Mr. Maphead
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Gregory sat in the proffered chair, which was on one side of a table with another chair facing it, all the time wondering what was possessing him to take this man seriously. After giving him his receipt, Glowacz went into a storage room and came back carrying a large, canvas-covered container, shaped like a bell jar, and a smaller glass jar with a wide glass top. He made another trip to the room and returned with a stretched, cured piece of parchment about twelve inches to a side pinned to a wooden frame.
He arrayed these objects on the table in front of the empty chair, beside a blotter and a glass inkwell with a quill pen resting in it. From a drawer in the table, he brought out a long pair of laboratory tweezers with flattened, padded ends, two sterile syringes sealed in plastic, a small vial of clear liquid and alcohol pads. He sat down across from Gregory and spoke to him while drawing liquid into each syringe.
“The man who passed you my card gave his name as Mr. Oeminos. I’ve met him only once. Clients for my more select service rarely return for a second map. They’ve been cured, you might say, of their wanderlust. Oeminos is an older version of yourself: a burned-out traveler, a dead-ender. One of those types who’ve seen so many places on the surface of this planet that they reach a point of saturation and disillusionment because they’ve visited those destinations accessible only by conventional means. But just as there are many more senses than our five, there are places in our world that can’t be perceived, much less reached, without using radically different modes of travel.”
“And a radically different map, too, I suppose, considering what you charge for it.”
“You’re staring at the syringes,” Glowacz said with a smile. “And wondering, as you should, about my good faith. I give you my word that they contain only a local anesthetic. And I’ll take the first shot, so you know it’s not poison or knockout drops.”
“Why do we need an anesthetic?”
He lifted the cover off the bell jar, and Gregory instinctively drew back from the table. Inside a dense web as messy and complex as that of a black widow hung a spider much larger than a widow, perhaps an inch across the abdomen and with a leg span of four or five inches. Its overall shape, the glossy, bulbous abdomen and sharp, thin, red legs, was similar to a widow’s, and he wondered if it might belong to the same family.
But the color of its cephalothorax and abdomen was like nothing he’d ever seen in the natural world, not even among flowering plants: a gorgeous, iridescent purple that seemed to catch and magnify the light. Its eight eyes were green constellations, and its black fangs were noticeably prominent. To Gregory, who admired spiders for their remarkable adaptations but found their appearance, especially the larger ones, somewhat alarming, this specimen looked like one to avoid.
Glowacz had been watching his reaction with interest. “This spider is so rare that it hasn’t been taxonomically classified,” he said. “It has many names, but on this continent it’s called the Asabikeshiinh, an Ojibwe word meaning both ‘spider’ and ‘dream catcher.’
“The method for mapping travel to wherever we’re going is a combination of dream divination and automatic writing. One sits at a drawing table with a blank piece of parchment and a pen, waiting to enter a state superficially resembling lucid dreaming, which is difficult to achieve and even harder to control. For the necessary trance state, the maphead induces the bite of this spider, the only arachnid on Earth, to my knowledge, with psychotropic venom. It must be female; the much smaller male spider’s venom is quite devoid of the deranging molecule and, anyway, she usually eats him after mating.”
“Why on earth would a spider need psychotropic venom?” Gregory asked.
“It doesn’t. It’s one of Nature’s lucky accidents, a mutation that doesn’t affect the potency of the venom and thus the survival of the species but is priceless to travelers like yourself. You might as well ask why the black widow’s venom is so much more toxic than it needs to be. No one knows why; it just is.”
“But didn’t you say that this spider is very rare?”
“True. I have to breed them myself. The female lays an egg sac containing hundreds of spiderlings, but from birth they feed on each other, leaving a precious few to perpetuate the species.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re going to let that thing bite you?”
Glowacz smiled grimly. “Both of us, Mr. Anselm. I won’t lie: the bite is excruciating — hence the lidocaine — but not dangerous. It induces an ineffable state between dreaming and waking, lasting several hours, that allows me to enter, explore and map where we’re going. As to how this happens on the physical level, I can only explain it by saying that our perception of the world is entirely governed by various states of consciousness, and the Asabikeshiinh’s venom allows the maphead to see pathways normally invisible to humans.
“As I write on the parchment, using symbols that are meaningless to my waking self, the pattern becomes fixed in my mind, creating directions that must be followed to the letter, however strange or counterintuitive they may seem, which is why I can’t distract myself with speech. If either or both of us stray even slightly from this predetermined path, we will almost certainly become lost, and those lost in a terra incognita seldom find their way back.”
He stared at Glowacz for an incredulous moment, then burst out laughing. “Now I know why you required your fee up front.”
“I’ll refund your money right now,” the cartographer said, clearly unamused, “if that’s what you want.”
