The City Under the Skin (16 page)

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. Shit—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.

“You stay there,” she said. “I'll be right back.”

He had no intention of going anywhere. Now at least he could open his eyes and look out the restaurant window at the city below, at the web of lights, the intermittent traffic patterns, the busy glow of streetlights spread on the horizon. He was high enough to feel above it all, though not exactly superior to anything down there. From this vantage point he could see the logic of patterns, lines, grids, but he knew they were just diagrams, schemata, they didn't tell even a fraction of the real story. Down at ground level there was all that confusion, all that necessary, deceptive human clutter; and below the street surface it got even worse: tunnels, sewers, drains, concealed voids, unmapped spaces that he knew absolutely nothing about. As for Marilyn, it seemed he didn't know a damn thing about her either. What kind of person would want to live her life alone up here, squatting in the unrevolving restaurant of an abandoned hotel?

When Marilyn came back, she no longer looked remotely like herself, or like anybody Zak knew or ever expected to know. The glasses, the bookishness, the hipsterism, the baggy clothes, they'd all gone. She was now wrapped in an enveloping floor-length iridescent black … well, he couldn't quite put a name to it … a robe, a gown, a cape? And was it real leather or fake? Or some kind of man-made material, perhaps developed as a by-product of the space program? And could those strips of leopard skin around the hem and the cuffs be as authentic as they looked?

“Zak,” Marilyn said briskly, “there are one or two things you should know about me before we get started.”

“I want to know everything,” said Zak. It seemed like the right thing to say, but mostly he wanted to stare.

“I'm not talking about innermost hopes and dreams. I'm just talking about sex, okay? I'd like to lay down some ground rules before we start. It saves time.”

“Okay,” said Zak, although saving time wasn't uppermost in his mind.

“Well,” said Marilyn, “I'll swallow if I like the taste; I'll spit if I don't. You shouldn't take it personally.”

“Then I won't,” said Zak.

“I don't mind being held down, but I don't want to be
tied
down, and I definitely don't want the ball gag and the handcuffs.”

“Good.”

“Sex toys are fine, but I don't like actual
equipment
. So a pony harness, no, but vibrators and butt plugs are fine, and available on request.”

“Okay,” said Zak.

“And you know, I really do like dressing up: boots, lingerie, fetish gear if it isn't too ridiculous. On the other hand, I absolutely, positively don't want
you
to dress up.”

“I'm glad,” said Zak.

“If you want to take some dirty pictures, that's fine, but I don't want to see them all over the Internet, at least not showing my face, and definitely not under my real name.”

“I can understand that,” said Zak.

“Spanking's okay, but I think it's more blessed to give than to receive. Water sports, well, all right, if you really want, though frankly it doesn't strike me as much of a sport, though I do understand the nature of territorial pissing.”

“The map is not the territory,” said Zak, then wished he hadn't.

“And I guess we should use condoms,” Marilyn continued. “You don't look like a guy who barebacks with other guys, but how would I know? Oh, and if you want me to wear a strap-on, I will, but I can't promise to keep a straight face.”

“That won't be an issue,” said Zak.

He understood the advantages of talking to women: learning what they wanted, telling them what he needed. Nobody liked everything, and nobody liked everything equally. Even so, he thought it might be better if you worked those things out as part of the process, rather than as preconditions. Marilyn seemed to be giving him a map of her sexual landscape, but there were times when it was much more fun to be without one, to find your own way, to get lost for a while. Even as he thought this, Zak wondered if he might be too immersed in the business of Utopiates.

“Other than that,” said Marilyn, “you can do whatever you like.”

She stood up and let the robe or gown or cape, or whatever it ought to be called, fall away. Zak took a deep, desperate breath. She was wearing a strange, gorgeous, ornate halter corset—he thought “steampunk” was probably the word to describe it—made mostly of leather, though there were bands of suede and silk, some laces, metal clasps and buckles, studs. It was a substantial and devastating piece of costume, curling up around her neck and shoulders, cupping her breasts and framing her crotch, while at the same time leaving them completely, emphatically exposed.