TWENTY-FIVE

The World

[Winter, 2006]

The helicopter, polished and gleaming in the artificial lights of Cleric’s illumined downtown, set down, almost, atop a flat-roofed building.

“I didn’t know we had a helipad,” said Proteus, astonished.

“We don’t.” Amanda set about rearranging her hair, or at least getting it out of her face.

They watched as two figures jumped out of the aircraft, which in fact hovered without touching the rooftop: a man and woman in evening dress, he in a manner of tuxedo and she in something dark and sparkling. They both, Proteus thought, could’ve presented themselves quite well on the Oscars’ red carpet…

“Hey,” he said, “is that…? That’s not…”

“It is,” she told him, blasé as could be. “Those two? Yeah. They’ve come to these things before.”

He fished out a smoke for himself and gave her one also. “Why?” He lit hers, then his from the same match. “What’re they doing here?”

“You might not expect it of her, but Mary Margaret Mary Alice really knows how to throw an opening-night party. How she gets people like them to come, I have no idea. She’s explained it to me, but I still don’t understand it.”

“Is there even room for them in the gallery?”

“Room for them? They’re no bigger than anyone else.”

“Oh. I guess not. Right. Still, it isn’t a big gallery.”

“Big enough, I suppose.”

•

On the street just outside the Infinite Eye, where local citizens and Ceres newcomers alike, now all in their formals (i.e. long hems, high collars, frills, their girl-shoulders and arms well-covered, legs entirely-hid) mingled in the light amongst and amidst those number of unfamiliar folk, the ones who’d appeared, maybe not so spectacularly as had the famous Hollywood couple, but in what must be their own accustomed style (Proteus noted a scattering of black limousines parked awkwardly around, wherever they fit), Mary Margaret Mary Alice immediately intercepted Proteus as the two approached and she pried him unceremoniously away from Amanda – who stood in neutral observance, the hand which once held his now trailing, and watching the older woman’s manipulations with detached interest. “What are you doing smoking? You shouldn’t be smoking,” the older woman scolded him as she dragged him toward the entrance. “It looks bad. Or maybe you should. It makes you seem aloof, unconcerned about trends, a rebel, who cares what other people think… Okay, good choice, the cigarette, but no smoking inside, so put that out.” She snatched it from his hand and threw it to the curb, hesitated a moment, then stamped it out with her heel. “Good touch with the accessories, by the way; the badge, the, uh… hat. Right. Oh! I had to order several gallons of fresh lemonade to accommodate this new crowd. I hadn’t expected that. There wasn’t anything else here they’d drink. It was kind of expensive, last-minute and everything, but necessary. The right choice in the end, I think you’ll agree. Come here…” She yanked him through the door. A loud, monotonous techno beat struck him as he entered, as much in the solar plexus as in the ears. She stopped him at the display wall that faced the entrance. “What’s this?!” Mary Margaret shouted so that he could hear. She pointed towards one of his photographs, towards the irregular edge of the image frame, exposed beyond the matte. “Why did you do this?!”

Proteus squinted at it for a moment, trying to understand what she meant. “Oh, that. Why? I liked it that way.”

Mary Margaret frowned at him. “Well they didn’t. You should’ve run it past me first. I would’ve told you not to do that. It might’ve cost us the sale.”

They?

Proteus noticed then the price she’d attached to the piece and bared his teeth at the audacity of it. Beside this number was a smallish green dot, a cheap little sticker affixed to the tag, and he wondered what it meant. But before having a chance to even think of asking her, Mary Margaret pulled him around the false wall and into the gallery, where a disc jockey at two turntables was set up in back. This young man, someone he’d never seen in Cleric until now, had a large set of headphones over his ears, despite the volume of the music from his powered speakers, and seemed more the center of everything than his own work, which covered the inner walls. The room was packed with people, some few who were known and many more not known to Proteus. But the real focus, at least of most everyone’s attention now, was the glamorous couple, who were followed by the popping of flashbulbs and the frenzy of several photographers’ orbits around them. The two had somehow managed to clear at least a short radius for themselves, enough to move comfortably within, beyond which everyone else pressed toward them as if pulled in by magnets.

