Mr. Maphead
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Gregory Anselm was almost fifty when he realized that travel, until then the one constant of his life, had lost its savor. It had happened gradually, culminating aboard a friend’s yacht bound from the Maldives to the Solomon Islands, in the Chagos Archipelago, where they planned to dive and snorkel on a pristine coral atoll. Everything had been as promised: uninhabited islands with perfect beaches, water of astonishing clarity, a reef thronging with life, and his seven fellow travelers as interesting a group as he could have hoped for, yet somehow it all felt numbingly familiar.
A listless torpor, which he initially mistook for the first symptom of an illness, hung like a dusty curtain between himself and everyone around him, and for the entire two-week period his smiles were forced, the food tasted bland, the drinks watered, and the conversations like old records that had enthralled him in his youth but now sounded insipid and juvenile. He’d worked harder at concealing this disaffection from his companions than in keeping up with them, several of whom were twenty years younger.
He’d hardly stopped moving for the last thirty years, spending from hours to months in over seventy countries. He’d seen most of the old buildings and ruins in Europe and Asia, ridden camels for weeks through deserts, dived cenotes in Mexico, safaried in Africa, bush-planed into the Arctic National Refuge, journeyed up the Amazon and Congo Rivers, surviving malaria, dengue fever and leishmaniasis, and idled away so many pleasant and sometimes less than pleasant days with bare acquaintances and strangers on the make, some of whose faces were stamped as indelibly as coins in his memory, and others fading like vapor trails. Was it really so surprising to have finally wrung the wineskin dry?
So he was done with travel, at last. The question was, what to do now? Marry, “settle down” for what remained of his life? Every moment of his past revolted at the idea. What was he really good at, or good for, besides adapting to a new set of rules every few days, exercising his quick, shallow facility for languages, acquiring sea legs, learning on the fly what to do and not do in the more dramatically variant cultures? He knew that he probably had several books’ worth of experiences in him, but also knew that he lacked both the desire and the patience to write. The necessity of earning a living had been removed from Gregory Anselm at birth, and he preferred evasion and lies over admitting that he’d never held a job, that he’d been too busy crisscrossing the planet to learn a trade.
He owned a brownstone in Brooklyn, where he holed up for several weeks, reading, catching up on his correspondence, eating in neighborhood restaurants, and drinking in a rundown old bar that was a survivor from his youth. He had friends in the city, but for the moment had no wish to see anyone. The days melted together, an indistinguishable slag of dead time. He was waiting for something, although what or who, he couldn’t have said.
He was at his dive bar late one evening, working on his third single malt, when an older man came in and sat a couple stools down from him. Hearing a mumbled order for a neat whisky in an accent he recognized as Greek, he took a quick glance at the new arrival. The man was smallish, bearded, with rough, sun-damaged skin bearing many scars, dense, curly gray hair and brown eyes light enough to be called gold narrowed by sagging eyelids and weary bags as dry-looking as sloughed snakeskin. He guessed the man’s age in the mid-sixties, but wondered if he’d ever seen the years scored more deeply in a human face. He wore old, dirty jeans and a ragged, long-sleeved khaki shirt.
Noticing his furtive scrutiny, the man turned a sidelong stare on him, then raised his glass in a silent toast. He returned the gesture and they drank. The man smiled, showing yellowed but unusually robust teeth, then turned back to his whisky. Gregory was reminded of the fossilized jaws of Neanderthals.
The man finished his drink, parked a ten under his glass and got up to leave. For the first time, Gregory saw the right side of his head. Where his ear had been was a hole about two inches wide and half an inch deep, as perfectly clean and symmetrical as the sand pit of an ant lion larva, as if the ear had been scooped out by a precision laser that had instantaneously cauterized the wound. It was the smoothest scar tissue he’d ever seen. The man paused for an extra second or two, as if weighing something in his mind, then he slid a business card across the bar to him.
“Ask for Mr. Maphead,” he said in a gravelly undertone, then turned and walked out.
There was a Latin inscription at the top of the card: Terrae Incognitae, and below that, “Isaac Glowacz, Cartographer.” The address was in Chinatown, but there was neither a phone number nor an email address. Gregory fingered it doubtfully, then slipped it into his shirt pocket. Was the gold-eyed man Isaac Glowacz, or was he offering Gregory a recommendation? If this was a come-on, he had certainly undersold it. It might be worth the trip to Chinatown to get a closer look at what, if anything, was going on here.
He chose a cool, windy afternoon to subway over to Chinatown. The address wasn’t hard to find, one of those impossibly narrow walkups between a noodle shop and a place selling mass-produced tourist junk. He pressed the button by the address plate, the door unlocked and he walked up a steep, dusty stairwell to a single office at the top. On the glass door was painted:
Terrae Incognitae
Old and Collectible Maps
Bought, Sold, Traded, Restored.
Maps Made to Order.
