“What are you doing?” she asked, though she thought she already knew.
He didn’t reply. He was engrossed, serious. She could hear him breathing deeply, making a low, inarticulate humming sound. Her shirt kept rolling down her back, falling in the way of his handiwork. He pushed it up, got on with the job. And then he stopped, let the shirt fall back into place. It hadn’t taken long. She didn’t turn around: she didn’t want to see his face.
She sensed him move away. There was silence, nothing, a lake of dead time, and then came the explosion, the slam, the gunshot. She only knew that’s what it was because she’d heard Wrobleski fire his gun while they were up in the compound: more than a bang, more than a crack, very loud but brief and short-lived, like a radio being abruptly turned off. Here belowground the sound was louder still, but also more intimate, darker, more compressed by the narrowness of the station tunnel.
She felt something hot and wet running rapidly, thinly, down the insides of her thighs. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, which part of her body it was coming from. But she did know that she wasn’t in pain. She had no precise idea what it felt like to be shot, but not like this, surely. She was on her feet. Her body felt intact. And then she realized she’d peed herself with fright. But that was okay, right? If Wrobleski had really shot her, then she wouldn’t be able to feel herself pee, would she? Would she? Whatever Wrobleski had been shooting at, it wasn’t her.
* * *
Well, who needs a map on flesh when you have the sound of a gunshot to guide the way? Actually, Zak could have said that “sound mapping” was a growing field among the edgier kind of cartographer, but he knew this was not the time. The noise reverberated wildly, came and went and came again, but there was no mistaking its direction. Billy, Marilyn, and Zak moved toward it as rapidly as they dared, though they didn’t dare imagine what they might find when they got to the source. Billy called out, “Carla,” but there was no reply, nothing except his own boomeranging voice. He shouted, “Wrobleski,” and the absence of response seemed even more profound. They moved faster, dashing through the sodden dark, and at last came to the strange, low arch that looked like the improbable entrance to a station.
“What the hell is this?” said Billy.
“Oh man,” said Zak, “it’s the old subway line; this is the mother lode for urban explorers.”
“Later,” said Billy; and then he called, “Wrobleski,” again, and once more there was only silence in reply. With infinite trepidation Billy led the way, taking the first determined yet dreaded half-step through the arch. He expected to be shot at; he expected worse, and then he heard his daughter’s voice.
“It’s okay, Dad, it’s over. Come get me.”
What could that mean? Still ready for the worst, Billy took a bold, reckless stride onto the subway platform and saw Carla standing just a few yards in front of him, her feet in a pool of liquid, her head drooping forward, the oversized miner’s helmet still on her head, its lamp glowing weakly. She seemed not so much calm as inanimate. Her face was pale and still, and it conveyed absolutely nothing.
“It’s all right now,” said Billy, trying to console himself as much as her, moving in for a moment that was supremely natural and supremely awkward. “I’m here.”
“Yes,” Carla said, her voice drained of feeling and, despite herself, pulling away from him.
“Where is he?” said Billy. “Where’s Wrobleski?”
“I don’t know,” said Carla. “I had my back to him.”
Billy Moore shone his flashlight up and down the bare station platform. He saw nothing. It was still and empty. There was no trace of Wrobleski, and he surely wasn’t a man to hide, to skulk in corners. Billy saw the tunnel entrances at either end of the platform. Yes, it was possible that Wrobleski had decided he could move more quickly without Carla, and had simply abandoned her and disappeared into one or another of those black mouths. If so, despite everything, Billy had no intention of pursuing him. Let the darkness swallow him.
Billy also saw the gaping sinkhole between the buckled rails. Was it conceivable that Wrobleski had decided to take the ultimate form of control and throw himself into the void? And the gunshot? Why that? A bullet in his own head before making the leap: the final anesthetic? Or something else, something that might almost be construed as compassionate — not so much a warning shot as a signal before he disappeared, the establishing of coordinates, a sound standing in for an x marking the spot.
“What did the bastard do to you?” said Billy.
With one long, skinny hand, Carla gestured over her shoulder to her own back.
Billy held her by the arms, tenderly turned her around, and raised her shirt again to reveal the bare skin of her back. It was blotched and inflamed. It wasn’t immediately possible to make out what Wrobleski had been up to — the marks were so shaky and imprecise — but it was clear that he hadn’t been drawing a map. Rather, Carla’s back seemed to be written on, signed with a single word, though around it were various blots and rashes, signs of hesitation, false starts. Zak, Marilyn, and Billy peered at the marks. Some decoding was required, and it took a while before they realized what Wrobleski had written there, a name: AKIM.
Now the earth began to tremble again, another underground explosion, not so far away this time, a slow crescendo that seemed to come from all directions at once. The fabric around them pulsed, shivered, and trickles of pulverized dirt shimmered down from the tiled ceiling directly above their heads. As they froze, stood perfectly still and silent, a cracking sound echoed from the darkness. It sounded organic, less the noise of masonry than of a great tree tearing at its roots. They turned in the direction of the sound, looked at what was now a long, narrow fissure in the station roof, like a cartoon drawing of forked lightning, with brown ooze seeping from the crack.
“Are we going to be able to get out of here?” Billy said.
“Sure,” said Marilyn, leading the way. “Just follow my butt.”
41. THE REVOLVE
There is a psychological condition known as cartocacoethes, in which people see the whole world as nothing more than a series of maps. They look at clouds, rock formations, wallpaper patterns, the stains on a motel mattress, and they see examples of cartography. The puddle of blood looks like Africa, every high-heeled boot is Italy, a woman’s pubic triangle becomes the Mekong Delta, before or after deforestation.
Some say this is a form of pareidolia, a condition in which arbitrary pieces of information suddenly take on unwarranted significance in the sufferer’s mind. And this in itself may be considered a version of apophenia, seeing patterns and linkages in sets of essentially random data. Others say cartocacoethes is just a fancy word made up by map obsessives to glorify their own obsession. But perhaps we don’t need to be suffering from any pathology in order to feel the need for orientation, to long for a method by which we can locate our position in a universe of uncertainties. We read the map, we read the world, we chart environments and faces and bodies. We hope to know where we are. We hope to read a message, a meaning, to work out a direction and a course. Is that so unreasonable? You could also argue that if the world is nothing but a series of maps, it’s that much harder ever to be truly lost.
Zak Webster rearranged the items on his desk in Utopiates. The computer mouse suddenly looked like an oversymmetrical island, an antique steel ruler looked like a man-made isthmus, while the swirling patterns in the fake wood of the desk’s surface looked like contours, or isolines if you wanted to get technical. It was 6:30 on one of those shortening, restless, end of summer evenings, and he had no intention of closing the store. He was waiting for Ray McKinley to arrive. Zak had told Ray a few simple and plausible lies, chiefly that he’d found a new customer who was about ready to spend some serious money starting a collection, but the guy needed to be coaxed, to have his ego stroked by the boss. It happened often enough, and Ray McKinley was enough of a player to want to be involved in the game.