TWELVE

The World

[Late Autumn, 2005]

“… Right… here?” guessed Proteus, after some long moments of consideration.

“You,” expressed the Professor with a certain degree of emphasis, “are in spot. If split.”

The slam of the front screen door followed the bent entrance of the long, tall man, Davis, who wound his way around the front of the store to where the Professor and Proteus spoke, facing one another at the counter, everything, every look, every inflection, every slight shift of a tone of the voice, a little overly significant between them, as if… as if… so that Proteus, by now, didn’t even know what they were talking about anymore. “What?” he said at last.

“Can I get a cigarette?”

Had the Ignatius! coffee! Co! settled yet, or begun to settle, into its day? Maybe it was too soon to say. There were birds outside, in the trees, in the sky, perched on walls and windowpanes, flittering in the branches of trees in squads, screaming out the morning with a certain cheerful belligerence. Ignatius himself had wandered over to where old Albert had taken a table; who, sitting there, staring into his coffee, seemed he’d been transfixed. The owner stood behind him and peered over the old man’s shoulder, down into the cup. Neither moved. Amanda hovered nearby, present, in an abstract sort of way.

Proteus and the Professor yet faced one another, the Professor’s bushy, gray, overlong eyebrows performing lateral athletics of signification beyond anything Proteus had thought could be done with only a human face. Adding further indication into the mix, the Professor pursed out his lips and puffed his cheeks meaningfully.

“Can I get a cigarette?” Davis bent forward and slightly to the side; a person not entirely vertical. But mostly.

“Professor,” said Proteus respectfully, “just exactly what was it you were a professor of? Exactly?”

“Semiotics,” his catastrophically-dressed elder replied.

“Can I get…?”

“Davis. Wait. Let me see. What are you…? No. Wait.” Proteus checked under the counter, dipping his head to look for the Sharpie-marked packs of generics kept… oh, right. “Wait. Davis? Why are you here?”

“I want a cigarette,” replied the bent man.

“Davis. Davis? You’re out of context. This is not where you belong.”

To that, Davis had no response whatever, but only looked toward Proteus expectantly, his dark and spiky hair a mess. Some small bug may have jumped a gap between strands, but Proteus wasn’t sure if he’d really seen that.

“Alright. Have one of mine.”

“Thangew.” Exit Davis, with desired cigarette, through the door in which he’d come. It banged shut behind him, its screen rattling for a moment after.

“He doesn’t belong here,” said Proteus to the ever-attentive Professor, whose eyebrows had at least stopped waggling. “He doesn’t belong here,” he explained further.

Davis poked his head back in the doorway and said, “There is somebody’s car… is in the way,” and then ducked back out, the screen door going bang back shut.

Sensing, perhaps, that he’d reached some limit, Amanda drifted forward to offer her assistance. “Here,” she said, “here, why don’t you just step away from this for a moment and come with me? What do you think? Let’s just go outside. It’s nice outside. Come on. With me.”

“Um. Oh.” He stared at her in amazement. Or maybe that was bewilderment. Turning to the Professor, though for what, he couldn’t say, he found the man immobile – seemingly frozen, at least unmoving. “Okay.” He shuffled out from behind the counter and allowed her to hook her arm within his and lead him away, through the shaking, flyspecked screen door that went bang shut behind them, and out onto the sidewalk, under the bright, too-large sun, where the birds, like living clouds, some settled, some still floating, were fairly screaming their hello-good-morning ratchet song at each other, at the sky, trying to break it.

•

Tilted at a harsh diagonal across the sidewalk, a silver Prius, all but brand new, a little dusty, its windshield cracked, straddled the high curb by three of its wheels, the fourth, rear left, the only one remaining in contact with the street. Fluid leaked from somewhere under the chassis. “I’m happy that you brought those with you, like I told you,” Amanda said, releasing the crook of his arm and slipping her hand into his, which was sweaty. “The magic, I mean.”

Off-kilter and skimming the sidewalk’s gutter, Davis passed by into some veil of shadowed corner as he lit his cigarette and looked back over his shoulder furtively, like someone getting away with something, or thinking that he had.

“Yes,” Proteus said, not looking at her, not looking at the car, not watching after Davis either, his eyes wide and cast straight forward into the middling distance. “Yes, the magic. I’m… I’m wearing it today.” Her hand to him felt small and delicate, warm and dry.

“I see. Thank you.”

“It doesn’t fit.”

“It fits you just fine.”

“Thank you. But why is the sun so big? Is it always that big?”

“Will you give me one of your cigarettes?”

“Of course. But why are we here? How did we get here?”

“What? The police station? We walked, silly. We walked up the side of the mountain.”

“Oh. I just… I don’t remember that.”

“I brought you here to show you something.”

“But… you’ve already shown me this.”

“Yes, but there’s more. You’ve not seen the important part yet. The really important part that I want you to see. Do you have a light?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course. He’s not supposed to be here, you know.”

