The City Under the Skin

5. ZAK WEBSTER PUTS HIMSELF ON THE MAP

It was 6:30 on one of those long, restless city summer evenings, a time when Zak Webster could justifiably have closed up the store. Chances were there’d be no more customers today; there were few enough at the best of times. In fact, he could have opened and closed pretty much whenever he liked. Nobody was breathing down his neck. Ray McKinley, his boss, the owner of the business, and of much else besides, prided himself on a hands-off management style. He trusted Zak, which was perhaps only to say that he was well aware of Zak’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility; and since the sign on the door said the opening hours were 10:00 till 7:00, those were the hours Zak kept.

The store was named Utopiates, a name that by no means said it all. It was an oblique reference to an Oscar Wilde quotation: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” But as Zak would tell anybody who’d listen, there were in fact a great many maps of Utopia, starting with the version in the 1516 edition of Thomas More’s book, as well as any number of later engravings, woodcuts, prints, and so on.

That was the business Utopiates was in: selling cartographic antiques — maps, atlases, globes, navigation charts, the occasional mapmaking instrument, folding pillar compasses, snake-eye dividers. Some were no more than decorative curiosities, but the best of them were rare, exquisite, expensive, perhaps “important,” maybe even “museum quality.” It was a specialist market, perhaps too special by half, it sometimes seemed to Zak.

The store was a small, brown, oaky, two-roomed space with a basement for storage, in a quiet backwater of what was now known as the Arts and Crafts Zone, previously the red-light district, but transformed by population shifts, property development, and marginal gentrification. Neighboring businesses included an outsider-art gallery, a seller of French horns, a designer of one-off wedding dresses. None of these enterprises were conspicuously thriving, and neither was Utopiates.

For the time being, that was okay with Ray McKinley, who regularly made it clear to Zak that the store was the most minor and most trivial of his many, many business ventures. He had a mild enthusiasm for maps and antiques, so he’d bought the store on a whim, when he’d seen how desperate the previous owner was and how much he’d lowered the asking price. The deal included the premises, the stock, and Zak, the store’s single, poorly paid employee; though Zak had no idea how long the current arrangement would last. For now the store remained open, but Ray McKinley insisted the value was in the site not the business. Before long the area’s gentrification would peak, then he’d sell up and make a killing. Exactly where this would leave Zak had never been discussed, but the chances were that he’d be left jobless, and homeless too.

Zak lived above the store, in a small apartment made smaller by the excess stock kept there. This was the stuff that wasn’t remotely collectible or important — mostly things they’d got stuck with while acquiring genuinely desirable items. There were boxes of out-of-date road maps, a job lot of school atlases, a few dozen cheap and cheerful illuminated globes. Zak made the best of living with the store’s leftovers.

Having to find another job and another apartment would hardly be a novel experience for him, but he was tired of it, and in many ways this was the best job he’d ever had, probably the best he could hope for. He wasn’t enjoying precisely the life or career he’d imagined for himself, but then he’d never been overburdened with ambition or specific goals. His education had been a patchwork of only marginally related courses: anthropology, nineteenth-century history, avant-garde film, museum studies, archival management, and, of course, cartography in various forms, including historical, critical, planetary, and radical.

It was hard to see what this had, or could have, prepared him for. Despite a certain scholarly manner, he wasn’t any kind of academic; his interests were way too eccentric and personal for that — Leon Battista Alberti, eighteenth-century “dissected maps,” the debates surrounding “information primitives.” He wasn’t going to study for a Ph.D. or write a book, and he was certainly never going to teach. And although there were days when he imagined himself as curator or custodian of some magnificent, highly specialized, and possibly clandestine map collection, he also realized this was pure fantasy. Most days he was content to think of himself as a map nerd, and map nerds ended up working in map stores — if they were lucky.

Now he sat at his desk and stared out the window into the street, his gaze as idle as a gaze ever gets, and when he saw what looked like a bundle of rags moving along the sidewalk, he needed a moment to realize what he was looking at. Naturally he knew the bundle wasn’t moving under its own steam, that there must be somebody inside it, crawling along. There was still a small population of tattered street people in the area, but that didn’t seem to be quite what he was looking at here. For one thing, these rags had obviously started out as fine fabrics, perhaps as a cape or velvet curtains. They were dirty and matted now, but they still had an air of ruined luxury.

The bundle came to a halt, was still for a moment, and then began to rise, as the person inside stood up. A head emerged, a woman’s head, the face young but not youthful, drawn, with long hair the color of wet newspaper: she might have been beautiful once, but not recently. Her eyes looked up at the UTOPIATES sign and saw something hopeful there. She hugged the rags to her and walked toward the store.

Instinctively Zak got up from his desk. His first thought was to block the entrance, to keep out an undesirable, but he opened the door just a little, so he could speak to the woman, tell her — with as much emphasis as was required — to keep walking. But as he looked her in the eye, something small and compassionate stirred in him, and he felt he ought to do just a little more than that: give her some money, for instance.

The woman stared back at him hesitantly, suspiciously, but then she detected something benign and trustworthy in his face, and said, in a clotted, deliberate voice, “Would you help me? Can you?”

Zak assumed she too was thinking about money, and he felt around in his pockets, only to discover that he had an insultingly small amount of change.

She spoke again. “What is this? A clinic?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a store.”

She looked horribly disappointed, though not surprised, as though this was only the latest in an endless series of disappointments. In fact, there was an emergency room not far away, and Zak was about to give her directions, but he never got that far.

