TWENTY

The World

[Early Winter, 2005]

“So what did you do?” asked Tunker, wiping down the fine, shiny, though somewhat scarred maple surface of his bar. There was no other soul in the Tooth Or Claw, save for himself and Proteus, despite the fading light outside, the hour somewhat darker at this time of year than any other.

“I had to run him in, of course. He left me little choice.”

“Regrets.”

“No, not quite, not yet. In fact, there was a certain satisfaction… I almost hate to say it… Of course he wouldn’t come willingly, not easily, not quietly at all. I had to take him by the ear, like a misbehaving child. He screamed the whole way, while I dragged him.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“I don’t drink.”

“That’s right, I forgot. How about some coffee, in that case?”

“Sure, coffee. Thanks.” Though Proteus’s eyes already wiggled a bit in his head.

Tunker poured him a cup, but refused his money. “Old Albert is a truculent one,” he said.

“I’ll say.”

“So where is he now?”

“I left him in the jail cell, that iron cage-thing? At the police department? I guess that’s what it’s there for. He was spitting fire and invectives at me, so I’m letting him cool off for a little while. I was going to bring him some food from Lorelei’s next door – after getting something for myself too – but the place is packed. I’ve never seen it so busy.”

“That crowd,” sighed Tunker. “I guess it’s good for the town and everything, ’cept I can’t say as I expect much love from them, myself.”

“So it seems.”

“I guess they’ll be staying for a while, under the circumstances.”

“It seems to me they were fixing to stay in any case, but yes, I think they’ll be here for a while.”

“Eh. We could do worse. Thanks for coming in though. Pay me a visit. I’m actually quite glad to see you. Professionally… or, how should I say it? Communally? It’s good for people to see the law in here once in a while. You know, to see that it extends, that it reaches into here too. Some folks forget. Of course, it runs both ways, as you’ve a crowd in here you might not see at Ig’s. This puts you into the community as well, see? A presence.”

“Right…”

Tunker noticed that his guest’s attention had fixed somewhere behind him and his face gone ashen pale. Tunker looked around, trying to spot the thing that had caught Proteus’s eye. Failing this, he finally asked, “What is it?”

“That showbill on the wall behind you.”

“Which one?”

“The Fishkill. The Fishkill. When was Fishkill here? When was this?”

Tunker found the xeroxed showbill stuck among all the many others taped to the mirror and pulled it off, accommodatingly handing it to Proteus. There it was, in high-contrast black-and-white: Vivianne in front with that look, and Vinny a shape at the drums behind her. The lettering in bold sans-serif was printed, white on black, across the top. But there was no date markered into the space left blank for one.

“When were they here? It’s not… I just…”

“Are you okay? You look kind of sick.”

“It’s just… I lost… too much…”

Sensing his distress, and uncomfortable with it himself, Tunker abruptly filled in the silence with a spate of talk: “This was from last summer? Kinda late… In fact, not long before you yourself showed up, if I remember correct. I forget exactly when it was, but they put on a pretty good show. I do remember that. It ended badly, though. This was just before, you know, he left. He showed up to see it, see. He showed up… and that was that for much of what remained of the town – almost everyone who’d turned out for the show. He knew better, too. By then, he knew what he was doing, what would happen. To show up like that… it was bad. It was just bad. And he knew. After that, so many people were gone…” Tunker looked with concern into Proteus’s face, now drained of blood and color, with his jaw dropped open and slack, his eyes looking toward something very far away.

“Can I keep this?” Proteus asked in a stricken voice, his eyes stuck to the paper.

“Sure. Be my guest.”

“I’m… sorry,” Proteus stammered, sliding down off his stool. “I lost… something… once. And she…” He staggered toward the door, showbill clutched in one hand.

Tunker watched him go, puzzled. Once Proteus had stepped out through the door, he picked up the coffee he’d poured for him and sniffed it quizzically.

•

Outside, the sky had darkened, and only a hint of the remaining daylight shone through the thick, broken clouds above and to the west. It had stopped raining, yet everything glimmered with a sheen of new wetness. The rain had fallen heavy and soaked the mountain, and the dry mountain had sucked it up where it could; in the dirt, in the grasses, in trees, in the air now charged with moisture. More would fall again soon, but for the moment it held back, and Proteus clutched at the showbill – now no better than a clump of wadded paper in his hand – as he limped across the empty street. He stopped in the middle and looked behind: there was the Tooth Or Claw, which he’d just left. He looked ahead: Lorelei’s Diner, so full of light, still stuffed full of Ceres wives and children, who bounced and bounded and screamed. The women fussed with the young ones, trying to more or less contain them within specific booths. Some of the older brood, like those two Nephi and Laman, who were all but grown up, kept to certain tables among themselves, discussing events and matters as seriously as might the various wives, who had their own long table in the center, to which they, when they could, returned. Maybe not the entire family was here, but there were enough of them. Amanda in her waitress apron moved swiftly through the diner. Proteus saw that she was helped by Lorelei herself, while he stood in the wide street and watched them. He likely didn’t understand what exactly he was watching, as his eyes had glassed over and his face, though stricken, remained blank. Like this, he stayed for a time that he had no thought to measure – it may have been several minutes – looking first into the blazing light of the diner, then back again at the Tooth, in its darkness and neon haze, then across the valley and into the gathering evening, which he could see from here as a wide patch of blackness where nothing else was, then finally returning to Lorelei’s and the circus within.