The Ceres wives and their children with them, those who were of age – who had also crammed themselves into the room with everyone else – were the least impressed by all this. The two dark sister wives (and it finally occurred to Proteus that they may in fact be sisters) seemed not to even notice the celebrities in their midst. The tough-looking woman with the fire-red hair (and the only one shameless enough to let some length of her arms’ bare and freckled skin show) studiously ignored the glamorous couple and their entourage while she stared hard at one or another photograph, as if critical of some particular detail, while to the side stood Shulamit, who watched the crowd’s behavior with open disapproval, even contempt. When Proteus realized that Mary Margaret Mary Alice had already abandoned him for someone more important, he sidled over in Shulamit’s direction.

“What a circus, huh?” he said.

“WHAT?”

He shouted toward the ear she’d turned his way, “This is out of hand!”

“IT’S DECADENT AND CORRUPT,” she shouted back. “WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?”

He realized that she meant the Hollywood couple, and not, as he’d first thought, the society crowd simultaneously parting and swarming around them. “They’re famous!” Proteus explained loudly, and then added, “They’re in movies!”

Shulamit nodded gravely as if that explained everything.

He realized that maybe it did.

He looked around the room, taking in, first, as best he could, the arrangement of his pictures across three of the four walls (the fourth, the back wall, belonged entirely to the DJ and his system), while opposite this, near the front, stood the all-important refreshment table, with its stacks of clear plastic wine cups, the bottles behind these of mid-range yet respectable reds and whites, two thermoses (or were they thermi he wondered vaguely?) of coffee and of tea – so they were marked – and then two pitchers filled with sweet minted yellow lemon drink and ice. As surreptitiously as he could manage, Proteus tried to gauge how people were responding to his images, though it may not have been the best time to do so. Few seemed now to pay them any notice, the more ephemeral and exciting things being what they were – aside, that is, from the red-haired wife, whose name he still hadn’t learned. In fact, no one else looked at the work at all. When next he looked around, he noticed that most everyone had left the room and it was quite suddenly empty. The famous couple had gone. As fast as they’d descended, they were gone, and they’d taken everyone else with them. He’d not heard the steady chop of the helicopter approaching, which must’ve only circled once or twice, which now – as he went back outside to see – again lifted away from the flat-topped building across the street, presumably with the movie stars back inside. Appearance made, scene made, their work was over and done with.

He watched the machine float away into the sky, its running lights blinking solemnly. The crowd, who were now mostly out in the street, had become far less coherent in its interest. As he stood staring after the diminishing helicopter, Mary Margaret appeared again beside him and also watched. Its noise receded as the air around them settled again.

“Well that’s that,” she said after a time.

“What was that about?” Proteus asked her.

“Ultimately,” she said, “nothing at all.”

“Uh huh,” he agreed. “But… why were they here in the first place? Are they collectors or something?”

“No, they’re not collectors. They’re something though, I think, and they can be induced to show up. The publicity engine works in funny ways, you see. Word gets out about something, some event, somebody says something to somebody. Of course, no one considers it the least bit important to be there. Why would they? But then there’s that segment of the population of the ridiculously famous who know how inconceivably hip it is to be seen where no one else is. By virtue of the fact that they were there, after all, it becomes the place where every lesser celebrity should have been, but wasn’t. This only increases their cache. It doesn’t, in itself, make the scene; it makes them making the scene, even if the event never actually happens. That’s the secret. The scene, as such, is a kind of residue left in their wake after the fact, a thing of memory that people can talk about, as if they’d seen it. More of an idea than anything else, really. The trick… is for them to be seen by all the people who aren’t there.”

“Is that why the cameras? The paparazzi?” Proteus asked.