“Hm?”

“Davis? That funny man with the spiked hair. You saw him walking down the street. He’s not supposed to be here. He’s from where I came from. Not here.”

“That’s alright, we’ll worry about him later. Now, will you let me see your gun?”

“My gun? It’s not my gun.”

“Alright. The gun, in that case.”

“It’s his gun.”

“Can I see it, please?”

“Of course.” He unholstered the weapon, handed it over.

“It’s quite a large one. Oh my.” She held it in front of her with both hands, inspecting the firearm.

“Nothing phallic about that.”

“Oh, now! Silly boy.”

“I mean… sorry.”

“None of that now. Here, I want for you to do something. Take ten steps back, okay? Ten steps toward the station house. And just stand there.”

“Alright…”

“Did you take ten? I counted nine.”

He took one more step backwards.

“There.” She raised the gun and sighted down its barrel, straight at his face, clicked off the safety…

[oh how the sun now snakes its golden golden feelers through my ever-quivering heart, it is like fingers, that’s right, isn’t it…?]

And with her stance that of a shooter with some experience, one leg forward, the other back, she made a bipod of her body, solid and straight, supporting her trigger hand by the wrist with the other. She was magnificent, he thought, perfect, her body lithe and lean and strong, light-colored hair blown only a little in the little wind that blew, her blue eyes – or, really, just the one eye opened, squinting down the sightline – so clear and bright, so clear and very focused. He loved her then. He felt a warm weight in his crotch that grew into a sudden, hard erection.

[the presence of each dancing bit of light now screaming out of the over-wide sun, every photon alive and sharp and singing we give life! WE GIVE LIFE! but it was this way always]

And I could see, even from this distance, the slight clench of her finger on the trigger, small muscle contracting, the slow squeeze, the pressure release, and… and… and…

•

Of the emptiness of walking in the city, I perhaps already knew too well. But of this, a city whose depth of emptiness shifted with each step – shifted the pitch of its grade, with stable horizon, if any horizon at all; the one thing different, different, and, if I should look at the one thing more than the one time, it will change into another thing, wholly other, a different sort of thing, or thing – I… I was never one for keeping overmuch with casual company when still alive (and still? when alive? when it comes and when it falls and when and when was that?) but with my dead friend Finch gone away (well, let’s be honest, he was never that much a friend, was he?) I’d begun to become, what, a little less certain of certain things. Things like… Well, for instance…

It was best at times like these to keep our mind on the simple and most direct things. Yes. Nothing was more simple or more to the point than feet, feet planted, planted on the solid earth, on the hard soil, on the flat street, the sidewalk; and it seemed enough, it did, to put the one foot in front of the other, and then the next, and then. To keep doing that. Because I could at least, I could at least do that, doing that. Facing, as I walked, the sky, empty as everything, empty of everything, colorless mostly, no, not of everything, but of the one thing, simple and unmodified, the… one…

•

“Did you see it?” asked Amanda, once she’d lowered the gun.

“See wha… see what?” I asked – I mean, Proteus asked – and blinked uncertainly, squinting against the light.

She cocked her head to one side, as if not sure what to make of m… of him. As if maybe he were putting her on somehow.

“I don’t know how I should take that.” The safety back on, she indicated his tent-poled crotch with the gun, waving the firearm like it was nothing more serious than a Hello Kitty pencil.

“As a compliment?” he offered.

Amanda shrugged and held the gun out to him, handle forward this time, lit cigarette dangling out of her mouth. He stepped the ten paces back again to her and accepted it, awkwardly replacing it in the holster hung around his waist, then lit up a cigarette for himself.

Around them, at the peak of Charles Mountain, the broken, scrabbled rock absorbed heat from the sun, bouncing its light, at least some, back at them.

“You’re a difficult case, Mr. Monk Man.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been out of the game for so long, I guess it comes out in strange ways. I think. Is what.” His hard-on, against the confines of his pants, was hurting, bent, but at least now starting to abate some. “This. Is.”

“That’s not what I meant. But apology accepted, if unnecessary.”

“Did you just try to kill me?”

“It seems I could’ve done so, if I’d wanted. But look, let’s go inside. There’s something else I want for you to see.” She led him into the small, plain building, the front door of which was still unlocked. Proteus wondered, briefly, why he thought it should have been locked, or who would have locked it, other than himself, found no answer, and forgot the question.

Inside, by comparison to outside, was dim, dark – not in the way of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! whose darkness defied reason, but in the way of a room whose ambient light the eyes simply needed adjusting to after being out long in the sun.

“Should we be smoking in here?” Proteus asked, and was given a look in response.

