Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

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.