THIRTEEN

The World

[Late Winter/Early Spring, 2006]

Fortunately for Proteus – who didn’t need much, not at present – the light remaining was sufficient. It may have been late in the day. His body had assumed itself to the shape. He, at the table, in the chair, the central if not singular form in the arrangement of world-making: with the plate in front of him, the ashes fallen to the plate, and his arm, his head, his shoulder, rested, forming triangular necessities, as were written – these were the first forms, the elbow-angled, the heavy lean, the droop to the skin of the mouth, the heavy eyes, the languid eyes, the hopeless eyes, heavy-lidded, drooped and looking toward nowhere; the curve of the mouth, open mouth, drooling some, shivering slightly.

I stood at the window. I held the curtain open by a finger, the heavy orange fabric, most likely nylon, lifted to one side, and looked out into the courtyard, visible in the failing light. Yellow lamps had struck and lighted at the edges of the square. Of the people who moved about it, off from work, out about, none seemed to pay much mind to the spherical object just stuck off-center, as if dropped from a height, except to walk around the thing, their separate pathways all going this way and that.

Mosquito had broken frozen ground. Its fall had done that here, too. A divot formed around it of broken ice and frozen mud earth. And footprints left woven in most every direction described at least some small radius of avoidance, enough to continue on as if it were almost not there.

“I’ve seen more, being dead, than you might think,” I said into the window, perhaps at the glass, perhaps at the object out some ways distant, though really toward, in round-about, Proteus, unmoving, who sat in the tableau of world-making, though I could not tell that he heard me. I didn’t face him, except in some reflection. He didn’t respond, did not seem to move at all. “No, strike that,” I said. “I scarcely see the point – what I’ve seen or not seen. You can probably imagine. Imagine, if nothing else. None of it was real. It was all kind of hollow, really. The lack of time, the colorless light. Nothing real. I guess the point…” I turned, dropped the curtain shut, faced the figure at the table who granted me scarce acknowledgement. None at all, in fact. “The point of all that was to take Finch across. To where he could get across, to the truly dead place. You remember Finch? Because he was stuck. He’d been facing into that divide – he’d been facing it and didn’t even know it, I’d bet – he’d been… facing straight into it. But he couldn’t get across. For some reason, I could help him across, get him to where he could get over. I guess. Just that little push. He couldn’t do it himself. You remember Finch, don’t you?” Proteus didn’t make a move, nor a sound. Imbecilic. Lucky for me, things had started coming back, filling me, facts and memory. Patterns. Presence. It was like I had a mind again. Now that I was back, all these things were, in their many, small details, returning: the scant traces at first, the sense of a thing, what things the body remembers; touch, smell, the sensation… and then, an accumulation of facts, one just piling up into the next. After that you’ve got a story. It’s your story: what happened: you. “Yeah, you remember Finch. Dead Finch, long dead, long ago, from school. Dead from smack. Smack-dead. Face-down on someone’s couch, throat filled up with puke. He wasn’t much, but he was always there, somewhere, somewhere in the back of your head, wasn’t he? Well, he’s gone now, finally. He finally got across. So you can stop thinking about him? I guess that’s what all that was about. I don’t know.” I turned back to the window, lifted the curtain again, looked. “After that, I was stuck. I didn’t think I’d be able to get out again. I forgot everything; I forgot all of this life. I figured I was just dead and that was it. I forgot you were even here.”

Outside, the object. The it-thing. Shallow reflections of the yellow sodium-vapor light, hinged in mid-substance, a variable likeness, flickering across the.

The.

“Right. And I brought you these.” I carried the articles of magic over and dumped them onto the table beside him: hat, badge, gun, all a-spill. “There,” I said. They sat in a scattered mess and Proteus scarcely twitched to notice them. “You’re welcome,” I added, and, “If anything can help you now, I suppose these might. Your credentials. What else have you got, really?”

His eyeballs rolled up to look at me.

“That’s right,” I said. “What else?”

A lip quivered, and he made a sound like duh-duh-duh…

That was it. That was enough. I’d had already quite enough of this imbecile act, and I went up to him and I slapped him, and hard.

His head rocked to the side and then slowly righted itself. Those dull eyes looked back up at me, unfocused, uncomprehending. I slapped him again, again and again, because now I was enjoying it. Each time his head rolled with the impact, and yet he didn’t seem to feel it, or feel anything. That was probably why I liked it so much. I watched the side of his face where I’d hit him turn bright red, but still he said nothing.

We looked to one another: he/I.

“Do you have any real cigarettes?” I asked, noticing the pack nearby on the table. I picked up the box and looked inside, found one remaining. “They don’t have anything but ghost cigarettes over there.” I fished it out and tossed the box aside. Looking for a lighter and finding none, I went to the stove and lit the end from a burner, inhaled, and coughed.

I looked again at him. He watched me. “It didn’t work,” I said.

He stared blankly.

“I said it didn’t work,” I repeated. “You’ve not made the whole world. You’re sitting there, like that, like you’re doing it, but it hasn’t done anything. So something’s wrong with it, with your tableau. It’s not working. There’s got to be something missing.”

Finally, that brought some life out of him, something like words, something comprehensible. What he managed to mumble was, “M-missing? But… here’s…?” A flap of the arm, upsetting the plate, sending it to a clattering, rolling, eventual stop and startling him with the noise, the gesture still something short of the roving, encompassing sweep it was maybe meant to be, to indicate: yes, this whole world, all around, right here.

“Well,” I said, standing planted, foursquare, at the middle of the room, “there’s that.”

•

Consider? Yes, this. A ghost will tell us what is and what is not. A ghost for assigning importance, a ghost for distance, and to describe these variable proportions of certain, lost objects, which are now recovered. Hat: a crumpled skin of some vacant creature long dead, wretched of shape and boneless, though with the greatest volume of all three. What bones there ever once were to presuppose this thing a proper or likely crown were long ago broken, sawed off, now gone for good. Badge: the fair oblong and shiny-shiny, deferential to the dully suppressed sheen of other orbs, flares well when sparkled, when rubbed hard and bright and left in the light of nearby radiant objects. Not that anyone has done this. But the scratch and damage resultant of negligence obtained has not, one might observe, done anything but to add to its impression as an object. Otherwise it offers no protection whatever. And gun, the: of this the least is known, and of what is known, the least is understood, and all those great gaps in knowledge left yawning are otherwise filled by misimpression, misperception, deliberate deception and misdirection of the mind. Which can be quite subtle. But the force and form of the matter, like the drawing of a scepter or most eloquent stick, is that the thing goes bang, and that loudly, and in potentia as often as one feeds it with the necessary metal slugs. That much is known. So mote it be.