He lit a cigarette, felt the wind, and stood there, watching. When the cigarette was half-burned, he turned and headed home toward the Warehouse, muttering as he walked and staring at his shoes the whole while.

•

“Good Christ, not again…”

Yes, the night had grown thick and darker even than before; the gathering night, with Proteus in the Warehouse, brooding – less thinking of his missing Vivianne (though he knew perfectly well that she had never been “his” Vivianne) than feeling the ache of the vicious gut-punch of her disappearance, and the shape of the hole inside him, a thing he’d more or less until now learned to live with and ignore, if not quite forget – and once he’d settled for the night on his mattress on the floor, eventually to’ve fallen asleep, as they say, to dream…

“What is it? What do you want?” The petulance in his own voice sickened him.

Each footstep fell soft and steady, as always. It descended from the ceiling down the staircase that wasn’t there, followed steadily to where he lay in the center of the Warehouse floor.

“Would you please just leave me alone?”

But of course it wouldn’t. For all he knew, it couldn’t. And once the steps had reached him, and stopped their steady fall, and the invisible body, after a moment’s thought, sat… right… through him, to impress the foam mattress with its ghost-weight, to make him slide into the indent, he heard the voice, only just soft, through some subtle displacement, a place slightly different from this (yet only just a little), and this voice was a woman’s, a voice he thought he knew, asking him, or asking somebody near him, “What were the skies like when you were growing up?”

“Oh, they went on forever,” Proteus told her.

He was again in the blue room, the bright room, the bedroom, with the girl. There’d been no transition, and it hadn’t occurred to him there should be one. All was as it needed to be: clear sunlight spread in through the sheer, translucent curtains that covered the windows and fluttered in the slight breeze. The girl at the window stood just as naked as he lay on the bed, atop the covers. Her back was to him, her blonde hair fanned back over one shoulder. The light played in faintest gradients over her ribs and the fine muscles along her spine. “I’ve often wondered,” she said, still facing the window, staring out through the opening where she’d lifted the fabric aside, her eyes fixed on something far off. When she turned to face him, he was startled to both recognize her and not, at once. “So much,” she said, “has changed since then. I don’t remember the skies at all.”

“Amanda?”

“I’m not the girl I was, then.” She stepped toward him. It was her face, but her expression was different: softer somehow, not as he’d ever seen her before.

His cock had become achingly, suddenly hard.

“I’m not the girl I am now,” she said, a little sadly.

The closer she got with each slow step, the more he could not stand it.

“I’m not the girl you think I am.” Her eyes flicked up and met his.

He came in hot, slow bursts.

When Proteus awoke to find that he’d soiled the sheets and mattress again, he groaned. As he stood, something in a far corner of the Warehouse flicked and shifted its weight, knocked against some tottering object, and scurried off. He dimly realized then that there was something important he’d needed to remember. But what was it? He’d not eaten; Lorelei’s had been too busy… So he’d wandered home, discouraged… and he’d forgotten…

Oh, fuck! Albert!

•

It hadn’t been that long, he told himself as he struggled up the hill against the night, fighting the gale that had suddenly appeared from nowhere. It hadn’t been that long, that the old man might by now be dead. Right? Sure, he’d be hungry. Maybe… he was diabetic? Lack of a regular meal could kill him… O-or maybe he required medications? And maybe he would be dead… Oh fuck! Oh fuck!

Proteus’s furious pace had left him breathless, winded easily by the altitude, in the thin air. Smoking again, he knew, helped nothing. He clutched the jacket he’d wrapped hastily around himself tight against his body, a slim protection at best against the cold that, just like the wind, had appeared from nowhere and all of a sudden. At least it wasn’t raining. Right?

He looked up. Thick drops smattered – one, two, now another – against his face.

O-or at least I’ve not far to go, he told himself. He looked uphill, past the lights of the town, which were few now; all the shops were closed, the Tooth Or Claw was closed, Lorelei’s had long ago closed. All windows everywhere were empty or curtained and cold and dark. Because most everyone would be asleep by now – see how the houses were dark? Streetlights shone his way through downtown. Some dotted and warmed the winding culde-sac appending the highway, where several houses stood (or once had stood). But beyond these, toward the summit, where he needed to go, there was only darkness, thick and living, thick and heavy, blowing strangely humid wind straight into his upturned face.

He had no food.

He stopped there in the street in dumbfounded paralysis right where he stood and stared into the dark up at the summit.

I have no food, he thought. There’s nothing to give old Albert. Even if he’s dead, if he’s starved, if he’s in diabetic shock, I’ve got nothing for him or for myself. There’s nothing I can do. I can run, he thought, to the top of the hill and do nothing. Or maybe, what, call 911?

