Spaceland Read online

  Though these Flatlanders were as tall as me, they were no thicker than their film of space. Seeing a flat man on his own in an underground room, I flew down next to him. I said a few words to him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Would it hurt his space if I reached into it? I thought of an ocean’s surface or a soap film. Maybe the surface would give way and stay tight around my fingers. I went ahead and stuck my two hands into the room with him. Just as I’d hoped, the space harmlessly gave way.

  The flat man saw the cross sections of my fingers in his room; he darted around in terror. I cornered him against the eastern wall. From my viewpoint in the third dimension, I could see his insides: his muscles, his bones, his brain and his desperately pounding heart. Curious to get a really good look at how he was made, I grabbed hold of his skin on either side and lifted him up.

  What a disaster. He fell apart like a hot slice of pizza with too many toppings. As his skin came up out of his plane, his innards spilled out and scattered. Some pieces drifted off into space, some fell back into the plane. I tried to put the man back together, but it was hopeless. There was nothing more to do for him. Sadly I stirred his remains with my hands, trying to get a feel for this flat world’s matter. It was like the objects in this world were scraps of cellophane embedded in a soap film. They had a weak kind of solidity to them, but mostly they depended on the upper and lower sides of their space to keep them together. The flat man had been like a mosaic held together by the pressure of his space.

  A Flatland woman appeared outside the room’s door, which was hinged on the ceiling like a pet door. The door was like a line instead of a rectangle—a fat line that bulged out to a ball at the top end, the ball held by a socket on the ceiling. The vibrations of the woman’s knocking and of her voice traveled up my arms and into my ears. “Hey Custer, it’s me, Mindy!” she cheerfully called.

  The door swung open and her greetings changed to screams. I pulled my guilty hands up out of the room, but not before she glimpsed their pink cross sections. She ran up the carved-out stairs and onto the main street of Flat Matthewsboro, shrieking out the news.

  I offered dead Custer a silent apology, and moved along next to the main street of Flat Matthewsboro myself, heading the opposite way from Mindy. Flat Matthewsboro’s street ran East/West, punctuated by the town’s buildings. It was more like a series of courtyards than a street. The buildings had staircase outlines, big on the bottom and small on top, with basements and sub-basements as well. I could see inside everything.

  The citizens of Matthewsboro moved along the streets by walking upon their weirdly jointed legs and occasionally leaping into the air. They were nimble as fleas. The gravity of their world was so weak that they usually chose to clamber over a building rather than finding their way through its passages. And when two of them encountered each other going opposite ways, one would somersault over the other. It seemed customary for the westbound one to hop over the eastbound one.

  The building’s doors were sturdy affairs, with leaf springs to hold them closed. It occurred to me that if anyone ever left a one-room building’s eastern and western doors open at the same time, the building could collapse. To make this less likely, the buildings with more than one door had more than one room as well, so that there were a series of doors. There even seemed to be some kind of signaling system to prevent the all-doors-open-at-once disaster, a system of strings rigged up along the ceilings between the pairs of doors.

  The buildings had markings in the form of colored dashes and dots along their outer walls. Thanks to the magic of dreams, I could read the signs. I saw a hot dog stand that I remembered from my boyhood: Cowboy Zeke’s Dawg ’N Suds. I watched a man eating a Wrangler Dog; he chewed it up and swallowed the pieces down into the sack of his stomach, washing down the food with a two-dimensional bottle of root beer. The woman behind the T-shaped counter had popped off the two-dimensional bottle-cap for him; the cap was a neat little thing shaped like a staple.

  In my dream I knew that the flat man was my Dad. This hadn’t mattered at first, but now it did matter. Dad reached up high to wipe off the mouth on the top of his head, then leaned on the counter of the hot dog stand, pointing his mouth towards the shapely young counter woman, bulging out his eyes so that he could look at her. They got into a lively conversation. I reached out and gently touched the surface of the flat world so that the sounds of their voices could travel up my arm and into my inner ear. The Flatlanders sounded country, just like the folks back in the real Matthewsboro.

