Can and Can'tankerous (18 page)

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 11
^th
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.”

“Ah. Yes, of course, I do indeed remember the bronze medal and how you cried. Well, let me say this, Master Charles Trimbach: you are a very nice young man. You need not be so unforgiving, of yourself, and of those for whom you labor. You have turned out to be an absolutely imperial young man, and I hold no bad cess for your having come to deliver this nasty news.”

I handed him the envelope containing the severance check. Though how you could pay him for what must have been hundreds of years of maps, well, I don’t know, Howard; I just don’t know.

He reached into a shelf beneath the slant-top of his desk, and removed a derby hat. He placed it carefully on his head at a rakish angle, took one last look around the shop—the greenery seemed to rustle a farewell—and he walked me to the door.

We stepped out into the Chicago night. It was lit by a full moon. He closed the door behind us, and turned to me as he locked up. “But with all your capacity for producing a map down to the last grain of sand in the Gobi, Charlie, the sad thing is that now and forevermore no one will be able to provide the questing customer with a route to Baskerville Hall, or Riallaro, or Nimmr in the Valley of the Sepulchre. With the closing of this little oasis, Charlie, your little civilization loses for all time to come. There is no Charta Caelestis for the improbable.”

And when I turned back to see, the shop was gone. It was now a boarded-up derelict, what had once been a deli or a place where they sold banded 12-packs of socks. Seconds.

Abner Wonacott and I walked out into the street, left the alley, and headed toward the city lights. It was terribly cold, that special awful Chicago cold that makes you think of the end of the world. He held his derby on with one hand and hunched deeper inside his jacket. I wished I’d brought a heavier topcoat. It hadn’t been supposed to get this cold, this soon.

“What will you do now?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll retire somewhere nice and warm. I hear Boca is pleasant.”

I wanted to cry. Just like that, so damned casually, I’d made everything go sour in the world. I fingered the bronze medal fob on my watch chain. I was a bad person, no matter what the old mapmaker said to ease my guilt. A bad person. I told him that. He smiled wryly and said, “Most of us think we’re more important than we really are, Charlie. The universe isn’t watching. It mostly, for the most part, doesn’t care.”

And at that moment, before I could wallow much more in sophomoric self-pity, a stout lady with one of those wire shopping baskets on wheels came up to us, and she looked at Abner Wonacott, the one man who could actually tell you where King Kong resided, and she said, “Excuse me, mister, is there a Domenick’s around here?”

“No, not too close,” he said. “There
was
an A&P for a long time, but it’s gone. I think there’s a Jewel Supermarket about a mile toward Lincoln Park, but…oh, wait a moment…yes, now that I recall, yes indeed there
is
a Domenick’s.

“You’ll have to go over three blocks that way, and then go left for two more blocks to…”

He paused, looked thoughtful for a moment, then reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought out a lovely fountain pen and a pad. “Here,” he said, “let me draw you a map.”

And all at once, the wind wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been; and the night was not nearly as empty.