The City Under the Skin

by Geoff Nicholson

  His circuit of the lot took him right by the trailer window, and although he tried to be discreet and quiet, the sound of his footsteps made Carla look up and put her face to the glass. Sanjay smiled, tried to look benign, gave a wave that he hoped might appear avuncular or fraternal, and she waved back and motioned for him to come to the door.

  He did as bidden, but he was reluctant to cross the threshold into the child’s private space. As an immigrant, an alien, even a well-educated one, he knew you couldn’t be too careful in these matters. He remained teetering respectfully on the trailer’s doorstep.

  “When did you last see your father?” he said archly.

  Carla realized he was probably quoting somebody or something, but she just said, “A few hours ago.”

  “And do you know where he is?”

  “Away on business, I suppose.”

  “But isn’t this parking lot his business?”

  “What can I say, Sanjay? He’s a man of many parts.”

  “That he is,” said Sanjay. “And what are you doing, Carla?”

  “Homework. I’m learning about skin.”

  “Ah, skin, a very large organ,” he said, then wondered if perhaps he hadn’t phrased that very well.

  “I’m learning about sweat,” said Carla, “and I’m kind of puzzled.”

  “How so?” He liked to help people with their questions. He was proud of his pedagogic instincts.

  “You see,” said Carla, “it says here that we sweat in order to cool down.”

  “Quite so,” said Sanjay.

  “But my problem,” said Carla, “is that I often hear people complaining about being hot and sweaty. But I never hear anybody say they’re cold and sweaty, so it seems the sweat doesn’t work.”

  “Sometimes,” said Sanjay, “people go into a cold sweat.”

  “Sure, but that’s different. It’s not like they start out hot and sweaty and they cool down and go into a cold sweat and that makes them feel comfortable. They go into a cold sweat because they’re scared or nervous or whatever.”

  “You make a good point, Carla, and, of course, I can understand why you might be fascinated by the subject of skin, given your disease.”

  “It’s not a disease,” said Carla. “It’s a condition.”

  “Ah, no doubt as you say, Carla. The human body is not my area.”

  “What is your area, Sanjay?”

  “Back home I studied business and geology,” said Sanjay with quiet pride. “I was hoping to go into the mining industries.”

  “Maybe you still will.”

  “At the moment it seems unlikely.”

  Carla didn’t argue with him.

  “You know,” he said, and this was evidently something that had been on his mind for some time now, something he had to get off his chest, even if only to the boss’s daughter, “it seems to me there are certain liabilities in having these subcontractors’ trucks here on the lot.”

  Carla didn’t say, “Why are you telling me this?” though her face certainly conveyed that. Sanjay was not deterred.

  “The drivers seem a little lax,” he said. “If they scrape the fence or each other’s truck, they seem to find it quite the joke. And besides that, many of the trucks have signs on them saying HAZARDOUS MATERIALS, in one case even CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES. But these workers and drivers do not seem aware of the hazards, and they certainly don’t seem cautious.”

  “Have you talked to them?”

  “I have. I suggested that there might be certain elements in this city who would be all too keen to get their hands on some illicit chemicals and/or explosives.”

  “And?”

  “And, Carla, I’m afraid they did not treat my suggestions with the respect they deserved.”

  “Have you told my dad?”

  “Oh no, Carla. That is not the way. My job is to bring him solutions, not problems. I learned that on my very first day at business college.”

  “And have you got a solution, Sanjay?”

  Sanjay thought long and hard.

  “No,” he said, “but your father did very kindly supply me with a baseball bat.”

  24. TREASURE

  Marilyn had moved into the driver’s seat in case a quick getaway was needed, but as Zak staggered back to the car, he looked damaged rather than hurried, and he opened the door and got in beside her with surprising delicacy, as if he were a package of fragile goods, already broken but perhaps still partly salvageable. Marilyn looked at his face with fresh, pained alarm.

  “What happened?”

  “Cactus,” Zak said, through thick, barely mobile lips, though he knew that explained nothing.

