The car needed a new transmission. That was the problem. Everything else in the world could be falling apart -- and it was, everybody knew it was -- but the car needed a new transmission and Jack didn't have the money for a new transmission and that was the problem.

***

Boss Thompson stood on the porch of the gas station, looking up at the sky. He had been doing that a lot lately. Standing on the porch. Looking up. Talking.

Jack didn't ask who he was talking to. He had learned, over the two years he had been working for Boss, that some questions are not worth asking. The Boss talked to the sky like the sky talked back. Jack didn't care. The Boss paid on time. The Boss didn't ask about Jack's past. The Boss gave him a place to sleep above the pumps and let him fix cars in the bay without charging him for the parts he took home.

"Jack," the Boss said, not turning around. "You ever think about it? The sky?"

"Every day," Jack said. It was a lie. He thought about it maybe once a week, usually when he was lying in bed at three in the morning and the oil stain on the ceiling looked like a face he used to know.

"It's not what we think," the Boss said. He was a big man, Vietnam vet, Navy technician, the kind of man who had seen things and decided, early on, that most things were not worth the energy required to be shocked by them. "It's not aliens. It's not gods. It's not any of the stuff they tell you on the radio. It's --" He searched for the word. "It's a frequency. A number. Something coming through the wires, through the atoms, through the --"

"Through the car?" Jack said.

The Boss smiled. It was a rare smile. "Through the car, sure. Why not."

***

The Professor sat at the bar drinking bourbon that tasted like it had been distilled in a radiator. His name was Arthur -- Professor Arthur Pendelton, formerly of Case Western Reserve University, where he had been fired six months earlier for "inappropriate speculation" about the social implications of extraterrestrial contact.

"Extraterrestrial contact," he had said at the faculty meeting, sitting in the back row where nobody listened to him anyway, "is not a question of whether. It's a question of when. And when it happens, we are going to need a new social theory. The old ones -- Marx, Weber, Durkheim -- they were built for a world with one civilization. One species. One set of rules. When there are more, the rules change. When the rules change, everything changes."

Nobody had listened. The Dean had asked him to take a leave. He had taken it. Now he worked at a gas station in Ohio and drank bourbon at Sue's bar every night after work.

Sue was twenty-four, married to a man who drank more than she did and loved her less, and she served beer at the bar with the weary efficiency of a person who has decided, early, that life is going to happen to her and she might as well serve drinks while it happens.

"Another one, Professor?" she said.

"Sure."

"You know they're coming, right?" she said. It was not a question. She had heard the rumours. Everybody had. The fleet. The frequency. The scientists dying. Nobody knew what was happening. Everybody knew something was happening.

"They're already here," the Professor said.

"Where?"

He looked around the bar. The men at the end of the counter were talking about football. A woman in the corner was crying into her beer. The Boss was on the porch, looking at the sky. Jack was under a car, probably changing an oil filter he could not afford to replace.

"Everywhere," the Professor said.

***

The junkyard was where the Boss took Jack when the sky started doing strange things.

The sky was no longer blue. It was grey. Not the grey of clouds but the grey of something that had been photographed and developed and then left in the sun too long, the colours bleached out until everything looked like a newspaper photograph from 1947.

"What is this?" Jack said.

"I don't know."

They were standing in front of a freighter -- an old boat, rusted, half-sunken in the mud of the Cuyahoga, that the Boss had bought from a liquidator for scrap value. The boat had been cut. Not sunk. Cut. Cleanly, horizontally, from bow to stern, by something so thin you could not see it.

The hull hung in pieces. The pieces were held together by wires -- thin wires, thinner than hair, invisible in the flat grey light. And on the wires -- on the wires were the bodies. The previous owners. The liquidator and his two boys. They had been on the boat when it happened. They were now slices. Thin, horizontal slices, hanging from wires that held them in the air like a butcher's display.

Jack looked at them for a long time. He did not scream. He did not cry. He had seen worse in Vietnam -- he had not been in Vietnam, but he had grown up with men who had been, and their stories were worse than this.

"Who did this?" he said.

"Nobody did," the Boss said. "Or everybody did. Or the universe did. I don't know. I just know the number told me to come here. The number told me to bring the wires. The number told me to --"

"What number?"

The Boss looked at him. His eyes were red. He had been crying. Or sleeping badly. It was hard to tell with the Boss. "The frequency. The number. Whatever you want to call it. It comes through the wires. Through the atoms. Through everything. And it's --" He couldn't finish.

***

The drought came in June. It was the kind of drought that makes you forget what rain feels like. The land in Ohio -- flat already, by nature, by centuries of glacial erosion and sedimentary patience -- became flatter. Not lower. Not higher. Flatter. Like someone had taken an iron to the earth and pressed it until every ridge and hollow and dip and rise had been smoothed away.

Jack was under a car when it happened. He was changing an oil filter on a '78 Chevy that belonged to a woman from Cleveland who paid in cash and never tipped. He was underneath the car, oil on his hands, when he felt it -- not a sound, not a vibration, but a change. A change in the air. A change in the light. A change in the way the ground felt beneath his back.

He slid out from under the car. The sky was grey. The land was grey. The gas station was grey. The world was grey.

And flat.

Everything was flat. The hills in the distance -- gone. The trees -- flattened. The sky -- flattened. Not a sky anymore. A ceiling. A flat, grey ceiling that stretched in every direction with the smoothness of a table.

Jack stood up. He wiped his hands on a rag. He looked at the Boss, who was standing on the porch, looking at the world with the same expression he had worn when he heard about Pearl Harbor, when he heard about Kennedy, when he heard about the moon landing -- the expression of a man who has seen too much and is still seeing more.

"Well," Jack said.

"Well," the Boss said.

Sue walked out of the bar. She was wearing a apron that said SUE in faded letters, and she looked at the flat world and she said, "My god."

"Yes," the Professor said. He had appeared from somewhere. Nobody knew where. "Yes. That's exactly it."

Jack looked at his hands. They were oily. They were real. Or they had been real. Now they were -- he held them up. They looked flat. Two-dimensional. Like a picture of hands.

"Transmission," he said.

"What?" the Boss said.

"The car. It needs a new transmission."

Nobody laughed. There was nobody left to laugh with. The world was flat. The sky was a ceiling. The men who had been coming in ships were not coming anymore, because they had arrived, or because they had never existed, or because the concept of arrival had become meaningless in a world without depth.

Jack looked at the '78 Chevy. It was flat now too. A picture of a car. Beautiful, in a way. Like a painting. Like a photograph. Like everything else.

He picked up his rag. He wiped his hands again. There was nothing left to wipe. Everything was clean. Everything was flat. Everything was done.

He sat down on the curb. He watched the grey sky that was not a sky. He thought about Sue. He thought about calling her. He thought about the transmission.

He thought about nothing. Which, in a flat world, was the only thing left to think about.