as living representative – broken within the sea of the fractured – our worst sin to remain in pieces – and though I am a sea-creature, I fear that I have drowned – and while some will behave as furniture, others will merely scream – and I am sorry (fuck!) that I am not real – I am sorry that I am invisible – I am only just sorry and nothing else. Sorry, sorry sorry sorry…

He filled the remains of the page with the word sorry in an increasingly fevered and frenzied hand, one that might be considered manic by those in the business. Before he’d gotten even three lines into this work, the word had lost its meaning. The arrangement of letters only seemed wrong somehow. This did not stop him.

In the basement dining room, the lights were failing. Fluorescent tubes flickered and went dark, lighting half the room while spastically strobing throughout the rest. I sat at one of the little square tables in the middle and rested my hands to the surface in front of me, flat on the scarred formica. The right one was twice the size of the left, mottled white and red. It didn’t hurt, exactly. I wondered for how long it would be this way, and if this were the price for stepping through.

It was one thing to step through, quite another to touch the other side. Now I knew.

When the kitchen door slowly opened, it frightened me. I was the only one left in the house who should have had access; the door, at any rate, should have been locked. But it was who stepped through it that both set me at ease and worried me the most.

“Finch?” I said. It seemed that he had come from deepest memory, a thing erratically functional even in the best of times.

He looked at me with that same questioning look that I remembered from the dream so long ago, the same what-is-everyone-saying-this-about-me-for? look.

“You haven’t changed,” I told him. “So many years, and you’re just the same. Twenty-one years old, dead as a doorknob, you’ve no color to you at all… I always knew that kitchen was haunted. But you? What are you doing here?”

“Last time…” he came forward, “you gave me doughnuts. Thanks. They were really bad. But thanks. Do you know where you’ve been?”

I thought about this. “No,” I answered, “but I would ask you the same thing. Is it time to go away now?”

“You know.” I hooked my thumbs together and fluttered the fingers like they were wings, lifting away. “Off into the whatever. Thing.”

He got this kind of sideways-eyeball, suspicious look. “I’m not so sure about that. Somewhere? Maybe? But not that.”

He moved a chair and sat down at the table with me. A scared ghost. Confused. But who wouldn’t be, right?

And come the day, with its exigencies and petty tyrannies of sunlight, after some small spot of welcome though less-than-satisfactory sleep, Proteus found his way to the local dealership of two-wheeled, motorized transport, looking over a self-narrowing selection of machines that he could afford.

“This one?” asked the dealer, standing beside a blue Honda with a dent in its gas tank and rust spots developing across everything chrome. “This is a 1979, with a five hundred cc engine. Shaft-driven, so you won’t be having any issues with a chain or a belt. Very reliable. Don’t let its age and appearance fool you. These things will go forever.”

“It’s been dropped,” the man told him, “but that’s the worst of the damage, right there. Really, its problems are cosmetic. With nineteen thousand miles on it, it has a lot of life still.”

Proteus stared up into the blue sky. A few tufts of clouds interrupted its surface, which otherwise stretched overhead a perfectly smooth dome. He wondered, with a certain self-disingenuousness, what lay hidden behind its gradients, what structure supported it, or intruded upon it, or, yes, perforated through it; knowing full well what did. Once he’d gotten the contact sheets back from the lab of the rolls of film he’d shot, and saw, there in each and every frame, that same shape, greater or lesser, every time, darker or lighter or barely present, though in none quite so obvious or opaque as to be entirely undeniable as anything but some curiosity of flawed optics, an aberration of the lens, despite what he knew, though no one else could – that these circles were never there originally, not visibly – and despite what he also knew, though few would bother their critical faculties to ask: how a lens flare would show such telltale signs of depth or solidity, as for instance a shadow along its underside, consistent to the direction of the light, or how an object might lay between the varied depth of cloud, some behind, some veiling across it in front; and after studying these small images so closely, again and again, Proteus had some idea what was also there, entirely invisible, though no less present for it.

Proteus blinked, considering again this world at ground level, the salesman with his questioning look. “Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”