The rags were evidently in place only because she clutched them to herself. The news that Utopiates wasn’t a medical facility caused her to slacken her grip, and they fell all the way to the ground. Zak suddenly had a naked woman standing on his doorstep. She had a lean, pale body, grubby at the edges, the ribs prominent, the skin loose, but Zak hardly had time to take in the sight before the woman swiveled, turning her back to him.

Her back looked less naked than the rest of her. It was marked with tattoos: wild, incomprehensible lines and symbols that Zak first read as a meaningless accumulation of ink, a savage scribbling, and yet there was something compelling about it, something that suggested it wasn’t entirely haphazard. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it might just possibly be a kind of wild, ramshackle map, but the glimpse was brief, and then the woman turned again to face him, quickly pulling the rags up over herself. She’d allowed him a glimpse of something precious and secret, and that was as much as he was entitled to.

Unsure of what he’d seen, and why he’d been shown it, and to a large extent wishing he hadn’t seen it at all, Zak stuttered that he could close up the store and take her to the emergency room if that was what she really wanted. She said nothing, but shook her head sadly.

Zak had no idea what to do next. He feared the two of them might stay like that for the rest of the night, perhaps for all eternity, without words or volition, but then he noticed a battered metallic-blue Cadillac parked a little way down the street: perhaps it had been there the whole time. Now it moved, traveling a hundred yards or so until it pulled up directly in front of the store.

The driver, a man in a beat-up leather jacket, pushed open the two front doors of the car before he got out. Zak watched him move swiftly and determinedly toward the woman, place one hand firmly on her arm, the other on her waist, and push her inside the car. It wasn’t violent, it wasn’t even rough, but it seemed irresistible. Certainly the woman didn’t try to resist. Once she was inside, the driver slammed the passenger door shut after her, then looked up for a second and caught sight of Zak staring at him. Zak turned away, avoided eye contact, pretended lamely that he was checking something in the window of the store. He didn’t dare watch as the man got into the Cadillac and drove away.

Zak remained in the doorway, poised among various kinds of uncertainty and inertia. The incident had been so brief, so self-contained. What had he actually seen? Was that really a map on the woman’s back? Had she really been showing it to him? And if so, why? The mental image was already fading, and he felt that was probably no bad thing. And who was the guy in the car? The woman’s keeper? Boyfriend? Kidnapper? He looked in the direction the car had gone, curious and intrigued, but equally aware that there was nothing more to see, no conclusion to be drawn. It was a little while before he realized there was somebody standing beside him.

It was a woman about his own age, maybe a little younger. She was tall, a little gawky, fit-looking, with something steely yet quizzical in her face. She was wearing thrift store clothes, a man’s jacket that was too big for her, baggy pants, combat boots, and her big dark eyes looked out through ornate tortoiseshell glasses. Something about the image didn’t quite suit her, as if she was trying to appear more bookish and hipsterish than she really was. She straddled a bike that was either an old wreck or something very cool and retro — Zak couldn’t tell which — and there was a serious-looking camera slung over her shoulder.

“Did you just see what I just saw?” she said to Zak.

“I’m not sure what I saw,” Zak said, honestly enough.

“Sure. But the woman and the stuff on her back. You saw that, right?”

“Yes,” said Zak: how could he not have seen it?

The woman looked at the window of the store with detached curiosity.

“How long has this place been here?” she asked.

“Quite a while,” he said.

“Strange, I never noticed it before.”

He didn’t think that it was all that strange. If you weren’t interested in antique cartography you’d have no reason to be aware of Utopiates’ existence.

“Come in if you like,” he said. “Take a look around.”

He wasn’t exactly sure why he said that. She certainly didn’t look like a potential customer, a fact that was confirmed when she took half a step toward the front door, hesitated, peered into the interior of the store, then gave a mild but distinct shudder.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “The place kind of gives me the creeps.”

As he watched her get on her bike and pedal away, he couldn’t understand quite why he found her remark so hurtful.

* * *

At last Zak closed up the store and went for a walk around the neighborhood. He did a lot of that. The city was a big mess these days: in the process of being simultaneously built and unbuilt, reshaped and made formless. Well, perhaps all cities are like that, but here special conditions applied: big changes were being made in the name of regeneration and renewal, a civic master plan, public and private initiatives, a cultural and commercial renaissance. Yeah right. At the same time, nothing ever quite got finished. Projects were constantly stalling, running out of money or coming up against planning “snags.” Buildings sat half-built, while others sat half-demolished; the whole city seemed to be suffering from completion anxiety.

And so wherever Zak walked he encountered detours, blocked sidewalks, metal plates covering the street, giant trucks making impossible turns. Roads were closed or made one-way. The fabric of the city was being torn wide open, both above- and belowground. One of the more glittering prestige projects involved extending the subway system, creating the new Platinum Line to connect downtown with the slums on the northern edge of the city, a connection that not everybody thought was such a great idea. Work on the subway created occasional deep, subterranean rumblings as new tunnels were blasted through some particularly unyielding section of the earth below — a trembling, an unsettling that Zak sometimes chose to see as symbolic.

As he drifted, he kept trying to make sense of what he’d just seen, unsure whether there was any “sense” to be made. It was puzzling, but hardly one of the world’s great mysteries. Strange women got into strange cars with strange men at any time of the day or night, every day, every night. People had all kinds of weird stuff tattooed on their backs. People lived incomprehensible and desperate lives. It probably meant nothing: things only meant what you decided they meant. He would probably forget all about it in a day or two. But he kept thinking about the woman in the tortoiseshell glasses; he knew he wouldn’t forget about her quite that soon.