He entered an untidy space that might have been the map room of a library, fragrant with the comforting, slightly musty smell of old books, the floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with massive atlases and maps, some of them pre-Renaissance and mounted in plasticine covers, and one wall covered with prints of maps dating back to the Romans.
There was a cluttered counter facing the door, a Fifties-era cash register at one end, and almost hidden behind it sat an elderly but by no means frail man with sparse white hair and heavy, harshly angled gray eyebrows. He was reading from a tattered old book bearing the title Partial Inventory of the Contents of Pandora’s Box by Neville Petrie and looked up only after Gregory had been standing there for several seconds. “Yes? May I help you?”
“Possibly. A guy in a bar handed me this card.” He laid it on the counter. “For some reason, he seemed to think I should come here and ask for a ‘Mr. Maphead.’ Would that be you?”
The old man picked up the card, glanced at it, then shook his head. “This is my business card, but the name is Glowacz. Like the sign says, I deal in maps, catering, as you might imagine, to a very small clientele. Did this man give you his name?”
“No. Would it help if I described him?”
“It might.” He described the man minutely, finishing on the weirdly missing right ear. “Well, if it were me,” Glovacz said, “My first impression might be that he was some kind of con artist.”
“That occurred to me.”
“Which raises the question why you’d bother to come at all, given your apparent skepticism.”
“Curiosity. I don’t know if that’s his job, to make guys like me curious enough to pursue what might be something other than what it seems, but if it is, he does it very well.”
The man closed his book and fixed his severe-browed gaze on him. “I hope you’re not suggesting that this man shills for me?”
“Heavens, no. So I have to assume he was serious.”
“Serious in what way?”
“That he thought I might benefit from some service offered here. So, if your, uh, secret identity is in fact this Mr. Maphead, then I’m interested. If not, sorry to have wasted your time.”
“You say you’re interested,” the man said, peering intently into his eyes. “Without knowing what ‘service’ I supposedly offer?”
“Well, I assume it’s a map of some kind. Though not, I hope, to the buried treasure of Captain Kidd.”
The man twitched a faint smile and stood up, revealing a tallness Gregory hadn’t expected. “May I ask your name, sir?”
“Gregory Anselm.”
“Isaac Glowacz. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” They shook hands. “Now, Mr. Anselm, I’d like to ask you a personal question before this conversation goes any further. “Why did you come here? I mean the real reason.”
“Desperation.” He surprised himself by practically blurting it out. “Truth is, I’m not built for the daily routine. Never have been. I’ve traveled, more than most, but recently I seem to have hit a wall. Yet I’m as restless as ever. That’s as straight an answer as I can give you.”
The old man nodded, apparently satisfied. “I have another room in the back. Let me close the office and I’ll lead the way.”
“Do you prefer ‘Mr. Maphead,’ or ‘Mr. Glowacz?’”
“The latter. The other name is more of a code recognized by those few aware of what I do. To put it plainly, a maphead is a cartographer of unknown places.”
“Terrae incognitae. Of course,” Gregory said, beginning to feel foolish.
“By that, I mean places not found on any topographic map,” Glowacz said. “And I’m well aware how preposterous that sounds. But there really are such places, though reaching them is difficult. Access points can occur in the unlikeliest spots, some of them all but impossible to reach, such as the deep ocean or in the heart of a volcano.” He motioned Gregory to come behind the counter, then opened a door that appeared to be a map shelf and led the way into a small, dimly lit room. “Others are contiguous with an ordinary room like this one.”
Gregory decided to play along for the moment. “Shouldn’t I know a few things beforehand, Mr. Glowacz? Like how you go about making a map that will lead me both in and out of one of these places? And what it’s going to cost me?”
“Probably more than you’re willing to pay. The reason for my high prices will become apparent if you choose to proceed. I’m oversimplifying, but try to imagine a deck of fifty-two playing cards floating in space. Each card is a doorway leading to fifty-two different locations, stacked, so to speak, in the same space that we’re presently occupying. My map will lead you to one of these access points, but the doorways are not fixed in space. In quantum terms, they randomly shuffle themselves, and one can never know which place a door will lead to on any given trip.
“I should also warn you that one might enter a place that is only potentially real, a kind of dormant reality that becomes actual only in the presence of an observer. There, the traveler’s own thoughts, dreams, memories and fears can activate and shape what one might call the basic protoplasm of existence. Unimaginable risks abound in such realms. And the odds, as I said, are enormously against reaching the same place, world, dimension, whatever one chooses to call it, twice.”
“So there’s no guarantee of a safe return?”
“None whatsoever. I’ll make us a map. The rest is up to its accuracy and our good or bad luck.”
“Hold on. You’re coming with me?’”
“I’m afraid I have to. Because in essence, I am the map.”
“Okay. When do I pay?”
“Now. I’ll write down the figure.” He scribbled on a piece of notepaper and passed it to him. Gregory looked at it for a long ten seconds, then handed Glowacz his credit card. “Thank you. I’ll be back in a moment with your receipt. In the meantime, please sit.”
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
