Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

“You really live here?”

“Sure,” said Marilyn. “A view property.”

“Why?”

“Who needs a reason?”

“Isn’t it like living in a Kubrick movie?”

“ The Shining or 2001 ?” Marilyn suggested. “Or were you thinking Spartacus ?”

“Not sure,” said Zak.

“Sit down at one of the tables,” said Marilyn. “I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

She disappeared into the dark hub of the restaurant, into what had once been the bar, and returned with rubbing alcohol, tweezers, a freezing spray, and began the long, delicate, painstaking process of extracting the cactus spikes from Zak’s face. She started at the top, by the hairline, and worked her way down.

“Jesus!” Zak yelled, as she made her first incursion.

“If you could find some way of distracting yourself while I do this, that would be great,” said Marilyn.

“What?”

“Just talk.”

“It hurts when I talk.”

“Okay, then,” Marilyn said, “I’ll start with the mouth.”

Zak gritted his teeth as Marilyn cleared the area around his lips. Not talking hurt too, but once she’d cleared the area, operating like some kind of cosmetic bomb disposal expert, detonating tiny controlled explosions as she went, he was increasingly able to string some words and thoughts together, while she went back to working on his forehead.

“You know,” he said, “those maps on the women could be parts of something bigger. Sectional maps aren’t unusual. If, say, a group of you is going on a secret mission behind enemy lines, you may not want every member to know where you’re heading, so each of you has a piece of the map. Oh shit, Marilyn, that really fucking hurts. So you need each other, but you’re also keeping secrets from each other. And if one of you gets caught, the whole mission isn’t blown.”

“So what’s the mission in this case?” said Marilyn. “And who’s the enemy and where’s the line?”

It sounded like something he’d have said. Marilyn continued her task, concentrating on the eyelids.

“No idea. Wrobleski is surely putting the pieces together,” Zak said.

“I guess,” said Marilyn. “But how many segments are there? How many maps? How many women?”

She sloshed alcohol onto a raw area of Zak’s inflamed cheek, so that he experienced a new kind of dense, flooding pain as he considered an answer.

“You’d think it can’t be very many,” he said. “Nobody makes a map with, say, a hundred sections, because it’s too hard to get a hundred people lined up in the same place at the same time. Shit — did you train as a sadist in a previous life?”

“No, I learned it all in this one,” she said. “And the question remains, when we put the sections together, what do we get? What’s it a map of? It looks like a city, but is it this city?”

Zak said, “Could be, but the maps are so bad, it’s hard to recognize anything. And they’re probably coded anyway.”

Marilyn worked steadily, methodically, moving down the topography of Zak’s face, following the random pattern of spikes, creating fresh contour lines of pain. Zak felt as if his face were melting, turning to hot clay. He wanted to scratch it, tear at it, drive his fingers right down to the bone. He felt like bawling.

He said, “And why was Wrobleski crying?”

“Maybe because he doesn’t understand the maps any better than we do,” Marilyn suggested.

“Or because he understands them too well,” said Zak.

Marilyn’s tweezers dug into the rear of Zak’s jaw this time, into the hinterland between cheek and ear. He took a big, greedy swallow of air.

He said, “But what if Wrobleski is assembling a human treasure map?”

“Say?”

“There are arrows and lines on the women, they could be marking a route or a destination, and the symbols could be like x marks the spot.”

“Hurrying to a spot that’s just a dot on the map,” Marilyn quoted.

“Maybe the compass rose marks the spot.”

“Right at the base of the spine, just above the ass. Well, there are worse spots. But what’s the treasure? And who buried it? And why?”

“There you’ve got me,” said Zak.

She did indeed have him. She abruptly stood back, looked at Zak’s face, admired her own handiwork.

“I can’t get any more out,” she said. “You’ll have to let nature take its course with the rest.”

“Oh no, not nature…”

She reached across and took Zak’s battered face in her palms, and searched for a neutral spot, eventually selecting a small area below his black eye, not the most erogenous of zones, but good enough, and she touched her lips there softly. It hurt him only a little.

“You stay there,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

He had no intention of going anywhere. Now at least he could open his eyes and look out the restaurant window at the city below, at the web of lights, the intermittent traffic patterns, the busy glow of streetlights spread on the horizon. He was high enough to feel above it all, though not exactly superior to anything down there. From this vantage point he could see the logic of patterns, lines, grids, but he knew they were just diagrams, schemata, they didn’t tell even a fraction of the real story. Down at ground level there was all that confusion, all that necessary, deceptive human clutter; and below the street surface it got even worse: tunnels, sewers, drains, concealed voids, unmapped spaces that he knew absolutely nothing about. As for Marilyn, it seemed he didn’t know a damn thing about her either. What kind of person would want to live her life alone up here, squatting in the unrevolving restaurant of an abandoned hotel?

When Marilyn came back, she no longer looked remotely like herself, or like anybody Zak knew or ever expected to know. The glasses, the bookishness, the hipsterism, the baggy clothes, they’d all gone. She was now wrapped in an enveloping floor-length iridescent black … well, he couldn’t quite put a name to it … a robe, a gown, a cape? And was it real leather or fake? Or some kind of man-made material, perhaps developed as a by-product of the space program? And could those strips of leopard skin around the hem and the cuffs be as authentic as they looked?

“Zak,” Marilyn said briskly, “there are one or two things you should know about me before we get started.”

“I want to know everything,” said Zak. It seemed like the right thing to say, but mostly he wanted to stare.

“I’m not talking about innermost hopes and dreams. I’m just talking about sex, okay? I’d like to lay down some ground rules before we start. It saves time.”

“Okay,” said Zak, although saving time wasn’t uppermost in his mind.

“Well,” said Marilyn, “I’ll swallow if I like the taste; I’ll spit if I don’t. You shouldn’t take it personally.”

“Then I won’t,” said Zak.

“I don’t mind being held down, but I don’t want to be tied down, and I definitely don’t want the ball gag and the handcuffs.”

“Good.”

“Sex toys are fine, but I don’t like actual equipment . So a pony harness, no, but vibrators and butt plugs are fine, and available on request.”

“Okay,” said Zak.

“And you know, I really do like dressing up: boots, lingerie, fetish gear if it isn’t too ridiculous. On the other hand, I absolutely, positively don’t want you to dress up.”

“I’m glad,” said Zak.

“If you want to take some dirty pictures, that’s fine, but I don’t want to see them all over the Internet, at least not showing my face, and definitely not under my real name.”

“I can understand that,” said Zak.

“Spanking’s okay, but I think it’s more blessed to give than to receive. Water sports, well, all right, if you really want, though frankly it doesn’t strike me as much of a sport, though I do understand the nature of territorial pissing.”