Can and Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison (R)

  But this time, oh boy this time it couldn’t be swallowed. I particularly hated it, Howard, when you gave me the assignment and said it was apropos that I be the one to carry it out, seeing as how my name is Charles Trimbach. You laughed at that. You and Barry, both of you thought it was hilarious: “trim back” was a terrific play on words for such a puke job you wanted done. I couldn’t swallow hard this time; it made my gorge buoyant. And the lesson I learned, if it’s a lesson at all, is what prompts my resignation.

  I quit, WorldSpan. Howard, Tom Jr., Kincaid, all the rest of you, on the 44th floor. I’m done. Take the fat paycheck and stuff it. Done, fellahs. But I’m dogtrot trained; a lot of years; so here’s my last piece of work. The report. Pardon the casual tone. But you notice: I didn’t once use the eff-word.

  The flight was late coming into Chicago Midway; and by the time the cab dropped me off in Old Town on the corner of N. Wells and Wieland it was coming up on late afternoon, early evening. Even with all the gentrification, it was still a sweetly raffish part of town. Jammed crisscross at the proper hemlines of Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, what was left of Old Town still sucked up all the light and breathed back disturbing shadows. In a few more years everything between N. La Salle and Larrabee would be so squeaky clean you’d have to clear it with the condo committee to import even a tiny sinful act. But on this bitter cold February afternoon, with the blade of wind slicing in off the lake, turning my bones to tundra, it was the old vengeful Chicago I’d grown up in.

  And I got lost.

  I always got lost in Old Town. Somewhere near Elm and Hill I turned the wrong way, got twisted, and wandered for the better part of an hour. Then, some dim memory of my childhood kicked in, and as I passed a sweep of vacant shops with the blind eyes of upstairs apartments reflecting the last tremor of setting sunlight, I saw the mouth of the dark alleyway that was my landing site. How I’d recalled it, over decades, I don’t know. But there it was; and I crossed the street and stepped into dim shadowed yesterday.

  There was a paper flower shoppe, and a guitar repair joint, and an antiques/collectibles store; and wedged in between the guitar emporium—with a really cherry 1947 Les Paul “Broadcaster” hanging in the fly-specked front window—and the scentless dried brayera trying to look brave like a Victorian ruined garden…

  There was the map shop. As neat and clean and brightly painted as a little red wagon on Christmas morning. The shop of maps in which labored a man named Abner Wonacott. The old guy you had sent me to fire. Charlie Trimbach, come to “trim back” that old cartographer in a store that shouldn’t have existed, but did. Maybe it always had.

  In hundreds of adventure movies, there’s always a map of some strange, lost land. In Muslim mythology it’s Kaf, the mountain range that circles the earth. In THE ODYSSEY it was Ogygia, the island where Calypso kept Odysseus a captive. If you went looking for King Kong it was “2 south, 90 east, latitudes way west of Sumatra, southwest to Skull Island.” The Garden of Eden, Barsoom, Asgard and Midgard, Atlantis and Avalon, the Catacombs of Rome, Mount Olympus, Oz, Nepenthe, Lilliput, Islandia, Hy-Brasil, Lemuria.

  Did you never wonder where do these maps come from?

  Who makes these maps?

  By what arcane mappery do these cartographs come to be? What nameless Mercator or Henry the Navigator, what astonishing Ptolemy or Kropotkin, beat the paths to Narnia and lost Hyperborea and the Fountain of Youth?

  Who, did you ever ask yourself, who? What mapmaker sat and actually drew the lines and shapes? To all those terra incognita venues.

  One of those things no one really thinks about. You hear a story about some expedition going to Mt. Everest—“Chomolungma” the Mother Goddess of the Earth—because they’ve got a highly reliable map of the terrain where the yeti mates; or Sotheby’s has auctioned off for two million five a map—highly reliable—that locates El Dorado; or the Seven Cities of Cíbola; or the fabulous sunken islands of Gunnbjorn Ulfson between Iceland and Greenland; the real Yoknapatawpha County; the real Grover’s Mill that changed its name and altered its city limits after that Sunday night radio broadcast on CBS in October of 1938; the real location of Noah’s ark at 17,000 feet above the Aras River plain but not atop Mount Ararat; you hear these stories, and you may wonder for an instant…

  Where did such a map come from?