  “We need to do something about that,” said Marilyn.

  “I was thinking … same thing,” he said. It hurt.

  Marilyn began to drive, with purpose, though not fast. Zak slumped beside her, the skin of his face zinging under a web of small, sharp, stabbing pains. Below that was a deeper, spreading ache, and deeper still a more general feeling of nausea now that the adrenaline was curdling inside him. As they drove, he explained as best he could, as economically as possible, what he’d seen and done, and what had then been done to him. The only thing he couldn’t tell her was what any of it meant. Marilyn was a good deal less sympathetic than he’d hoped for. He wanted her to be caring, compassionate, concerned for his welfare; instead, she was all business.

  “So we now know the guy’s name: Wrobleski,” she said. “And you say he’s a customer of Utopiates.”

  “Yes, a collector.”

  “Is that why he wants these women? Could it be that simple?”

  Zak grunted.

  “Okay, maybe that’s not simple at all,” said Marilyn. “And he didn’t recognize you, why? Because you’re a nobody as far as he’s concerned?”

  “Right,” said Zak.

  “But if he ever comes in the store again, he’ll definitely recognize you. God knows what happens then. And Billy Moore did recognize you, he must have, but for some reason he pretended not to. But it seems he’s just a nobody too, just a guy whose job it is to bring these women to Wrobleski.”

  “Sometimes being a nobody has … advantages,” said Zak.

  “At least the women seemed to be okay,” said Marilyn. “Well, as okay as you can be when you’ve got tattoos across your back, when you’re being kept in a compound by some blubbering weirdo, and you’re being paraded naked in a conservatory.”

  “Yep, these things … comparative,” said Zak.

  He looked out of the windshield through one half-closed eye, couldn’t make out where they were.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to my place,” said Marilyn.

  “In other circumstances that would make me so happy,” said Zak.

  “I think I might still be able to make you happy, Zak. Once I’ve done my stuff with tweezers and rubbing alcohol.”

  “Where … you live?”

  “I live in a squat,” said Marilyn.

  “Yeah?”

  “In a hotel. The Telstar. You know it?”

  “Everybody knows the Telstar.”

  * * *

  Like Wrobleski, like many others, Zak was inclined to think of the Telstar as “that place that used to have the revolving restaurant.” More correctly it had had the Canaveral Lounge, a space-themed bar up on the twenty-third floor that had delivered a complete panorama of the city, 360 degrees, every sixty minutes. It had stopped revolving a long time ago.

  The Telstar Hotel was, or at least had been, an optimistic statement in steel, tinted plate glass, and exotically colored concrete, an embodiment of 1960s ideals and design tics, with grounds that took up most of a city block. Its base was a four-story chunk with walls that flowed and ribboned, and rising from one corner was a tower, a little too short to be considered genuinely phallic. From directly above, in outline, in aerial photographs, or on a map, the effect was of an amoeba and its off-center nucleus, or perhaps, according to some, a fried egg. Inside, th
e vestibule had looked like a psychedelic planetarium; the honeymoon suite resembled NASA headquarters; in the basement there was an Op Art disco with floor-to-ceiling aquariums.

  Critics, of which there were plenty, said it was too cool a building to remain cool for very long, and they were dead right. When business slackened, when room occupancy fell, when the conference trade evaporated, the place came to seem very old hat, and stilling the revolving restaurant was the first, all too symbolic, money-saving measure. But it wasn’t nearly enough. The Telstar had been closed and shuttered for the best part of a decade now, but it wasn’t quite empty or uninhabited.

  Even before Mayor Meg Gunderson came into office, there had been ambitious, if amorphous, plans to revivify the place, to turn it into apartments, or a college, or a museum, or some combination of the three. There had always been other plans, of course, to demolish the damn thing. After it had sat empty for a few years, as the early discussions reached stalemate, a group of politicized, leaderless squatters occupied the building. They called themselves the Homesteaders: part Woody Guthrie, part Road Warrior, radical, anarchic, surprisingly media savvy. They moved in with their many children and dogs, and started holding press conferences. Speeches were made about social control, homelessness, deprivation, corporate evil: it played pretty well.

