You Are Here: Tales of Cartographic Wonders

by Lindsay Buroker

“Captain, Long. Assistant, Rot,” Taylor said, as if he needed to repeat this information in order to remember it. As far as he was concerned, it was one ocean. He tried to see the benefit in naming each side individually, but it only made him think about how the highway traffic only flowed in one direction. He wanted to ask Hammond why he thought this was, but he knew he’d get some useless answer. Hammond had precious information—actual factual data—locked up in that old head of his, and Taylor had to be patient enough to suss it out.

  “Every hauler has one captain and one assistant,” Hammond said. “There has to be a hierarchy so there’s never any disputing. Captain decides when to switch drivers, plain and simple.”

  “Right.” Taylor knew all this, because he had to pass an exam when his parents released him and collected the program bonus for submitting their offspring as a driver.

  “And they can’t be related, neither. And definitely not lovers.”

  “Why can’t they be equals?”

  Hammond’s forehead crinkled and he turned his head away from the road for the first time that morning. “Because you got to have trust, boy! Now pay attention.”

  Taylor thought that there was more trust in equality than in hierarchy, but he didn’t see an advantage in arguing this point. He raised his brow and nodded, encouraging the other man to continue.

  Hammond looked back at the road when he was sure Taylor would be silent. “Trust has gotta work both ways. It’s gotta work all ways. Captain has to trust his assistant so that he can sleep at night while the other man is driving. And the assistant has to trust that the captain knows when to switch drivers and that he’s not gonna abuse his position, because both of their lives depend on it. You have to trust the truck and you have to trust the road and you have to trust the other drivers out there. You understand what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “No trust is death, that’s what I’m sayin’.” Hammond slowed the truck down by about two kilometers an hour and waved to a driver in the lane to their left. The other truck, a long red vehicle spotted with rust all along its bottom paneling, slowly pulled forward enough to merge into the lane in front of them. The runner lights on the red truck blinked twice.

  “Why does the road only go one way?” Taylor asked as he watched the red truck drift forward. “Captain. What if someone wanted to turn around and drive back?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, boy?” Hammond’s voice was light, amused. “That’s a joke, right? I can just imagine that—trucks driving straight at each other, smashing and crashing all over the road.” He released the laugh that was building behind his words.

  Taylor frowned, not out of anger or embarrassment, or even confusion, but out of realization that this man’s concept of a highway was the same as a river: it flowed in one direction by definition, not by choice. It was a truth that all drivers likely agreed on.

  He involuntarily looked at the clock in the center of the console. When he felt Hammond’s eyes on him, he flinched and looked out the window to his right. He watched the ripples in the unending Rot Ocean.

  “Time,” Hammond said after a few minutes of silence. “Time is another thing you gotta trust. You start pushing time, and you break trust. Some folk just wanna go fast on this road. They wanna see the end of it before they die.”

  Taylor turned and faced his captain again. “The end?”

  “That’s right,” the darker man said with a toothy smile. “They wanna see the end of the road. But there ain’t no end! Death is the end of the road. They drive faster and they just catchin’ up with death faster.”

  “What do you mean, there’s no end?”

  “Oh, lord, here comes another one. Listen to me, boy: I’ve been driving this road for fifteen years and there ain’t no end of it. Now I know what you’re thinkin’,” Hammond said, putting one of those long hands out across the cabin as if to steady the other man. “The only way it could really be endless is if it loops around somehow. But I’ve been out here for fifteen years now, and I ain’t even ever been to the same town twice.”

  “That’s impossible.” Taylor couldn’t tell if the other man was misleading him. Maybe this was one of his educational moments, or maybe it was some half-truth, some mythology that Hammond was determined to perpetuate.

  “I thought it too when my captain told me the same thing I just told you. I didn’t believe him either. And I was determined to get to the end of the road. I didn’t start believing it until I’d been out here a full year. And believe me, you see enough of this road and you’ll know it don’t end. Ever.”