  The last survivor of a Norwegian barque. The rambling mad foot-soldier who emerged from the jungle after six months missing. The withered septuageneric Cree by the side of the road selling potions and talismans. The gypsy fortune teller. The speaking-in-tongues child who has been blind since birth.

  There’s always a chain of provenance; and it’s always bogus. Comes to as dead an end as terra incognita itself. Yet the maps do exist. They come into the hands of the L. Frank Baums and the Edgar Rice Burroughses and the Ponce de Leons, Samuel Butlers and St. Thomas Aquinases. But, do you ever ask yourself, where did they…how did they…come by these amazing—highly reliable—charts? Who draws the map that shows the entrance to the mountain where the children of Hamelin disappeared? Who describes latitude and longitude of the tropical island beyond Anacapa where Amelia Earhart came down safely and hid from the Japanese fleet? How does the singular cartographer get a highly reliable tracing of the rocky battered shore of Lemuria and the Kingdom of Prester John and the Well of Souls?

  Did you ever ask that kind of question?

  I never did, Howard, till that shadowy alleyway in Old Town on a bitter chill late afternoon in February.

  What interior landscape I could see through the elegant gray-glass of the central pane of the ornately-carved teak front door of the map shop was inchoate, indeterminate, yes a terra incognita. Absolutely appropriate. The handsomely whittled wooden sign that hung by brass chains at 90° to the storefront read:

  INCOGNITA, INC.

  A. Wonacott, Prop.

  I turned the bright shining gold handle of the front door, the handle in the shape of a sextant, and let the warmth from within flow out around me in the dark alley.

  Then I stepped inside the curious map shop.

  Understand something: I had been born and raised in Chicago, I had been away a long time, I had been married and widowed, I had a grown son and daughter who no longer needed my daily attention and who lived half a continent away, I had been a loyal corporate tool for most of my adult life, and I was solidly grounded in the pragmatic world, what they call the Real World, the continuum as received safely and sanely by those who renew their driver’s license regularly and who watch their saturated fat intake. I do not go off on flights of fancy.

  Now let me describe Incognita, Inc. to you.

  All I knew was that WorldSpan had acquired this enterprise, this supposedly “mom ’n’ pop” shop, line-item-buried on a Schedule of Assets & Liabilities, on the second-to-the-last page of a thick sheaf of wholly-owned subsidiaries of the mega-conglomerate WorldSpan had murdered in the takeover. Then had begun the pogrom, the flensing, the “de-accessioning” of properties that did not breathlessly contribute to the bottom line. The memo you e-mailed me, if you recall, Howard, used the phrase cease and terminate this operation.

  But there had been no phone number, no fax number, no e-mail address, nothing but the shop number in a tiny commercial alleyway I couldn’t find on the most detailed city map of Chicago. And so you had me fly to Old Town.

  To trim back one Abner Wonacott, who apparently had been the owner and sole employee of Incognita, Inc., at this odd location, for what seemed to be—in spotty records—sixty-five years. And now I stood inside the door, and now I looked upward, and now I looked around, and now I found myself unable to grasp what I was seeing, here, inside this tiny shop.

  Outside. Very small.

  Inside. Vast.

  I don’t mean to tell you it was large. Large is the rotunda of Grand Central Station. Large is the St. Peter’s Basilica. Large is Hanging Rock in Australia. This was vast. Narrow, but vast. It stretched out beyond the logical, codifiable, eyesight-c
orrect limit that Euclidean space acknowledged. The horizon line was invisible. There was no back wall to the shop. It all just stretched on out of sight, vast and deep, and going on and on till it came to a blurred point somewhere a million or so miles back there at the rear of the shop. On either side of me the walls rose straight up without break, and both walls were nothing but deep cubbyholes, hundreds of them, thousands of them, uncountable perhaps millions of them. Up and up and up into some sort of inexplicable ceilingless ionosphere, where clouds and chirruping creatures moved lazily. And in every cubbyhole there was a rolled map, or a group of rolled maps. Hundreds of maps, thousands of maps, uncountable perhaps…

  And clambering all over those two walls of cubbyholes, were the tendrils of the most luxurious liana vines I’ve ever seen. Dark green and lustrous, the vines writhed upward and downward and from side to side, wrapping themselves about a map roll here, a pair of papyrus charts there, then extricating their tendril ends from the cubby and slithering swiftly across the face of the wall—sometimes hurling themselves full across the shop to the wall opposite—and then fled rearward, to extend their length to an unknown destination far away in the cloudy foggy misty backland of Incognita, Inc.

