Mosquito (New People of the Flat Earth)

Though Proteus has accepted his unfitness for living in the world of things and people, he finds, ten years after taking his refuge in a Zen monastery, that he can no better stay cloistered within its contemplative grounds when the alien presence he’s discovered within his own mind – and come in time to rely on – abandons him. Has his sudden and overwhelming desire for a charismatic woman driven this presence away, or has the presence itself sent her to lead him back into life? Is she the alien, or is she simply a conflicted and confused girl? Working now the night shift in a home for the insane, Proteus might be content to dismiss the matter as troubled fantasy if it weren’t for an overheard radio interview in the small hours of the night, in which a small-town sheriff describes seeing exactly this same alien presence in the sky, and how its influence has since penetrated his own life. The presence seems to want something of them both, as the two are, to its inscrutable way of thinking, the same person, only inside-out. Proteus, like a cat chasing after the beam of a laser pointer, is being played with. Or perhaps he is being compelled toward some ultimate breaking point, though whether of profound understanding or madness – perhaps both – is to be seen, driven by the unknowable alien mind which can take any form. The alien may be the whole world. It may even be Proteus himself.