  Taylor looked at the road and then looked back out at the ocean. “I suppose the ocean is endless too.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Hammond said quietly. “But listen up, boy. There’s another reason I woke you up and told you this stuff.” He paused to see if the younger man would turn and face him, but when he didn’t, he continued anyway. “We’re coming up on a town pretty soon. Maybe sixty kilometers or so, going on the distance they gave me at the last station back in Greco, where I picked you up.”

  “Finally.”

  “Yeah, finally. Two weeks is a little long between stops. Most times, it’s shorter, but sometimes it’s longer. Anyway, I wanted you to know. Some folks get into driving because they just want a way out of town. They want to check out the next place on down the highway. Now if that’s you… well, this is your stop.”

  Taylor didn’t respond and so they drove in silence, watching the waves and the other trucks on the road. The traffic was getting denser, a slowly building pressure system that would culminate in a storm of on and off-ramps at the next town.

  *

  In the tiny town of Romeo, they made three delivery stops and two pickups. Taylor thought they might spend the night, but after refueling and restocking their food supply, Hammond was ready to get back on the road.

  The thought of quitting the truck and staying in the first town they came upon had not entered Taylor’s mind until Hammond mentioned it. It never occurred to him that being a driver was the easiest way to check out the next settlement, because checking out the next settlement wasn’t enough of a reason for him to leave. If someone went to the next town and didn’t care for it, there was no way of getting back; you could only go forward. He had to admit that once the notion was presented, he was tempted to stay. It was such a relief to see buildings again, stores and restaurants and houses and schools, after so many days of that tunneling road and the countless trucks that drifted along it.

  And Romeo was not as outlandish as he expected it to be. It was just another town, much like his own, which made the temptation to stay stronger. He learned that this was a common observation; each town influenced the next in line, culturally, architecturally, and organizationally. It was a global game of telephone and the only way to know what was lost and what was kept from one point to the next was to go down the unidirectional highway.

  “Back in the day,” Hammond was saying. Being back on the road must have reminded him that he still had ranting to do, because he’d reignited his trust talk. “And I mean, decades ago. Centuries ago. Back then, there was no trust at all. They had to rely on laws and governments.” He pronounced this last word carefully, as if when mishandled, it could detonate it in his mouth.

  “We have—there is a government in Greco. Captain.”

  “Not like back in the day. Trust me. Back in the day, the government owned the highways.” The older man paused to turn his bone-white eyes on Taylor. “Can you believe that?” Taylor didn’t answer. His history education was pretty thorough, but it was limited to the information available to the historians and professors who were stuck in Greco. Hammond was as uneducated as they come, and yet no one could call the man ignorant, for he had seen fifteen years worth of non-stop travel in the world.

  “I know what your next question is,” he said. “Who fixes the roads, right? If no one owns the roads, then who fixes them?”

  �
�The towns.” Taylor knew this answer already. “Each town has to maintain the highway that leads from the previous town to themselves. That’s how they guarantee the arrival of goods.”

  Hammond stared at the road and his jaw slid back and forth as if he were chewing on something. Taylor had learned all about the highway and its care when he was in school. And sure enough, when they had approached Romeo, he’d noticed a road crew carefully inching backwards along a special maintenance track on the far side of the highway.

  “At least, that’s what they taught us back in Greco,” Taylor continued to break the other man from his unnerving reverie. He also wanted to see if Hammond would contradict his education. “Maybe that’s how it works there, but not everywhere.”

  The older man snapped out of his daze. “Yeah,” he said, thoughtfully. “That’s how it is almost everywhere.”

  “Almost, Captain?”

  “See boy,” Hammond said, at full tirade volume once again. “Gotta have trust. The driver’s gotta trust that the next town down the road is keeping it tip-top. Their survival depends on it. Otherwise, they get no deliveries. It’s in the Rules.”