  The woman’s name was Dawna. Dad wanted Dawna to come for a walk and let him “pitch some woo.” Dad often talked that way, using that forties kind of big-band slang. Some women liked it. Dawna sealed up the hot dog stand and they set off, scrambling over building after building until they’d found their way into the woods to the east of Matthewsboro.

  The woods were like the cross section of a broccoli plant: green and filled with nooks and crannies. Beyond the woods lay the shallow bowl of a lake—a water-filled dent in the planet’s surface. People were swimming in the lake, diving to pass under each other when necessary. There was steady foot traffic back and forth over the woods between Matthewsboro and the lake, but the daytrippers stuck to the outmost edges of the vegetation rather than pushing down into its depths. Dad and Dawna were as private as a pair of aphids in a tea rose.

  I watched them bend their heads to rub their mouths together, and then they peeled off their clothes, the thin strings they wrapped around themselves to hide their skin. How small their clothes were compared to their bodies.

  Dad’s penis stiffened between his legs. He and Dawna folded and bent their double-jointed legs so they could have sex. Dawna helped Dad insert tab A into slot B. It looked so strange from the third dimension.

  A teenage girl was passing westward over the outer edges of the woods, on her way home from swimming in the lake. She looked familiar, but for the moment I couldn’t place her. She wore her hair glued into two ponytails below her eyes, one ponytail on either side of her head. She had a little pet with her, a small darting animal like a dog. The pet unexpectedly burrowed down into a narrow inlet of the woods, and the girl followed after it. Perhaps the dog was drawn by Dad and Dawna’s rustlings. The ponytailed girl saw the two lovers, but they didn’t see her. Very agitated, the girl grabbed her dog and took off towards Matthewsboro.

  A bit later, Dad dropped Dawna off at the hot dog stand and ambled home, pausing on the way to vomit the digested remnants of his meal into a special public trough at the side of a building. In this flat world, people didn’t have full digestive tracts. Dad bumped into a friend at the trough. I touched my finger to their plane in the shadow of the trough so I could pick up their sound vibrations.

  “Howdy, big gaaah,” said Dad’s friend, another cowboy-type character. He, too, was squeezing out the waste from his belly. “Nothin’ like emptyin’ yore gut before dinner, hey Ed?”

  “Urp, yep,” said Dad. “After some lovin’ it’s pretty good too, Jed.”

  “You devil,” cackled Jed. “I noticed you slippin’ outta town with that little Dawna from Zeke’s. I guess you been too busy plowin’ to hyar the big news.”

  “What all’s that?”

  “Some kind o’ weird cult killin’. Custer. He was butchered like a flat pig. His waaf Mindy found him, she said they was things like hands rootin’ around in his bloody guts. Spirit hands without no body.”

  “Mercy me,” said Dad. And then, without missing a beat, he began wondering aloud how this might affect Mindy’s sexual availability. “Widders gets lonely pretty fast, I hear.” Same old Dad.

  I followed Dad to his humble home—which turned out to be a Flatland version of the house I’d grown up in. What a pang it gave me to see it, flat and open as the back of a dollhouse. Inside were Mom and my sister Sue, a loudmouth with a lot of attitude. Seeing Sue and her ponytails, I suddenly realized that she was the girl who’d seen Dad and Dawna. And, yes, her flat dog was with her, fuzzed with orange
and white hair just like my boyhood dog Arf. Mom looked angry; her motions were jerky and angular. Sue had already spilled the beans.

  I had a sinister feeling of things coming together. My dream was turning into the day when my mother had stabbed my father in his stomach. The worst day of my life. Maybe this time I could do something to keep it from happening. I touched a finger to the corner of the room beneath the couch and listened to them.