“No, the cameras just follow them around anyhow, no matter what they do. Those photographers have their own reasons for showing up. It used to involve selling the photographs to the tabloids and whatnot. Now that’s become mostly irrelevant. Truth is, they’ve gotten beyond that, the need for an actual image. At least the ones who are worth their salt. There are less substantial sorts of energies involved in the transaction now. The image, like the event, is just a residue. Ultimately unimportant. Besides, celebrities at this level don’t need photographs – they don’t even need eyes – to be seen. They have more sophisticated ways of generating image and making sure the image is perceived. Rumor about who is and isn’t, or about who will and won’t be at an event gets around long before anything ever happens. The important work for everyone is done long before, which by then the event doesn’t have to take place, not really. The event itself is rather pro forma, and can oftentimes just be scuttled altogether – assuming, of course, it was ever actually intended to occur. You can see how sometimes it’s much more efficient and cost-effective not to really do anything. But then people like these two actually sometimes show up. They only bother coming because, well, they want to go out or do something for the night, so why not? In the end, we benefit by it. All the buzz.”

Proteus was happy to see that Amanda had re-emerged from wherever she’d gone to and now moved again toward his side, opposite Mary Margaret.

“This is what I do,” said Mary Margaret Mary Alice. “I plant the necessary rumors in the necessary places about how important it might be not to show up somewhere. Or something like that. Today it draws these two out, maybe next year it’s somebody else, whoever’s at the top of the food chain by then. But people like these, they never buy anything. Granted, they could. They could buy up the whole damn collection then forget they’d done it, and never notice the difference to their combined bank accounts. They might even like the stuff, except I don’t think it ever occurs to them to look at it. Obviously, that’s not the reason why they come.”

Proteus looked at Amanda, who smiled.

“Come back inside with me. There’s someone I want for you to meet,” Mary Margaret insisted.

“Okay.”

But as soon as they re-entered the gallery – which now, again, was reasonably full of people who were not nearly so famous – Mary Margaret was immediately distracted by something or someone else more important, told him to wait right there, and rushed off again, leaving him this time at least in the company of Amanda, who blinked up at him and said, “I told you.”

“I guess there are reasons why she’s well paid for what she does,” he said as they drifted back into the heart of the little room. Though the crowd was thinner now by far, still there were a good number of people about, and many of them seemed like they might have money and could perhaps be there with a mind to buy something. The music had been turned down considerably from before and the disc jockey was gone on a break. Now a record simply played on one of the two turntables at a reasonable volume. Now, he noticed, what people who were there were even actually looking at the pictures. That made him, after a fashion, happy. Proteus tried again to gauge the amount of interest these mingling and well-dressed folk showed, though he puzzled over the inexplicable presence of so many little green dots stuck next to the prices – there was one beside each of them, in fact – the same as those in the front display. Curious, he thought. He asked himself what it could mean, and found in himself no answer at all.

“Did you see their eyes?” Amanda asked him. But because he was lost in thought, at first he didn’t understand that she’d spoken to him.

“What?” he asked, looking up, once it sank in.

“Their eyes,” she said again. “Did you notice the look in their eyes?”

“No,” Proteus admitted. “I didn’t. I couldn’t see their eyes, not with everyone in front of them.”

“They seemed happy.”

“They did? Good. That’s good. I want them to be happy, I really do.” Proteus, after all, was happy. After a fashion.

“Me too.” She took his hand in one of hers and spread his fingers apart, then interlocked hers between his. Then she leaned forward and kissed him lightly once more, lingering a little, and when she stepped back, she looked into his eyes (surprised) while he stared into hers (wide, soft, and knowing of an ambiguous and indefinable something) before she again turned and drifted away, leaving him where he stood, his heart quivering like a little bird.

He realized, after some moments of smiling down at his own shoes, that the red-haired Ceres wife now stood next to him. It didn’t happen all at once. First he’d felt a presence, and all the small hairs on his skin stood up. Only then did he look over to see that she was there. She stared at him fiercely, directly, without blinking, with holy fire in her eyes, as if she meant to burn him, if she’d only had a regular flame to set him on fire with. For now, her eyes would have to do. Proteus realized in that moment that he’d not spoken one word with her for as long as she’d been in town, and that this was because she scared him.

“Hi,” he said, his voice breaking.

