TEN

The World

[Late Winter, 2006]

Proteus found himself back at the apartment. He didn’t remember how he’d got there. Yet he stood at the window looking out over the courtyard, holding the heavy curtain aside and staring down at the frozen mud. It looked like the moon. At this particular hour, late in the afternoon, coming soon on the evening with all its diminishings, there were few people crossing its width, only some at the far perimeter, distant specks on the horizon, bundled against the cold. The window was also cold. Without touching it, he could feel the warmth of the room sucked out around him. The cold was something that reached out to touch him and laid its fingers deliberately over his face and skin.

“Where…?” he started to say, then stopped abruptly, confused by the sound of his own voice in the flat, unresonant space.

Where’s my soul? he thought. Is it there? He didn’t see it. Is it there? He didn’t see it anywhere. Not walking over the frozen mud, not coming any closer, not hovering nearby. And here he was supposed to have the thing already, or so the old man had said. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see it.

But what did the old man know?

Actually. The old man seemed to know something.

But he didn’t feel the least like he’d gotten his soul back. He still felt divided, diminished, and only a part of himself. Or so he imagined. Really, he didn’t know. He didn’t know how much the part that was missing constituted of the whole of himself. He could scarcely imagine what feeling like the whole of himself might be. He didn’t know that he’d ever been one entire person, much less how exactly the division had come about. But here he was. He was a shadow now. He stood at the window now. He looked out, he stared out, to the courtyard – if a courtyard it could be called – and now witnessed the unfoldment of the frozen ground, its stasis, its bleaching away of colors, its scratch-line of paved diagonals, diminishing into the distance, divisionary lines as much as pathways, and he could see toward the skyline beyond it, the mountains beyond that, the cloud cover above everything, an unbroken distance.

There was this: the person: everything. He was perhaps a ghost.

The walls held a rank and oily smell.

The curtain seemed largely of plastic.

His nose had started to run.

And into the distance: the flat and middle distance. There was that. He dropped the curtain and turned back to the room.

•

Was the part of himself missing truly his soul? He called it that – or others had called it that – as a matter of convenience. It was a piece that was gone. He considered the shape of the space inside him. He considered that volume of dislocated self.

The room was also darkening, as it was outside, with the day’s retreat of sunlight, into murk. There was still enough light to see by, though things, in a general way, grew hazy and indistinct, and things that were already that way became more so. It wasn’t much, to be sure. The apartment was little more than a box with some fixtures. There was a long table and a single, wooden chair in the kitchen, and a plate left on the table, covered in a film of grease. A spoon sat beside it, cockeyed. He’d touched neither of these things. The kitchen was empty of actual food. There was the plastic chair with the metal legs in the living room where he stood, which he’d set aright when he’d found it. Beside the chair were stacked a number of Sheriff Friendly’s notebooks, spiral-bound, hand-writ in tiny letters, their covers in so many colors, worn, bent, creased, crushed. The notebooks had been the focus of such intense concentration and effort – first of the sheriff himself in their creation, now of Proteus in their apprehension – that they should have reasonably burst into flames and burned everything, but that did not happen.

Instead, a terrible stillness lay about everything. The air in the apartment was flat and dead, and sound did not carry. When he cleared his throat, when he spoke a word – “When…” he said – but his voice fell mutedly in its flight from his head and went nowhere. It was useless. Gravity itself went wrong.

“When…” he said again, then barked once, then gave up. It was no use. Making sound was of no use.

He put his hand to his face. He had a face. It was right there.