  It was, truly, the jungle telegraph. Possibly a kind of fern FedEx. Delivery by botanical messenger.

  And right in front of me, not ten steps inside the front door, was the (apparently) sole living employee of this soon-to-be-terminated establishment, Abner Wonacott. Prop.

  He sat high up on a bookkeeper’s stool, something hugely Dickensian in appearance, like one of those old woodcuts by “Phiz” or Cruikshank from DOMBEY AND SON or A CHRISTMAS CAROL. The desk at which he worked was a very tall slant-top, tulip stenciled with tapering legs framed with cross stretchers. The grain identified it as a very old mahogany.

  He wore a full day-coat with short tails, striped trousers, wing-collar shirt with a plum-colored cravat, and a diamond stickpin glistening between the trisail lapels. He wore a pince-nez that perched securely at the bridge of his aquiline nose, his hair was thick and pure white, and it hung over his forehead with an abundant curl like a dollop of whipped cream.

  His eyes were the most revelatory shade of almond I’ve ever seen, with very black pupils, like a pair of well-ensconced beetles frozen in hundred million year old Baltic amber. It was enigmatic, trying to ascertain his age. He might have been sixty, less likely a weathered fifty, perhaps much older.

  He had the kindest face ever gifted by the cruel and mostly uncaring world. He wore it without affectation.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Mr. Wonacott?”

  “Be with you in a spot, young man. Having a nip of a mean time with one of these isogrivs.” He was working on a line, on a map he was drawing, up there on his high stool. “Grivation has never been my strong suit.” He scratched quickly with the nib of a crowquill pen. “Look around. Amuse yourself. Be with you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  I turned to look at the wall on my right. I walked across the pleasantly springy, mist-shrouded floor to the cubbyholes and marveled at what they held. Not just maps to Happy Valley and Ruritania and Lyonesse and Shangri-La; to Zothique and Ur and Erewhon and Pellucidar; but the route Verne parodied to reach the center of the Earth; a sad-looking graph locating the mass grave of the original colonists of the Lost Roanoke Colony (with a triptych map to the gravesite of Virginia Dare, first queen of the Croatan Indians); a large scroll map of “The Dark Continent” with an identifying Gothic cross marking the locale of The Elephants’ Graveyard. It was somewhere near Mali. There was a recently configured map of the shoreline of Lake Michigan indicating where to dredge to find the Bowie knife O.J. Simpson had thrown away.

  “Would you like to know what our most requested item is?” I turned at his voice. He was sitting now with hands folded decently on the slant-top of the desk. I walked back to him and looked up into the kindest face in the world.

  “Yes.”

  “Well now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that it would be something like Atlantis or Camelot or an underwater configuration for Spanish treasure galleons, yes?” I smiled agreement. But no, he indicated with a waggle of a finger, “Five to one, our best seller is a personal site location map to the original and translated into spoken English lyrics to the song ‘Louie Louie.’ Isn’t that remarkable?”

  I stared up into his amber eyes. “Remarkable,” I said, in a soft voice. “Like this shop. It’s, uh, it’s improbable.” I felt my cheeks burning with embarrassments “improbable.” What the hell kind of a stupid word was that to use?! “It’s very big. Inside.”

  “Oh, this is cramped quarters, I fear.” He waved a hand above his head, diminishing the ascendant abyss that rose high and away over us. “You should have seen the absolutely imperial spaces accorded me when I worked for Khufu. Pyramid, it was. Very nice. And there was a canyon in Mesopo—”

  I cut him off. “I’ve come to close you down, sir.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I had to stop him. I felt so awful, like some sleazy server of subpoenas pretending to be an interested passerby. “I’ve come from corporate headquarters to…I have a very generous severance check here in my…how is it you’ve worked for this company for, what is it, sixty-five years, can that be accurate, we don’t seem to have much paperwork on all this uh…”

  I ground to a halt. I felt just awful.