“No, no, I’ve come this far. But my hand better be as numb as a piece of wood when your friend there does her thing. I don’t like the big ones in my immediate neighborhood, much less biting me.”
“You think I do? Unfortunately, it’s necessary.”
As he was speaking, Glowacz removed the glass top of the specimen jar, then opened the hinged top of the bigger jar and, taking the tweezers, lowered them into the web with the greatest care, trying not to touch the webbing, and gently grasped the spider around the thorax and pulled it out of its web. Placing it in the specimen jar, he quickly put the top on. Then, tearing open the packet containing an alcohol pad, Glowacz sterilized a spot near the knuckle of his left index finger, picked up one of the syringes and slowly injected it.
He then injected Gregory’s right hand in the same spot. He brought the specimen jar closer, and Gregory watched with alarm as he removed the glass top, stuck his hand into the jar and used his index finger to bar the frantic escape maneuvers of the spider around the bottom. It tried to avoid him, but he kept edging his finger closer and closer, until finally, feeling cornered, it raised its forelegs menacingly, and bringing its large fangs into play, darted forward and bit him, leaving two almost imperceptible punctures.
Glowacz winced and breathed hard, then withdrew his hand and looked up at Gregory. “Your right hand, please.”
Gregory reluctantly surrendered his hand, then looked away and shut his eyes as Glowacz firmly took hold of it and pushed it into the jar. He felt the bite as a fiery stab, with an intolerable burning sensation rising behind it, like acid under the skin. But almost immediately a growing numbness overwhelmed the pain like a flash flood on a brush fire. In hardly more than a minute, he began to feel disoriented, then felt his head nodding, and with an effort raised it and looked at Glowacz.
The older man was slumped in his chair, his chin on his chest, his right hand holding the quill next to the inkwell, his left hand resting open on the table, his index finger already swollen to half again its thickness, a sickly yellow tinge spreading like ink under the skin, creeping up to the knuckle. The spider was in the covered specimen jar, now quite still.
Gregory looked down at his own hand and saw the bitten finger like a bursting sausage tinged with yellow. He tried to laugh, but wasn’t sure if he made any sound, then drifted off.
He experienced an odd sensation of movement, half floating, half walking. It seemed as if his legs were several feet ahead of the rest of his body, striding along a wavering path composed of a gray, gelatinous substance that moved like oily smoke in slow motion, leaving footprints that quickly closed over and disappeared, and pulling his balloon-like upper half along behind them, as if he were attached to his legs by a string. The path abruptly ended, and his legs stopped short, giving his body time to float forward and reunite with his lower half, which felt as effortless as if he were a cartoon character.
He heard sounds like New York street noises and turned to look behind him. The room was clearly visible, but the two chairs were empty, and as he stared, the gray, viscous medium that composed the path and really, everything else, wherever this was, closed slowly over his window-like view as it had his footprints, and the room vanished.
A jolt of panic shot through him, and he opened his mouth to call Glowacz’s name, then noticed something exceedingly strange: his hands didn’t match. The right hand he recognized as his own, but the left hand belonged to an older man, larger and hairier than his, with long, thin fingers, the index finger hugely swollen and yellow.
As he struggled to comprehend what had happened to him, the alien left hand involuntarily closed and opened four times, then the swollen finger pointed into the gray, shifting nothingness. Glowacz had said there was no way to predict what might happen when one traveled in a terra incognita. But could he have taken this into account? That they would somehow be sharing the same body? He’d said they wouldn’t be able to talk to each other. So it was hand signals or nothing. Or were they sharing brains, too?
Hesitantly, he began walking, or making the motions of walking, since he wasn’t really on a surface any longer, counted twenty steps, then stopped. He heard a faint sound like someone wheezing, and cupped his left hand around his ear, before realizing that it was Glowacz’s hand, which felt like a stranger’s, and he pulled it away with a startled yelp. Using his right hand, he tried again, and could hear the labored breathing approaching from no fixed direction.
A figure limped out of the swirling gray stuff, which seemed to stand in for earth and sky here, a man with his shaggy gray head hanging down as if too heavy for his neck, stolidly putting one foot in front of the other, like someone on a treadmill, but whether he was actually making forward progress or his steps were somehow pulling Gregory/Glowacz toward him, it was impossible to say.
When he was barely a foot away, the man stopped. He was dressed in what looked like a faded, blue denim dress or robe that hid everything but his head and hands. He looked up, and Gregory was unutterably shocked to see a much older, gone-to-seed version of himself, with a patchy gray stubble and a fixed, hopeless stare. The man leaned forward, peering into his eyes, as if not sure whether he recognized his younger self. Which wasn’t surprising, Gregory thought, considering his dual identity. He was grateful for the absence of mirrored surfaces.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