•

From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

The outblast of radiating mindstuff is a signal, meant as one or not. It is. Blue signal. Blue-white signal, bluered. The transmission of the exploded headparts: brain, bone, facestuff. Blue, white, and red. It goes out, it flies, it signals, this king, to make connection with others of like kind, in sympathetic, or so-thinking. The. Sends to others – others? what what others? – filaments of substance, of like-kind substance, to people. People? What are people? So imagined, so defined: the others who are or might be people. Did I do that? Good question. Did I just blow up? Good. Seems I did, but I don’t think. That was the signal: my FACE. Pieces of it fall splat on the floor. This is the transmission: a picture, spherical, primary, sovereign. It is like a net, it is cast out, cast wide, it flies, it is pulled back in, and it catches and it gathers in its selfsame, like-same substance, i.e. the people, and it winnows by its selfsame self, i.e. people, it winnows off the strands of notwithstanding, the, they, they, the others. The people. I.E. Why, way, why come all the way out here? Might be a question. Seems a reasonable question, reasonably asked. Here away, here of all places, all this way? Otherend dot Oftheworld dot.

This is the place, right? (Never allowed that doubt before, now it’s too late.)

This is the place, has to be, it’s where I’ve come. OtherDotEnd. Dot.

Limping now. Have NO HEAD. Nope. None. They might think dot. They. They might ask dot dot dot questions, any number of questions, but not hear the answer. BECAUSE THE HEAD HAS BLOWN WIDE OPEN BOOM and IT IS A BLOWNOPEN HEAD like that and can’t talk. Ears gone flying, face gone flying, bone, brain BOOM. He has gone into the sky. He is not of the Earth. This kind, this king, he flies away from you. Fall splat onto the floor. But the questions are all blank, the answers are all blank; must, by definition, be. They won’t hear it. Flies away. Because I am or am not here – no, here; no, not here; no – nothing will happen, nothing can. The un-being, BLOWN. I know how this. If I make the call they hear the call. They. They. But if I make it, only I respond, and I am here am not here –

•

Proteus noticed, either despite or because of the gathering darkness in the room, something about the arrangement in the kitchen, awkward as it was, of the long table, the single chair, the greasy plate and spoon beside it. In the dim yellow light. He stood, observing this arrangement. There was something about it…

He stood. He shifted a little to the left, looked.

No, he thought, that’s not quite it. Not how it should be.

He moved in closer, put his nose in near the plate and smelled it. It smelled, itself, like nothing, however thickly the aroma of mutton and vinegar had permeated the walls all around. The plate itself had no smell. He moved back, shifted a little to the right.

No, not quite.

He picked up the spoon and tossed it. It clattered against a wall and fell to the linoleum.

There. Now it was right. Almost. But what else? Something…

•

From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

A PARTIAL LIST OF QUALITIES AND CONDITIONS AS PERTAINING TO THE OBJECT, ITS PRIMACY, ITS EFFICACIOUSNESS, AND ITS SOVEREIGNTY

1.   The articulate language of common objects.

2.   The variable requirements of visibility, insofar as some objects are visible and some are not.

3.   The similarities of one kind of object to another, as related or unrelated to their visibility.

4.   The primacy of certain objects, and of the arrangements of certain objects in relation to one another.

5.   Persons and the arrangements of persons, and how persons are or may be objects, and are also arranged in relation to other objects, visible or not, or persons.

6.   Persons may also be visible.

7.   Persons as objects may also be arranged in relation to themselves, as they are to other objects, even if they themselves are not visible, as if they themselves were other objects, though they are not.

•

Once night had fallen and all traces of the day were gone from the sky, lampposts threw their light down in brief cones of sodium-vapor yellow at intervals over the courtyard, and far fewer people scampered about, moving from this side to that or somewhere down the middle. Though there were still some – specks overwhelmed by the indifferent ground. Proteus stood at the window, perched, his nose near the glass, watching the one figure directly outside on the frozen ground. He’d found him there the moment he pulled the curtain aside. Now he watched and waited. He wanted to see what might develop of this.

The figure in the courtyard stood straight out from his window, several yards back, close enough to be noticed in some detail, far enough away to be mistaken as insignificant to someone not watching so carefully as Proteus. The figure stared up toward him, gaze fixed, twisting his long, thin body back and forth, this way and that. He let his arms flap out centrifugally and wrap around himself, then turned to twist in the other direction, windmilling, doing it again. And again.

