Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

“I’ve been expecting you, Billy,” Marilyn said. “What kept you so long?”

He had no answer, and neither of them said anything on the journey to Wrobleski’s compound. He didn’t even turn on the radio. As they were crossing the threshold, entering the courtyard through the metal gate, Billy Moore turned to Marilyn.

“I’m sorry. I’m really lost,” he said.

* * *

Wrobleski was waiting for her in the courtyard. She had endlessly played and edited the scene in her mind, through all its possible fluffs, retakes, and alternate endings. And of course Wrobleski had always been the ogre in this scenario, the fiend. Now that she finally saw him, he appeared so much less monstrous than she expected, than she wanted him to be. Sure, he looked like a heavy, and was no doubt capable of any amount of malevolence, but he appeared, nevertheless, all too human. She found herself horribly disappointed. He gazed at her without much interest, then he turned, moved away, gestured to Akim that she was now his responsibility. She was having none of that.

“Wrobleski,” she called, “talk to me. You owe me an explanation.”

He gazed at her vacantly.

“You think?”

He said it quietly, with weariness but not with any great concern.

“Yes, I do.”

“I really don’t care what you think.”

“No,” Marilyn insisted. “That’s not right, that’s not good enough.”

He stared at her as though she were a laboratory experiment that had gone awry and produced unexpected though not especially fascinating results.

“It’ll have to do,” said Wrobleski. “You want your big drama, your big scene. But I’m not playing.”

She flew at him. He hardly moved, and did he really snap his fingers? In any case, before she was on him, Akim was standing between the two of them, and he was now thoroughly taking care of things. She felt a blow on the head, and then a jab from a needle. Akim’s hands were on her, in all kinds of places they didn’t need to be. And was she imagining it or did he say quietly in her ear, “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be over.”

Then there was a new reworking of a familiar nightmare. For a while she could still scream and struggle, but then ropes were tightened around her, two thick layers of duct tape were stickered across her mouth, and then she couldn’t see, though at least this time it wasn’t because of a leather hood. She was dragged away, across the courtyard, deep into the compound, down a set of stairs, into a new basement room, the size and extent of which she couldn’t fathom. It was hot and it smelled of weary bodies, and she thought she could hear voices, though it might only have been a TV. She would spend the rest of the short night on her back, on a mattress, bound, sightless, motionless, inert, and without feeling, but absolutely ready for whatever was coming next.

Billy Moore stood beside Wrobleski, shaking just a little. For reasons he couldn’t fully understand he’d wanted to step in, to smack the stuffing out of that little jerk Akim. So why hadn’t he? Because he was afraid of Wrobleski? Well sure, that might have been reason enough, but it was the symptom, not the disease. He knew that somewhere inside him, at his core, there was a growing, curdling reservoir of cowardice. That was perhaps worth knowing, but it didn’t make him like himself any better.

Wrobleski put his hand on Billy’s shoulder and squeezed it with what might very well have been his idea of affection.

“For you, old man, the war is over,” he said. “You’re free and clear. You’re no longer in the Wrobleski business.”

Billy couldn’t yet allow himself to feel any relief.

“It’s a shame,” said Wrobleski. “I saw quite a future for you.”

“Not sure it’s quite the future I see for myself.”

Wrobleski looked at him slyly. “Well, I’d never ask a man to do a job he didn’t want to do.”

Billy knew that wasn’t true, but he still said, “Thanks.”

“Nothing I can do to change your mind?”

“I don’t believe so,” Billy said solemnly.

“Don’t look so worried,” said Wrobleski. “I’ll prove there’s no hard feelings. You remember back at the beginning I said I’d show you the really good stuff?”

“The maps?” said Billy. He had no desire whatsoever to see Wrobleski’s collection, but he knew he would have no choice, and he suspected it would not be a simple “showing.”

“The maps, of course,” said Wrobleski.

They began by following a route that Billy had walked before, past locked metal doors, as though again heading for that oddly cheerful waiting room and the elevator that led up to the roof. But before they got there, Wrobleski stopped at one of the other doors and, with more show and ceremony than Billy thought necessary, produced a bunch of keys on a globe-shaped fob, and painstakingly unlocked it.

“I can’t show you everything,” Wrobleski said. “That would take forever. I just want you to experience the broad scope of my interests.”

And so Wrobleski walked Billy Moore through just a few rooms of his collection: large, cold spaces that must have been offices when the building was first used. There were maps thick on the walls, crammed together, edge to edge, and more stacked in piles on the floor. The light from fluorescent tubes overhead seemed deliberately harsh and ugly. The collection was not so much displayed as exposed.

The role of tour guide didn’t suit Wrobleski. He preferred to let the maps speak for themselves. They were a wild and miscellaneous bunch: some gigantic, some miniature, a few ancient and crumbling in the frames, others very modern, very high tech, printed on Lucite or aluminum. A lot of them inhabited the disputed territory between cartography and art. Many were hand-drawn, intense, obsessive, massively detailed, perhaps drawn by madmen or disturbed children. Some showed mythical, invented, oddly formed countries, not from this planet or any other, one in the shape of a giraffe, one like a phallus, one like a slice through a human brain. There were plans of fantastical cities, the streets arranged in geometrical figures, some cruciform, some in the shape of pentagrams, some fashioned after crop circles or fractals. There were maps of cities in chaos or in ruin, after bombings or natural disasters. There were maps of the stars and planets, maps of the oceans, maps of the inside of the earth. There was far too much going on in most of them: the colors were eye-popping and unsettling, designed for show, not clarity; the cartouches were overelaborate; gods and mythical beasts, mermaids and angels ranged through the few otherwise empty spaces.

Despite Zak’s brief attempt to educate him, Billy still didn’t “get” maps, and perhaps he never would, but it did occur to him (and this was certainly a thought he’d never have had if he hadn’t stepped inside Utopiates) that this collection was actually a map of Wrobleski’s world, his psyche, a menacing, dangerous, and primitive territory, a place of lurid, angry colors, jagged edges, and dragons that were not quite imaginary. Billy tried to make the right noises, to show the appropriate degree of interest and quiet enthusiasm, but it wasn’t easy, and unless Wrobleski was an idiot, and he quite conspicuously was not, he must have realized that Billy wasn’t impressed.

“You know what would be a nice idea?” said Wrobleski. “You should bring that daughter of yours. She’d get a kick out of all this, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t think she’d be interested,” said Billy, making some nebulous attempt to protect Carla from Wrobleski, though, in fact, given what a weird little kid she was, he thought she probably would love to see this demented collection.