“You know,” she said, leaning toward him, “we’re forbidden to say the angel’s name, just as we’re forbidden to portray its nature in images. The angels you see aren’t the angels that are there. We show it, when we show it, as a man with wings. But it is not a man with wings.”

“No. No, I didn’t know that.”

“It can only bring disaster. It can only bring plague and famine. To say the name is to destroy the world.”

“Oh.”

“To portray the angel’s nature in its nature is to invite it to show itself in this same form. No human can withstand this form.”

“He… it sounds terrible.”

“It is. Terrible it is.” She poked his chest, surprisingly hard, with each word: terrible… it… is… “Now you’ve been told. The word has been spoken.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ve not sounded your horn yet, have you?” she asked, eyes burning. “Have you called the terrible thunder?”

“My… horn. I… don’t believe that I have. I would know, right?”

She regarded him askance. “You’ve been told,” she said. “The word was spoken.”

With that she left him. He watched her walk off with purpose, as it seemed that the woman considered her work here done. He found Amanda, who stood to the other side of the room. She looked to him now with flaring eyes – not gentle as before, as only a moment ago, but with some similar, terrible intensity, one shared with the Ceres woman. It struck him. What had changed? Because something clearly had. Had he done something… wrong? Was Amanda angry? No… no… that wasn’t it. She wouldn’t be angry. Would she? It was, he thought, as if Amanda had a purpose also, and she shared her purpose with the Ceres prophetess, with them; it was a family purpose – having familiar origin, in a kindred sort of way, of a kind – and though this made him uneasy and always had (because, yes, he’d seen this look before, this purpose, if only in dreams – or had it been a dream?) it did not frighten him quite as much nor in quite the same way as that of the fire woman. The Fire Woman. Because she really did scare him. Yep. But this look in Amanda did something to him also – because now he could feel, somewhere inside his body, that there was a deep, disturbed sensation, now only just beginning, or that had been there all along, only so subtle that he’d not felt it, not until now: a quavering, a quivering, a shivering; something shuddered within his wet tangle of guts.

It was like a living thing. No, no – it was a living thing. A bird. That bird. He didn’t like it; it wouldn’t stop. Across the room, Amanda seemed to dilate back, to recede into vague distances. He watched her go, and it was terrible…

“Oh, there you are!” came Mary Margaret, as if he were the one who’d discarded her. She thrust at him a thin, thin older woman dressed all in frill and fur and shades of pink. Everything was pink: her coat, her collar, her shoes, her skirt. Her shirt was light and satin, and though nearly white, ultimately not, no: it also was pink. So were her eyes, bloodshot and bulging from her skeletal face. And she carried a tiny, fluffy little dog. The dog was not pink – it was a white dog – with dark eyes and a black little nose. But the collar around its fuzzy neck was very, very pink. Its eyes rolled up at him. Its ribbon tongue stuck out: pink. The old woman smiled. Pink lipstick smeared her teeth.

“Oh my, oh! Hello.” She extended a bent and bony hand toward him. He took it, trying not to break the fragile thing.

“Proteus, this is Mrs. Felicia Drudge,” offered Mary Margaret.

“Of the Houston Drudges,” added Felicia.

“Of c-course,” said Proteus, the shaking deep inside him making his voice unsteady.

“And you’re the artist?” she drawled, not releasing his hand.

“Y-es.”

“You’re sure about that?” she asked, and gave him an exaggerated stage-wink.

He screwed up his face in confusion. “…Ye-es?”

“I see. Oh, this is all so very… so very…”

“Felicia is a collector of artists,” Mary Margaret broke in, though Proteus thought he must’ve misheard her.

“An art col-lector,” he commented. “I s-see. Yes.”

Mrs. Drudge gave him a mocking look, as if to say, Oh no, my boy, you simply don’t understand.

Again, he wondered: had he done something wrong?

“Well if you are the artist,” Mrs. Drudge said, “this really is something now, isn’t it?”

“…Th-th-anks?”