  As soon as he came in, Dad started telling Mom about Custer’s killing. “Seems Mindy found Custer all hacked up, with his innards all over the room!” he exclaimed. “People are gittin’ nastier all the time. Mindy’s about off her nut; she’s sayin’ she seen hands crawlin’ around inside the remains. Hands without nothin’ attached to ’em, all wobbly and changin’ their shapes like clouds.”

  Mom wasn’t going to be distracted. “I suppose you’ll be slippin’ around to comfort Mindy next,” she snapped. “Too bad them crawlin’ hands didn’t git her too.” Mom knew her husband. “You and your tramps,” she yelled. “Your sluts! I know what you got up to this afternoon with Dawna!”

  “Why do you have to run around with other women all the time, Dad?” said Sue in a shaky voice. “It’s ruining my life. People tease me about you at school.”

  “Some day you’ll know the score,” answered Dad in his slow, Western drawl. “A fella’s got his needs.” The maddening thing about my father had been that he never seemed to feel guilty. He was like Arf: one whiff of an available female and he was gone, not a thought in his head but burying his bone.

  “Oh, let him be, Sue,” said Mom, suddenly turning listless. “It don’t matter none.” She’d often gotten like that towards the end of the marriage—too sad and crushed to make a fuss. Deflated. But I knew how much rage was inside her. I knew she was about to snap.

  I had to do something to stop the disaster. I stuck my hand further into the film of Mom and Dad’s living room. As before, the space gave like the surface of a pond, easily letting me poke through. I moved my hand and waggled my fingers, moving them around in the air above their floor.

  Seeing the little pink circles where my fingers crossed their space, the three flat people jerked in surprise. Inside their bodies, their two-dimensional Valentine hearts pulsed faster. Mom screamed, “It’s them hands!” She darted into the kitchen next door, dragging Sue by the hand. She hooked the flap of the kitchen door behind her; the barking dog was with her too.

  I hacked Dad against the other wall, herding him with my fingers. Once or twice I bumped him. He was lighter than the thinnest scrap of paper; my slightest touch sent him flying. When he stopped trying to escape, I lowered my head sideways down into the space and talked to him.

  “Don’t be afraid, Dad. I’m Joe. Your son.”

  “Git!” said Dad. “Don’t touch me!”

  “I’m from Spaceland,” I said. “The land of three dimensions.”

  “What that crap supposed to be?”

  “Spaceland has up, down, East and West like your Flatland,” I said. “But we have North and South, too.”

  “That don’t mean a thing. North. Where’s it at?”

  “It’s the other direction of your body. Not up or down, not left or right—it’s what you might call back and front.”

  “Back and front ain’t words neither. You gonna tear me apart like you did Custer?”

  “That was an accident,” I said. “I only want you to understand me. I’m your Spaceland son. Maybe if you understand me, then I can understand the fourth dimension.”

  “You not my son,” said Dad. squeezing shut his eyes. “I’m not seein’ you a’tall.”

  “I’m real,” I insisted, with a catch in my voice. “Look at me.”

  I was weightless; I could fly in any direction I liked. I floated through the house’s living room front-on, making a cross section that was first the oval of my stomach, then a two-dimensional outline of my arms, legs and head, then the rounds of my butt, and then nothing. Dad didn’t say anything.

  I turned and drifted through Dad’s space again, this time feet first, like Momo had done. plane intersected my legs in a pair of circles. The circles grew and joined to make a cross section of my waist, accompanied by the cross sections of my arms. The arm circles merged with my body circle, and shrank down to my neck. And then I showed Dad some outlines of my head. Still no reaction.

  I turned my head at an angle, holding it so that both my eye and my mouth were in Dad’s space again. The cross section I made was an irregular blob.

  “You a freak,” said Dad. “A space monster. You kilt Custer.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But Mom’s about to knife you.”

  “Say what?”

  “I remember, Dad,” I told him. “I’ve been through all this before. Here, let me help you. I’ll augment you.”