  No one settlement had all the resources a modern society needs to function; that was the philosophy that Taylor learned in school. Greco, for example, had no copper mines in the fields that surrounded the town at the edges of its island. They had a few other metals—iron, for example—but copper is an ideal conductor of electricity. Without trucks bringing in new loads of copper periodically, Greco would find itself plummeting into the dark ages. The only thing that almost all towns had was oil. Indeed, Taylor had observed that Romeo had an off-shore rig on the back side of the island just as Greco had.

  “Maybe the end of the road is the spot where the next town gave up on fixing it.” Taylor swallowed hard, but could not take back the words that had already bumbled out of his mouth.

  Hammond’s forehead creased into a mountain range, the tops white against his black face. “God dammit, boy. Don’t say shit like that. Lord help me, I took a curse aboard my vessel. You realize you curse us with that talk, doncha boy?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Taylor said quietly. Feeling the burn of guilt in his stomach, he changed the subject. “So the whole highway is owned by no one? Captain.”

  Hammond huffed and a forced smile pulled up the right side of his face. “Where there is trust, the road needs no owner.”

  “And there is trust everywhere?”

  “I ain’t stupid, boy,” Hammond said, but he didn’t lose the crooked smile. “No, there ain’t trust everywhere. Where there’s no trust, there’s the Law.”

  “The law?” Something about the way the older man said those words unnerved Taylor. “Wouldn’t that imply some kind of government?”

  “No government. Just the Law. The Law of the Highway,” Hammond said, the smile finally turning down. “I only ever seen the Law once. Eight years ago, it was. I don’t ever want to see one again.”

  “What was it?” Taylor was surprised to hear the waver in his own voice.

  “A cruiser. Painted all black. Not shiny black, but the kind of black that looks like a hole in the world. Like nothing, a ball of nothing just sliding from lane to lane, searching.”

  Taylor was surprised at how much the image rattled him. He felt his eyes scan the highway, blinking away distortions in his vision made by the heat of the sun and the grime on the windshield. “Searching for what?”

  “Someone who broke the trust of the road.”

  “And what happens when they catch who they’re looking for? Captain.”

  “They toss him in!” Hammond hissed with alarming intensity, his white, red-lined eyes bulging out of his face, his right hand shooting across Taylor’s vision and stabbing at the toxic waves gleaming in the sun just beyond the edge of the road.

  Taylor flinched and felt his face burn when the older man began to laugh uncontrollably.

  “The black cruiser.” Hammond wiped his eyes with a long thumb. “I was supposed to wait a while before I gave you that one. But you’re such a goddamn know-it-all, I couldn’t keep it in.” He laughed some more.

  “Wait, what? So there is no ‘Law’?”

  “Nah, that’s just shit made up to scare new drivers.” Hammond got serious again. “Think of it as a story—as a warning. Something that we’d have to have… if there were no trust.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Taylor whispered, watching the frothing churn of the toxic water only a dozen meters distant.

  *

  After four days of swapping driving shifts and more education doled out by the captain, they passed through another town, this one called Napis. They unloaded and reloaded the truck. Taylor observed many small differences between this town and his hometown Greco; mostly in fashion and architecture. The telephone message was beginning to degrade.

  Hammond decided they would stay overnight in Napis. Since the truck couldn’t be left unattended, Taylor, as the assistant, was obligated to sleep in the bunk above the cabin. This meant he was alone when the inspectors showed up. He was using the shared table space in the garage, all of his notes and drawing tools spread out before him.

  “What is all this?” The lead inspector was a woman in her fifties, with light brown skin and jet black hair. She touched the edge of a page gingerly, as though the paper might cut her.

  “I’m mapping the highway,” Taylor said. He felt a flush of embarrassment at the ridiculousness of it as it came out of his mouth. “It’s just a hobby.”

  The lead inspector shared a smile with the young man that was accompanying her. “Well I guess we all have our hobbies. Wentz here collects coins.” She waved at the truck. “Is it open? I’m going to look through the back.”