Mary Margaret leaned in close and whispered to him, “This is not who I meant to introduce you to,” then she led the old woman away as the two laughed between themselves as if at some private joke – at his expense – and the small dog yipped at them both, looked back at Proteus imploringly, and then forgot about him. Proteus actually scratched his head. When he turned again, with some intention of finding another place to stand, just for variety’s sake, he all but ran into the two missionary boys, both in their same suits as ever, now even more closely shaved (not that either could grow much of a beard yet) and somehow more brightly, redly, really well-scrubbed than usual. They smiled patronizingly at him.

“Hi,” said one.

“Hi,” said the other.

Proteus couldn’t remember their names. It must’ve shown on his face.

“Nephi,” said the first.

“Laman,” the other told him.

“Of course. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry. We know our names are strange names,” Nephi told him. “That’s why people usually don’t get them. Why are there circles?” He pointed toward a nearby photograph.

“Was something wrong with the film?” asked Laman. “It looks like there was something maybe wrong with the film.”

“Maybe,” explained Proteus.

“We’ve been told not to look,” Laman said. “But so we had to.”

“You were told…?”

“Why did you put circles in the sky,” asked Nephi, “when they’re not supposed to be there?”

“I’ll bet it was because somebody told you not to put them there.”

“I didn’t puh-put them there,” said Proteus. “They were just there.”

“When are there just circles in the sky?”

Laman punched his brother in the shoulder, hard.

“Ow!”

Suddenly angry, Laman said, “You know when.” Then he turned to Proteus and shined his accustomed smile, full of bright teeth, saying, “Thank you, sir. Have a good day. Night, I mean.”

Laman then pulled his brother away, who seemed on the verge of tears.

When Proteus looked up to try and find her once more, he couldn’t. Amanda was nowhere around. He thought to go outside and have a cigarette, thinking maybe he would find her there. But when he turned in this direction, he all but walked straight into Mary Margaret Mary Alice, who now had another guest with her. Because his clothes were, for the first time that he’d ever seen, flawlessly coordinated – even, he had to admit, downright dapper, if maybe several decades out of style – Proteus did not at first recognize the Professor. The wizened man – whose white beard and hair were for once neatly trimmed, combed, and miraculously under control, and whose understated plaid sport suit was meticulously tailored to fit him, a brownish vest underneath his jacket and even a pocket watch, its gold chain draped between front pockets – beamed at him with his familiar beatific, if not downright ecstatic, smile.

“Proteus,” said Mary Margaret, “this is the person I’ve been meaning to introduce you to. Please, I’d like for you to meet my good friend, Professor Stolen White Head.”

So that was the Professor’s actual name, thought Proteus, wondering if he’d heard it right, and wondering if it was Indian. The man did not the least bit look Indian, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. “I already know the Pro-fessor,” he said. “He c-comes to the coffee shop every day.”

The Professor beamed.

“Oh I doubt that,” Mary Margaret corrected him. “No, I don’t think that’s possible at all.”

“Wh-what do you mean? Of c-c-course he does. I see him there all the t-time. I fix him a d-drink that’s… impimp-impossible?” Proteus began to doubt it himself then.

The Professor beamed and beamed.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no. There’s no chance you could have met him before. You see, the Professor’s been dead for more than forty years.”

“I… I see. My m-m-mistake. In th-that c-c-c-case.” Proteus, the shaking now so firmly established in his gut that it couldn’t help but show in the tremble of his arm as he extended it slowly toward the Professor to take…

“My child.” The Professor bowed stiffly and ever so slightly, even reverently, but did not accept the proffered hand.

That was when the small man came and shut the whole thing down.

•

The small man truly, truly was a tiny man, scarcely more than two feet high, squat and solid, barrel-chested, clad in blue overalls with black, heavy boots and a little cap. He carried also a small wooden ladder, and if only a short painter’s ladder, it was still several times longer than he was himself. He crossed in from the entrance and made straight for the center of the room, vectoring a quick path through what remained of the crowd. By now this was not much. To all appearances nobody noticed. Or if he was noticed, no one paid him any mind but Proteus, who definitely himself did – both notice and pay him mind – since the small man crossed in the narrow but awkward space directly between himself and his interlocutors, smacked against his shins with the ladder, and offered not so much as an I’m sorry. The Professor and Mary Margaret didn’t look at the small man; they hadn’t seemed to notice that anything was amiss. In fact they were unusually still and silent, as if stuck in a trance, and they only stood there, looking to him – that is, to Proteus – in a bovine, seemingly narcotized complacence.