  In my dream I knew I had to make my father wet and then shock him. It seemed I was holding something like a cattle prod, and now, to wet him down, I found myself peeing onto him. My urine spurted into Dad’s space from the third dimension, dousing him all over. I touched the electrode of the prod to the center of his brain and—lo and behold—a stalk grew up with a bright black eye at its tip. I ran the prod around the edges of his body and his skin writhed and then spread across his exposed surfaces, a higher skin closing off his exposure to the third dimension.

  And then I pulled myself out of their space and watched, with a listening finger resting behind the couch. After a minute, Mom reappeared from the kitchen. Sue and the dog had escaped out the back door.

  “Are you all right, Ed?” said Mom uneasily. “Where’d them devil hands go? Did someone put a hex on you and Mindy?”

  “I—I can see over your skin,” said Dad, staring down at her with his third eye. He could indeed see over her skin and into her guts. “I can see inside you, Mary. I see your blood and your crap. You as dirty inside as me.”

  “Oh, I hate you so much!” cried Mom. “You make my life filthy!” She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a long sharp triangle. The carving knife. She stabbed at Dad, but Dad instinctively humped up the middle of his body, making a little arch that the knife could stick through without actually touching him.

  From Mom’s point of view it was as if Dad’s middle had disappeared. She screamed and ran out of the room. Dad’s stomach sank back into his flat space.

  “You still hangin’ around, Space Joe?” he asked. “How in tarnation did I disappear my stomach like that?”

  “You lifted it towards the front side of your body,” I said. “Into the third dimension. Would you like ro see what it’s like up here?”

  “Okey-doke,” said Dad. “And when we done, you set me down somewhere’s far away.”

  After the way I’d torn Custer’s skin right off his body, I was a little nervous about lifting up my flat Dad. But he’d been augmented now; his front and back were covered with skin. I took a delicate hold of his leg and jiggled it. It lifted up fine—though his sock and his shoe stayed behind.

  I pulled harder, and then Dad was up above his flat world. He had trouble seeing much of it with his regular eye. The problem was that his flat eyes only saw things that lay in the plane of his body.

  In my dream I knew he was able to get a true two-dimensional view of things by using the stalk of his extra eye. But it took him a while to figure out how to interpret this vision. For him it was as if he could look at a thing from every side at once. I began trying to get him to see my face, to really see me at last.

  Down in Flat Matthewsboro, the flat people were boiling down the main street, climbing over the buildings like an army of ants, heading for Dad’s place. A lynch mob.

  I thought I was safe from them, but the three-dimensional space around me started collapsing, squeezing in from either side, crushing me and Dad down into the world of two dimensions, down into that dull, level wilderness.

  I came down in our flat house’s backyard. I’d been smashed flatter than road kill. My arms and legs could still move,
but only left/right and up/down. I was a Flatlander, with my vision reduced to a single bright line.

  I heard the flat locals coming closer, yelling for my blood. I took off over the neighbor’s house, and over the house after that, on and on, with the yelling coming closer. I was doomed.

  6

  A Narrow Escape

  I woke to the beeping of my cell phone. For a second I lay there, gathering my wits. The long, complicated dream dropped right out of my head.

  I could tell from the sound of the traffic on 85 that I’d overslept. Nine-thirty on a Sunday morning. I could see the traffic with my subtle vision. The bed felt cool and empty and quiet. No Jena. I didn’t want this day to begin.

  It was her on the phone. “Joe! I’ve been worried sick. I thought something had happened to you. How could you leave without telling me?”

  “I saw you together with Spazz, Jena. Don’t you understand I can look through walls?”

  It took her a second to formulate her comeback. “You were spring on me? Like a pervert?”

  “Don’t try to turn this around, Jena. I saw what you were doing. and I left. It’s over.” I was just saving this for effect. I pretty much expected she’d contradict me. But she didn’t.

  “It’s been over for a while now, Joe,” she said softly. “I didn’t want to admit it to myself. But I can’t live with you. You’re too cold. Too selfish.”