  “Look,” I said, “you won’t remember me, but I came here, I think, once before; a long time ago; thirty-something years ago. To get a map. I’d lost something…”

  He smiled down at me. “A bronze medal you had won, third prize in a kite flying contest in grade school.”

  “Yes! Yes, that was it, exactly! You remember. I’d lost it. Your map…”

  “To be sure. My map. It’s an all-purpose item, we sell quite a lot of them. I call it the Map to Your Heart’s Desire. Do you still have that medal?”

  “Migod yes!” I pulled out my pocket watch, and showed him the bronze fob. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever won in my life. Not so much as ten bucks on a lottery, but I have the bronze medal. You found it for me.”

  “And now you’ve come to put me out of business.”

  “Believe me, it’s not my idea. They gave me this lousy job because I mentioned one day, just idly, mentioned I was from around here…and they thought it would be…”

  He looked sad. “I’ve been expecting something like this. There was a letter from…what’s the name of the new company that bought up the old one…?”

  Nowhere among the million conundra that scintillated and sang within the vast, questioning mind of the very old man who now called himself Abner Wonacott, like a heavenly chorus of inebriated lightning bugs, was there even one that wondered by whom Abner had been employed, now going on sixty-six years. If it wasn’t a Pharoah, it was a Doge, if it wasn’t a Khan it was a Demiurge. The shop, and Abner under other names, had gone on for centuries. Every Friday by five PM the cashier’s check appeared in a late post, signed in pen in an unintelligible hand, for that week’s labors. Abner was only human, after all, and he did require food and shelter. And so it had been for now going on sixty-six years at this current location. Periodically, every sixteen months by rough estimation, Abner’s check was nine per cent greater than those that had preceded it. On his birthday—June 11th usually—and at holidaytime—he had never known if the impetus was Chanukah, Ramadan, or Christmas—the check included a crisp new one hundred dollar bill as bonus. And so, without wondering, because he loved his work of a lifetime, of many lifetimes, Abner worked with serenity and satisfaction in the vast, tiny narrow and limitless cartography shop in the shadowy, dismal, perfectly pleasant narrow alley three streets off the bustling thoroughfares of that immense metropolitan nexus that might, at other times, have been Avalon or Tyre or Carthage, might have been Marrakech or Constantinople or Vienna, but was only, in truth, for going on sixty-six years, at this location, the hamlet of Chicago.

  “I will, I must say, hate to
see me go. Abandoning the work to Replogle and Rand McNally will be…well, of course, they’re very fine people, and they try to do their best, but I think they still use that silly Here There Be Dragons at the edge of the drop-off.”

  I stammered and heard myself babbling. “We, that is to say, WorldSpan, has just completed on-orbit checkout and synchronization of our three geodetic polar orbital satellites, all of which are in geosynchronous configurations 22,300 miles above the planet, all with completely automated computer-driven cartography programs.” His eyes were wide as I gibbered, unable to stop myself: I’d rehearsed all this, straight from the tech memoranda, on the plane, not knowing who or what Abner Wonacott was going to be. And now I couldn’t shut up. “These are electro-optical imaging satellites. We now have a multi-planar, LEO, MEO, and GEO corporate capability to provide under-an-hour mapping and geospatial products to our worldwide customers. We can ‘direct-task’ both an electro-optical and hyperspectral satellite to image any 100 x 100 kilometer swath on Earth. We can employ our highly refined processing algorithms which allow us to…levels of reflectance…hundreds of spectral bands…”

  I ran down. So ashamed of myself. Just so damned damned ashamed of what I’d let you make of me, Howard. I wanted to sink through the unseen, misty floor. I felt like a giant gobbet of crap. And Abner Wonacott just stared at me.

  “So I am the relic from an earlier time,” he said. “I seem to be, as they put it, redundant. Well, that must be it, then, of course.” He slid off his high perch and put his hands on my shoulders. He was taller than I’d thought.

  “What is your name, young man?”

  “Charlie Trimbach, sir.”