He was 911.

He faced uphill into the wind. He turned and faced downhill toward town. He breathed heavily and waited. He stared straight up, into the sky, where he saw nothing at all – not a star, not a cloud. Nope, nothing. He lit a cigarette, cupping the lighter’s tiny flame against the wind within his fist. He turned first to every angle, trying to find the one where the flame did not blow out. It took forever. Nothing seemed to work. He lit the cigarette. He stood panting and puffing and thinking and when he sucked on the cigarette it burned in his throat and he coughed, and almost coughed out the cigarette from his hand, but didn’t, and so then he stood and he stared into nothing and felt helpless. He even contemplated going back home to his Warehouse-house, just saying the hell with it and if the man’s dead he’s dead. Because sometimes people are just dead and you can’t help it, particularly if you’re incompetent. Yet finally he decided this would not be right, and, finishing his smoke, crushed out the butt underfoot and started back up the mountain – walking now, and not nearly so fast – because he could at least, at last, check on old Albert, right? It was the right thing to do, right? The civil thing: go check on him. He would at least check on him. He could do that, at least. Right?

•

The police station was utterly dark. When Proteus flicked the light switch, nothing happened but a dull pop, a sick sound from somewhere neither in the switch nor the fluorescent tubes above.

There came a low, grainy sigh from in back, from where the cage was, from where he could not see into. Everything was dark.

“Aaahhhhh…” a voice seemed to be trying to speak, but barely able.

“Albert.”

“Yes, he is known to us,” the voice said in something like Albert’s own, but pitched low, graveled and debauched. “He was of some use, once.”

“Just checking to see that you’re alive,” said Proteus, a little too chipper perhaps, under the circumstances.

There was the sound of breathing, thick and phlegmy, but steady and strong.

“Are you hungry?”

“ALWAYS!” the voice shrieked.

Proteus jumped at the violence of this response. “I’ll try and get you some food in the morning,” he said helpfully. “The diner was too busy. I forgot. Something distracted me, and there is no food anywhere now.”

“Step closer…”

“Nah, Albert, I won’t do that. You just hold tight. There’s a toilet in the cage if you need it. I’ll bring breakfast in the morning. Get some sleep for now, okay?”

“I can see… where a part of you is missing. There’s a hole in you. I can see it – I can see the hole! Step closer… Everything leaks out!”

“That’s alright. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Proteus fingered the light switch back down, then remembered it hadn’t worked in the first place, decided it was right that it should be left off in any case, and stepped outside the building, shutting and locking the door behind him.

•

“When I found him in the morning, he was gone.”

When the eastern light shone direct through the window, this was the only time – in the morning – when the Ignatius! coffee! Co! might be described as adequately lit. It seemed the inner darkness wasn’t quite enough to kill the sun, though it could smother any other source with ease.

Amanda stood at the counter across from him. She asked, “You’ve checked?”

“Of course I’ve checked,” Proteus explained. “I went back there first thing. There was nothing of Albert in the cage at all, not a trace, but it was still locked up tight. There was no sign it’d been jimmied. Nothing was broken. Someone with a key would’ve had to let him out.”

“You’ve got to be the worst sheriff this town has ever seen,” she told him.

Proteus hung his head in black dejection.

She hurried to say, “Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” When that didn’t work, she added, “You make really good coffee…”

“I never wanted to be sheriff. I never thought I’d be any good at it.”

“Look,” Amanda told him consolingly, “someone has to wear the hat. That’s almost all there is to it. And he chose you. He had a reason.”

“Friendly never knew me from a hole in the ground,” Proteus said. “I was coming to see him, but I never said anything. I don’t know how he found me. I don’t know what he could’ve been thinking when he brought me all this… this stuff!” He was, of course, referring to the illfitting and crumpled hat – that is, the wide-brimmed sheriff’s Stetson that rested on his head – the golden, shiny badge that weighed against his skinny chest, and the all-too-prominent gun holstered loosely around his waist. These things were now a normal part of his daily garb. “None of it even remotely fits!”

“Okay, don’t worry about this. Sometimes people disappear. It isn’t necessarily your fault. Or maybe it is, but now you’ve got to pull it together and do your job. You’ve got a solo art show coming up in less than two weeks, the town is full of religious fundamentalists, and you… have got some issues of self-control to work on. This is hardly a time to feel sorry for yourself.”

“I’ve got… what?”

She set her eyes with a look that was scathing.

And in that moment, as if by command, there streamed in through the door the whole – or as many as would fit – of the Ceres clan, mothers and sons and daughters and small ones all screaming, all needing something to pull them into the day: hot chocolate, gallons of the good thing. After them, lastly, entered Shulamit, lugging her large purse, a stern and serious set to her face. She approached the counter. Amanda obligingly slid away, though her gaze on him lingered. Shulamit, amid the noise of her sudden crowd, said to him, “We’re here. And we are thirsty. Prepare us a potion, good man, in good number. Help us set this day in order, and well.”