The small man passed behind the sculptor Sarfatti who, round and great in his gut and chest, his legs again pressed into stick-skinny jeans, and who, bent stiff with his waist to look close at some part of a picture (and who by all rights should’ve fallen face-first into it, yet didn’t), also failed or didn’t bother to notice how the very small man set up his ladder in the gallery’s mid-point, just beneath the hanging central light. No one but Proteus paid any attention as he climbed ponderously up, his foreshortened legs stretching wide at each rung’s height to reach the next, and no one bothered to say a word in protest when the small man, at the ladder’s top, reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb, making not only the one, but somehow every light in the place go dark.

The turntable, still playing unattended, ran down to aural sludge before its speakers lost power.

Mary Margaret seemed to come back to her senses with that, announcing, “Well that will do then. Closing time!” Obediently, the scatter of remaining patrons filed placidly toward the door. She then said to Proteus, “We’ll clean all this up and get our accounts straight in the morning. Don’t worry about it for now. Enough for one night.”

But he was watching the little man pack up his ladder, fold it flat, balance the thing on a shoulder, then march ceremoniously out – all of it a difficult thing to see in the dark. “Wh-what?” he said once he realized that he’d been talked at.

“We did very well tonight,” she told him.

“We d-did? Great. Where’s the Pro-f-f-fessor? H-he was just h-here.”

“No… no… he was never here in the first place.”

“Oh.” Proteus then thought to ask, as the two of them shuttled out toward the door, talking as fast as he could to avoid a stammer, “Whatwereallthose… littlegreendots… beside the p-price t-tags about?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything sold. We sold every piece tonight, in fact as soon as I opened the place. We did very well.”

This only confused him, but he didn’t want his, he knew, underwhelmed response to show and draw comment, so he made a point of saying, by way of overcompensation, “W-well. That’s n-nice. That’s r-r-really s-s-something. Isn’t it.”

“Yes, Sheriff Proteus,” Mary Margaret said drolly as she turned the front door’s tumbler with her key, “it is.” She shook his hand stiffly. “Congratulations. Now good night.” And she stalked off into the darkness, leaving him there, stunned on the sidewalk, the last person left.

He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, struggling to reach the small flame to the tip. He stared into the impenetrable sky and felt the living thing inside his belly jump up and down and back and forth. First he looked, nervously, in one direction up the street, then in the other. Nothing moved except for him. The limousines had all vanished to wherever they’d come from, long ago. The streets were empty. Taking a long drag, he exhaled slowly and watched the escaping smoke drift off in whorls, realizing, a little at a time, that he, unlike everyone else, was still there, and that his guts were slowing, also a little at a time, back to accustomed, relative stillness.

Where was Amanda?

•

Not that he wanted to be there, but the Tooth Or Claw was the only place left open. It was just that he didn’t want to go home quite yet. But then, he didn’t want to be out either. He didn’t want to be with people, and he didn’t want to be alone. The night was still… if not young, at least not entirely spent, and he felt a terrible restlessness, an anxiety he couldn’t put a name to. The shaking had at least subsided by now – it was still there, a little, but nowhere near so bad – and Proteus had some idea that his “date” might – might – be waiting for him here.

Some date. She’d off and vanished. If he’d wanted to be anywhere, it was with her.

But she wasn’t at the Tooth Or Claw. The place was dark, the music scarcely loud enough to hear, and only two customers lazed about in the ambient disquiet and near-stasis – a fishbowl-state the Tooth Or Claw now lay in – apart from Last Man Tunker, the barkeep. Someone he didn’t recognize at one far, dark side of the room darkly, lazily threw dark darts at a board on the wall, while the sculptor Sarfatti leaned heavily against the maple, allowing his beard to be soaked and spotted with suds, all by his own self and, it seemed, without his knowing he’d done it.