“Davis,” Proteus said aloud, fogging the window with his breath. He waited for it to clear away, then said, “You don’t belong here,” and fogged the glass up once more. The twisting, tall figure blurred through the self-made mist.

Proteus dropped the curtain, blocking the courtyard out. He stood for a moment, staring into the orange pleats, then he pulled the curtain aside again.

The tall man was still in the courtyard, exactly where he’d been. He twisted this way, then that. His arms flapped, fell, flapped, etc. Not enough light from the nearest lamp reached his face to illumine it in any detail, though Proteus still could see, enough at least, the self-standing spikes at the top of the man’s head the brush of his short-shorn hair made.

“If you’re here,” Proteus said, fogging the glass again, “I know enough to not ask…” he wiped the pane clear, “why you’ve come. When you have not come, you’re simply here. This is good. What you expect of me… I’ve only two cigarettes left, and you can’t have them. I will smoke them myself.”

The figure twisted and watched.

Proteus let go the curtain and it again fell shut.

•

From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

“What about me makes you think of her?” she’d asked.

“I suppose it’s the hair,” I told her, “the dark hair. The long, dark hair.”

“My hair’s not long anymore. I’ve cut it.” She ran her own fingers through it. “You’ve not seen it long.”

“Still,” I said. “When I first met her, hers was short too. Then she grew it long. And she played guitar, and sang. Like you. The blues. But it was a long time ago. In Los Angeles.”

“I never liked LA,” she said, and took a long pull on her cigarette.

Normally, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone smoking in my bedroom, or in my house at all. But I let her do this. That is, I didn’t try to stop her. “But you’ve been?” I asked.

“I wasn’t there for very long. It didn’t work out. I just never took to the place.”

“I lived there for a number of years,” I said, “but I never took to it either. Nothing ever quite seemed real…”

Vivianne pulled another long drag from her cigarette. It smelled wretched to me, and I wondered that the stink would ever leave the sheets. But I’d never seen anyone enjoy a smoke so much as she did right then. Except…

“Did she…” She turned onto her side to face me. “Did she have a metal plate in her head too? Like I do?” She knocked her knuckles against her skull.

I thought about what to say. “Yes,” I told her finally, “she did. A metal plate. Just like you.”

Satisfied by that, she lay back again and looked toward the ceiling. I ran my finger along her thigh: soft, but muscled, lean and tan.

“Maybe it was me,” Vivianne sighed, resignedly.

“But you don’t remember any of that.”

“Nope.”

For her, it hadn’t happened yet. So what I said was, “It was a long time ago. Ten years. It probably wasn’t you. You just remind me a lot of her.” But what I was thinking, what I was so desperate to find out – and maybe somehow to prevent – was why she hadn’t disappeared, like all the others. Maybe it was the metal plate.

Vivianne got up from the bed and walked over to the window, pulled the curtain aside and looked out. A warm square of streetlight found its way across her breast and belly. She said, “I’ve been in some empty rooms before, but this…” The cigarette in her hand glowed redly as she took another pull.

“This is really empty. I know. I meant for it to be that way.”

“I’ve been in some rooms…” She looked out at something far away, and I couldn’t believe that anything was really out there.

“Let me get you something to use as an ashtray.” I stood and went to the kitchen, moving a little awkwardly for being naked. In a cupboard there was a small dish, one I didn’t use much, and once I got back to the bedroom, she was gone. The smell of tobacco still hung in the air. The curtain at the window where she’d stood swung slightly in the light breeze. Her clothes were still strewn about the hardwood floor toward the corner where she’d left them, but Vivianne was decidedly gone. Just to make certain, I checked the bathroom, which was off the hallway, but it was empty, its door open and dark inside.

I couldn’t say that I was that surprised.