  Taylor nodded and she strolled away, murmuring to herself. Once out of earshot, the young inspector named Wentz leaned closer. “Can I see the map?”

  Only then did Taylor realize he was blocking the drawings with his body, concealing his shameful scribblings. “I know there’s no point in mapping it,” he said. “But I still think it should be done. There were no maps of it where I’m from.”

  “It?”

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment. “The highway,” Taylor said quietly. They seemed to both know he might as well have said ‘the world’. If anything existed beyond the ocean, it might as well be on another planet.

  Wentz angled his head as he looked at the page. “It’s not straight. How do you do it?”

  Taylor swallowed. “I take measurements, with a quadrant,” he said. “An astrolabe. It’s far from perfect, but given an accurate timepiece,” he added, trailing off at the end.

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it allowed?” Taylor suddenly wondered aloud.

  “Making a map?” Wentz cracked a smile. “Of course. I wish I had time to show you my coin collection. They come from all over the highway.”

  Reflexively, Taylor found his hand in his pocket. He pulled out the old coin he always carried. “Ever seen anything like this?” he said, passing it to Wentz.

  The young man took it and turned it over a few times. “It’s old. Really old.” He handed it back. “Never seen one like it. Where’s it from?”

  Taylor looked at it between his fingers. There was an image of a building on one side and something more organic like a bird or a tree on the other side. The details had been rubbed down too much to be certain, and the once-words that ran around the circumference were little more than nicks and notches. “Someone gave it to me. One of my teachers. She got it back when she was a driver. She was the only teacher who answered my questions.” The only one that didn’t consider his curiosity a sign of trouble. Taylor felt the eyes of the inspector on him and he pocketed the coin. “Anyway. I’m new to this. My first inspection.”

  “Kenton Hammond captains this truck, correct?”

  Taylor was taken aback by the tone of the question. The sudden formality. “Yes.”

  Wentz looked at him for a long m
oment. “Do you like driving the highway, Mr. Taylor?”

  *

  When they left the next afternoon, Hammond was sullen and drove for six hours barely speaking a word before making Taylor take over and going up to the bunk. In the silent hours that plodded by, Taylor tried to distract himself by predicting what the next town would be like. He dreamed up industries and technologies and art and people. He dreamed of how his completed map might look, with the curves and twists of the highway connecting each town in serial. Of how someday, some unknown number of days, weeks, years into the future, he’d return to Greco as the endless highway looped around onto itself. He dreamed of all of this to keep himself from imagining what the drive would be like if he really were alone; if his captain were to never come down out of that bunk, nevermore to lecture him about the infinite road they were bound to and the ocean that was its boundary.

  The next day, Hammond woke up in a mood more characteristic of his usual demeanor. He chattered on about the weather with his familiar air of authority.

  “Yep, we’re definitely in a warm swing now,” he said. “See the thing is, when you sit in one place your whole life, the weather changes around you. It gets colder and then warmer again. But when you’re on the road, it goes all over the place. So we call it a warm swing when it gets a little warmer like this. And if it gets real hot, that’s a hot jump. When it goes down, that’s a cool swing, and when it really drops, that’s a cold dip.”

  Taylor let the older man go on in this fashion. He thought if he let the captain get into a rhythm, he might be able to get some real information out of him, like what he really knew about the highway, and what he could remember of all the places he’d passed through in the last fifteen years of driving. He was also curious about what Hammond had done the night they spent in Napis, but the anxiety over his own encounter that evening kept him from digging. He pushed the conversation with Wentz from his mind. It wouldn’t help to replay it or dwell on its implications.

  Instead, he passed the time by bringing out his quadrant and taking measurements. These swings that Hammond was prattling on about could indicate changes in latitude or altitude. He suddenly wished he owned a thermometer. Temperatures would always be dependant on the season, among other things, but he might be able to track interesting trends across his map along with his other measurements. He resolved to seek out a thermometer and a barometer at the next town they came to.