Amanda drifted over to the desk. “I don’t know if you’d noticed these, last time I showed you in here…” she opened the middle drawer and pulled out one of the sheriff’s spiral-bound notebooks, “but I think you’ll find them interesting.” Proteus came and stood close beside her, feeling her warmth, feeling the small hairs on his skin prick up in response. “He was meticulous in keeping these journals. There are probably several more scattered around here. This will only be the most recent of them. Really, the man was obsessed with writing down everything that happened, everything he observed or thought. In the end, it was a compulsion with him. It made him sick. He seldom left this place or his house. He just stayed inside, writing and writing, his back bent, his nose almost touching the page. If he went out, it was at night, when no one was around. He avoided people. He avoided everyone, even me. I guess he had his reasons. You know. Everyone except… well, someone he probably should have avoided, but didn’t.” She appeared lost in thought for a moment, letting her arm, the one holding the notebook, drift slowly, absently downward. Then she snapped out of it again. “But if you want to know what happened with him,” Amanda resumed, “this is where to look. If he didn’t record every last thought in his head, then I don’t know how many more thoughts he could’ve had. It wasn’t like he was some kind of super genius or something. But, finally, this was pretty much all he did.”

Proteus remembered the last time he’d tried to look at this same notebook and the visceral, all-but allergic reaction he’d had to it. He found himself now only vaguely anxious, but thought of something.

“What about the jail?” He pointed toward the cage of slatted, black metal, off in the corner of the room.

She followed his finger. “What? That? What about it?”

“Did he… were there… any prisoners?”

Her brow was furrowed.

“I mean, did that see a lot of use?”

“The jail? Hardly. Really, you’ve been around here for a while. You know how rambunctious Cleric gets, even without anyone to enforce the laws. No, people pretty well know what they can and can’t get away with. This has nothing to do with what’s on the books, you understand. The law, the real law… it enforces itself, let’s say. For the most part. At least where it matters. I think he may’ve locked old Albert up here, once. Other than that…”

“Albert?”

“You saw how he drives.”

Proteus’s cigarette dropped its ash onto the desktop, which he impulsively brushed away.

Amanda laughed. “You act as if you think he’s coming back at any moment,” she said.

“And you don’t?”

“I know he won’t. For Sheriff Friendly to leave Cleric, once and for good, was inevitable. He had to. He had no choice left.”

“It was that bad?”

“Bad? No, not bad. Except for how everyone he got near to disappeared – yeah, I suppose that was bad. But that isn’t what I mean. I mean that… he was compelled to go. By then, we weren’t talking much, except over the telephone, late at night. Not that he was making a lot of sense then either. He was really just talking to himself, I think, with me as a sort of stand-in. But I knew that, for him, leaving the mountain became necessary. Absolutely. If you know something about what he saw… Proteus, if you know what he saw, and what it did to him, then maybe you can understand how things became for him. From my perspective, well, it was clear he needed to leave.”

“You miss him.”

Amanda looked up at him, as if startled. “I miss him, yes – like a brother, I miss him. I never had a brother, but like that. It’s right that he’s gone, you know, but I want to know that he’s okay. If I saw him again, that would make me happy. But I don’t need to.”

Proteus dropped his eyes from her, looked toward some spot on the desk blotter.

“Are you jealous?” she asked.

“Jealous… I don’t know,” Proteus said. “Envious, maybe, is the better word.”

With the hand not holding the notebook, she reached up and touched his cheek. “Aw, Mr. Monk Man, you don’t need to be. And besides. You’re the sheriff now. You’ll be at least as good at it as he was.”

•

“You, I never know,” complained his employer as Proteus returned, alone, to the coffee shop, “if you’re on the clock or you are not.”

“There’s a clock?”

Exasperated, Ignatius shook his head sadly. “You’re working, you’re not working. I so seldom can tell which.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“At least tell me when… you’re not.”

“I would, but you were…” Proteus looked into the proprietor’s sad eyes, ill-prepared as they were to accept anything he might have to say. And what would he have told him? That last he’d seen him, he’d been in a trance? Stuck outside of time and unmoving? He dropped the matter and took his position behind the bar, made himself a shot of espresso, mostly to check that the settings of the grinder were correct, then downed the results unthinkingly.

The shop was full now, or mostly full, of the morning’s local regulars. Chatter floated freely and filled the air. The atmosphere failed to baffle sound as it did the light, so that conversations to the farthest corner seemed as present and unavoidable as those directly in front of one’s nose. No wonder Ignatius was annoyed – he’d faced the rush alone. Never mind how often he’d left Proteus to do the same, the owner seemed to think his money’s worth was in the trouble he didn’t have to take. Which Proteus, upon reflection, decided was actually reasonable to expect. He looked about the busy room, peering through the murk, making out the faces that he knew, if not the names. He watched as Albert took presently to his feet, collected his black, woolen jacket from the chair and wrapped himself in it, then perched his matching fedora on his head and stepped, slowly, deliberately, toward and out the door.

To return three beats later and with far more urgency, his face flushed, a scrap of white paper squashed in his hand. The old man stormed the counter and demanded of Proteus, shaking the ticket at him, “What… in heaven’s name… is this?”