So I took the small dish back to the cupboard where I’d found it, then sat down in the chair at the table, and stared for some time at the table’s wooden surface, at the grain of the wood that showed through large chips and gouges in its paint. After several moments like this, I got an idea. I went back to the cupboard, again took out the dish and put it on the table. I rummaged through Vivianne’s clothes, then remembered her pack of cigarettes was still on the floor beside the bed, where she’d left them. I took one out and looked at it. It was an off-brand that I wasn’t familiar with. I took the cigarette back to the kitchen, realized I hadn’t thought to bring her lighter as well, but decided instead to light it off the gas burner of the stove, almost burning my cheek as I did so. I inhaled and immediately my throat closed down in protest, making me choke and cough. “Jeezus,” I mumbled, “how the fuck do people…” and then crushed the thing out in the dish, still coughing, belching out little puffs of smoke.

I sat back down in the chair, slightly sickened, and after a moment thought, I should put some pants on. But I didn’t get up.

My entire head seemed to smell and taste like smoke, from the inside.

I will sell the bullets from my gun, I thought, I will get money. I will be granted passage. I will float –

•

When he pulled the curtains open again, it was daytime. Wan light spilled through the window, filtered by a thin layer of cloud, and touched his face. He couldn’t see his face. He couldn’t see what sunlight did to it. He couldn’t see the gauntness of his fleshless cheeks, much less understand, with any alarm, the hollow look of his eyes. What he saw was the courtyard (so-called), square, gray, vast, frozen, and the armed, legged dots moving furiously fast across and through it. Perhaps they pumped their little extremities against the cold, or perhaps they only seemed as fast as all that. But the single speck that didn’t rush from one end of the court to the other, the only spot, bright red, that stood straight out from his window, five floors below and looking directly up at him, jumped at the moment it knew it had been seen, raised its arms up in victory V, hello – a red puff, happy.

Byambaa waved at him spiritedly. She jumped again, raising her short arms higher, her hands up into the air. Could Proteus, from this distance, really see the great smile on her face? No. Someone thinking rationally would’ve said, no, that wasn’t possible. To see her smile from so far away. Yet she jumped into the air, again and again, waving, and wasn’t that enough?

Would anything be enough?

He let go the curtain and it fell shut again. He was protected from light.

She seemed enthusiastic. Her confrontation with the future must not have been so bad after all, and she was alright. All was forgiven. But how had she found him? He couldn’t remember ever telling the young woman where he’d stayed.

The magic must be working.

He resumed the experiment.

At the long table in the kitchen, in the chair before the plate, he took again to his position; the place, the plate, the posture, the tableau – as he’d come to call it – that made the whole world. Such acts of creation as these had their traditions of darkened rooms, which was a thing commonly known – or only known to him, it may be true. Or perhaps he did not know it either. But acts of creation in darkened rooms were the things he now occupied himself with, as his predecessor had done, as he now must. The narrowing of options had left him to this and this only, and this was the law: all not forbidden was compulsory. Nature had dictated it. His nature. He.

He bent over. He stretched out one arm and leaned his weight against the arm. He crooked the arm and bent the elbow. The elbow deflected the angle of the arm. The forearm bent back. The hand formed a fist. He rested the fist against his face and likewise his face to the fist, and the fist indented the fallow skin of the cheek, and he looked down toward the plate, he faced the plate and waited. He waited for the world to be made.

But there was still something about this not right. Why wasn’t it working? Something wasn’t right. What about this wasn’t right?

He couldn’t think. He took a cigarette, one of two remaining, it was an act of desperation, and lit the thing off the electric burner, and sat back down and worried. He looked at the plate. He smoked the cigarette. He smoked and looked at the plate. Its greasy film shown in the electric light, reflecting back a flare of light, the reflection of the bulb, otherwise offering nothing. When the ash had grown long on the cigarette, he flicked the cigarette. The ash fell on the plate. The small pile of ash rested near the rim of the plate, in the midst of its greasiness. It broke the flare’s reflection of the electric light. It seemed near wistful, this. It was a broken light.

He stared at it.

The light needs breaking. At the ends, see? Where it sits. The light needs bending. The interruption of.

He’d found the missing piece.