  Meg Gunderson was mayor by then, and she stepped in and organized a provisional compromise. Utilities would be reconnected to the hotel (though not enough to spin the Canaveral Lounge), and the squatters could remain so long as there was no trouble, until a final decision had been reached about the Telstar’s future development. They were still waiting.

  Naturally, Zak had thought about the Telstar as a suitable object for his urban explorations, but he’d been deterred by a number of things. First, it was said the place was a death trap: walls, floors, staircases were all likely to collapse under the weight of the naïve infiltrator, but Zak rather doubted that. The mayor was hardly likely to let the squatters stay there if the building was going to kill them. He had been more inclined to believe that the squatters themselves were the real threat. It was said they were a fighting, feral bunch. True, that didn’t square with what he knew of Marilyn, but perhaps that was only an indication that he knew nothing at all. Then the last time he’d scouted the perimeter fence, there was an armed guard with a sorrowful, angry dog, though it was unclear to Zak whether the pair were there to keep the public out or the squatters in. He hadn’t investigated. As his excursion into Wrobleski’s compound had just proved, urban exploration was sometimes a lot more fun to contemplate than actually do.

  Now Marilyn parked the station wagon half a block from a side gate of the overgrown hotel grounds, where a different security guard and his hound stood sentry. Marilyn walked up to the guard, said, “How’s it going, Bob?” pressed a couple of bills into his hand, and patted the dog. Bob looked at Zak, at his distorted face, speckled with blood and cactus spines, and decided it was none of his business.

  “Can’t complain,” Bob said, as he opened the gate and waved Marilyn and Zak inside.

  Marilyn took Zak’s hand (he liked that) and guided him through the obstacle course of the grounds, scattered with concrete buttresses, barbed wire, giant buddleia, a blackened school bus. They got into the hotel via a rear service entrance, passed through buckled metal doors into a long corridor, patchily illuminated by a line of bare bulbs hung from the ceiling like decaying fairy lights. The corridor led past cavernous, festering kitchens, skirted furnaces that resembled the innards of some scrapped steamship, past a giant laundry that was now a shantytown of stacked gray linens. The corridor walls were scorched with graffiti: grinning robots, dwarves with oversized genitals, political slogans—It’s the Insurrection, Stupid. At the far end there was a small, solid pool of light and an emergency generator adjacent to the rusted doors of a freight elevator. They encountered nobody, though Zak thought he could hear a band rehearsing somewhere up above.

  “Want to risk the elevator?” Marilyn asked. “It’s a hell of a climb otherwise.”

  In his punctured state, Zak didn’t want to risk anything whatsoever, but he wanted to climb even less. He found himself in the elevator, a makeshift and decrepit thing. Marilyn punched a set of numbers into a keypad in the wall, and they began a rattling ascent, up through a great many floors until the cage stopped with a shudder. The doors opened, a good two feet below the level of the floor outside, and Zak, stepping up and out, stared blearily into a strange slice of shadowy, glass-walled space. They were at the very top of the hotel, inside the Canaveral Lounge, the unrevolving revolving restaurant.

  “Oh God,” Zak groaned. “Now I’m in an alternate universe, right?”

  The Canaveral Lounge said sixties all right, though it spoke in a stuttering, muted fashion. There were plastic pods and blobs, white egg-shaped chairs, though all the plastic had crazed and developed a pale yellow patina. On the floor, the carpet showed a pattern of stars and planets, seen through a veil of plaster dust. The walls were decorated with memorabilia that looked authentic enough: tattered flags and banners, portraits of alarmingly youthful-looking astronauts, sections of charred rocket fins and satellite housings. There was a map that Zak, even in his present state, recognized as a lunar landing chart for the Sea of Tranquillity, still visible through cracked glass that had developed a thin film of mold.

  “You really live here?”

  “Sure,” said Marilyn. “A view property.”

  “Why?”

  “Who needs a reason?”