Tunker saw Proteus enter. “Coffee?” the bartender asked, holding up a handy mug, to which Proteus nodded.

He came and stood near him at the bar. Proteus didn’t know what else to do. Without Amanda, he wanted nothing here. He didn’t want a drink. He didn’t want coffee either, but there it was, and so he accepted the mug held out to him, now full, and feigned gratitude.

“Your show,” said Tunker.

“Yes.” Proteus nodded and drank from the cup. Acrid, bitter; not cold, but burnt.

“I hear that…” Tunker either could not finish the thought, or that was all there was to it.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” He took another sip. Acrid, bitter: burnt.

Proteus looked toward Sarfatti, who was watching, in turn, himself. The man hid a mocking smile, or something like one, within his tangled brush of beard, abstractedly amused. Proteus turned away.

“She left with him, you know,” said Tunker.

“She… what?” He imagined Amanda going home with the large sculptor, who was now already done with her and come back for a nightcap.

“You were asking me about Fishkill last you were in here,” Tunker explained, “about their show in the summer? The singer, that dark-haired girl, with all the legs and everything? She’s a friend of yours, did you say?”

Vivianne. “Oh yes,” he said, “Vivianne.” He pictured Viv and Sarfatti the sculptor together, then screwed up his face in confusion because it made no sense – because he imagined that Sarfatti, for some reason, once Viv had removed all his clothes, would be made entirely of plastic, with hinged joints, like an action-figure doll, only life-sized.

“She went,” Tunker continued, “with the sheriff.”

“But I’m the sheriff.”

“No, not you. Friendly – the other one.”

But that only confused him all the worse. “Oh right,” he said, and, “She what?”

“She went,” said Tunker, “with the sheriff. Your friend the singer, she left with the sheriff. Almost everyone else in here was vanished on the spot, the way he made them do that. The rest of us who were left, we couldn’t say. We didn’t know. You know. I barely managed to… not… go also… I was one of the few. I hid back here behind the bar. But you know that she just… she just took his arm. Took his arm. She did. Like they knew each another from somewhere – like wherever they’d been before, the two of them – and they walked off, the two of them, him and her, like they had to go catch a boat somewhere. Only they were in no hurry. Do you know? They knew each other. They were in no hurry. But she didn’t disappear. Not like that. Not at first, anyhow.”

“No,” said Proteus, “she wouldn’t. Not like that. Not at first.”

“The drummer kid, you know, he disappeared like that. But not at first either. But that’s because he’d gone out back. I don’t know. For a cigarette or something.”

“And then after that.” Proteus supplied.

“Right. After that he did. He disappeared like that exactly.”

Proteus looked again at Sarfatti, who’d been glowering and watching him this whole while, in some vaguely menacing way, with some implied threat or another.

“And then she…?” Proteus said, turning again to the barkeep.

“Then she disappeared,” he explained, “after that. Exactly like that.”

“Yes. Yes, she would.” He nodded. He sipped his burnt coffee and nodded.

“Your show.” This from Sarfatti, who, with his gruff voice, interrupted.

Proteus turned yet again toward Sarfatti, who glowered and grinned with amused menace.

“Your show…” the large man said again, only different this time.

Proteus sipped his coffee – acrid, burnt – and nodded.

“Your show?”

“Yes,” Proteus said, and nodded.

“It’s good work. I’ll give it that. I have to respect that.”

“Mm-hm. Thanks.”

The sculptor Sarfatti shook his head slowly, disdainfully. “Your work. Your show? Tell me,” he said, moving in closer, his beer breath fogging Proteus’s face, killing any flies that were near it, “your name… is Proteus? What sort of name is Proteus? That’s no name for a man.”

“My name…” said Proteus.

Sarfatti, in disdain, in amused though abstracted menace, looked him up slowly, looked him down, looked him up and down, then looked directly into his eyes, searching out the lie – yes, yes, just so, just as I thought, his searching look seemed to say – as if this thing, the thing he saw, whatever it was, proved his point exactly.

“…is not Proteus.”