  “Isn’t it like living in a Kubrick movie?”

  “The Shining or 2001?” Marilyn suggested. “Or were you thinking Spartacus?”

  “Not sure,” said Zak.

  “Sit down at one of the tables,” said Marilyn. “I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

  She disappeared into the dark hub of the restaurant, into what had once been the bar, and returned with rubbing alcohol, tweezers, a freezing spray, and began the long, delicate, painstaking process of extracting the cactus spikes from Zak’s face. She started at the top, by the hairline, and worked her way down.

  “Jesus!” Zak yelled, as she made her first incursion.

  “If you could find some way of distracting yourself while I do this, that would be great,” said Marilyn.

  “What?”

  “Just talk.”

  “It hurts when I talk.”

  “Okay, then,” Marilyn said, “I’ll start with the mouth.”

  Zak gritted his teeth as Marilyn cleared the area around his lips. Not talking hurt too, but once she’d cleared the area, operating like some kind of cosmetic bomb disposal expert, detonating tiny controlled explosions as she went, he was increasingly able to string some words and thoughts together, while she went back to working on his forehead.

  “You know,” he said, “those maps on the women could be parts of something bigger. Sectional maps aren’t unusual. If, say, a group of you is going on a secret mission behind enemy lines, you may not want every member to know where you’re heading, so each of you has a piece of the map. Oh shit, Marilyn, that really fucking hurts. So you need each other, but you’re also keeping secrets from each other. And if one of you gets caught, the whole mission isn’t blown.”

  “So what’s the mission in this case?” said Marilyn. “And who’s the enemy and where’s the line?”

  It sounded like something he’d have said. Marilyn continued her task, concentrating on the eyelids.

  “No idea. Wrobleski is surely putting the pieces together,” Zak said.

  “I guess,” said Marilyn. “But how many segments are there? How many maps? How many women?”

  She sloshed alcohol onto a raw area of Zak’s inflamed cheek, so that he experienced a new kind of dense, flooding pain as he considered an answer.

  “You’d think it can’t be very many,” he said. “Nobody makes a map with, say, a hundred sections, because it’s too hard to get a hundred people lined up in the same place at the same time. S
hit—did you train as a sadist in a previous life?”

  “No, I learned it all in this one,” she said. “And the question remains, when we put the sections together, what do we get? What’s it a map of? It looks like a city, but is it this city?”

  Zak said, “Could be, but the maps are so bad, it’s hard to recognize anything. And they’re probably coded anyway.”

  Marilyn worked steadily, methodically, moving down the topography of Zak’s face, following the random pattern of spikes, creating fresh contour lines of pain. Zak felt as if his face were melting, turning to hot clay. He wanted to scratch it, tear at it, drive his fingers right down to the bone. He felt like bawling.

  He said, “And why was Wrobleski crying?”

  “Maybe because he doesn’t understand the maps any better than we do,” Marilyn suggested.

  “Or because he understands them too well,” said Zak.

  Marilyn’s tweezers dug into the rear of Zak’s jaw this time, into the hinterland between cheek and ear. He took a big, greedy swallow of air.

  He said, “But what if Wrobleski is assembling a human treasure map?”

  “Say?”

  “There are arrows and lines on the women, they could be marking a route or a destination, and the symbols could be like x marks the spot.”

  “Hurrying to a spot that’s just a dot on the map,” Marilyn quoted.

  “Maybe the compass rose marks the spot.”

  “Right at the base of the spine, just above the ass. Well, there are worse spots. But what’s the treasure? And who buried it? And why?”

  “There you’ve got me,” said Zak.

  She did indeed have him. She abruptly stood back, looked at Zak’s face, admired her own handiwork.

  “I can’t get any more out,” she said. “You’ll have to let nature take its course with the rest.”

  “Oh no, not nature…”

  She reached across and took Zak’s battered face in her palms, and searched for a neutral spot, eventually selecting a small area below his black eye, not the most erogenous of zones, but good enough, and she touched her lips there softly. It hurt him only a little.