Interfictions

by Delia Sherman

  "I was digging for faith or direction,” Alfred replied. “I have no interest in China. I couldn't even find it on a map."

  "Then you have need of a cartographer,” another of the creatures said. “I have known many cartographers."

  "They are a strange breed, cartographers,” another of the creatures said.

  "They live in hovels and garrets,” another of the creatures said. “They seldom shave."

  "I have to go to work soon,” Alfred said. “I need to find some more berries before I starve to death or start to eat the dirt. Excuse me—” He began to walk away, but the three creatures stood in front of him.

  One of the creatures said, “The conventional scheme of decent living calls for a considerable exercise of the earlier barbaric traits."

  One of the creatures said, “We are the scars of wounding words."

  All three of the creatures thrust their shovels into the ground. Each pulled up a pile of dirt and held it in front of Alfred. “Choose wisely,” one of the creatures said.

  Before he could think about what he was doing or why, Alfred reached into the pile of dirt in the shovel of the creature to his left, and from the dirt he pulled a grey business card with a name and address printed on it. He flicked the dirt off the card with his finger and read what was written there:

  GÜNTHER P. LOPEZ

  cartographer and mime

  17 Gough Square, Lichfield

  When he looked up from the card, Alfred for a moment thought the creatures had disappeared, but then he saw that they had positioned themselves along the side of the road with their backs to him, and they had commenced digging to China.

  At that moment, Alfred realized the dawn had turned to day and he was late for work. He could not pull his eyes from the spectacle of the creatures at the side of the road. He was entranced by their gnomic greyness, his imagination inspired to build entire lives for them, lost lives—families discarded for the sake of indeterminate destinies, memories forgotten in quests that the years whittled down to simple syllables and empty gestures. Alfred pressed his fingers into his eyes. The creatures did not turn around. “Please—.—.—.” he said, but they continued digging. Fury rose in his chest, he clenched his teeth, he tried to keep his feet from moving, but within a moment he had become so unwitted that he could not escape his old habit of moving on, and he ran and ran down the road.

  It was, for a very long time, a straight road, utterly without curves or even indentations, basically a berm raised in the midst of the sewer sea, but after many monotonous miles, kilometers, and versts of unvarying straightness, the road curved, swerved, dived, and diverged into a web of tributaries radiating from a point, all labeled with flimsy metal signs indicating avenues and boulevards, lanes and highways, turnpikes, beltways, thoroughfares, underpasses, boreens, detours, post roads, and main drags.

  By now, Alfred's anxieties had barnacled themselves to other possibilities, worrying him about where to go and what to do there or here or wherever he ended up, but he remembered the card of the cartographer and it eased his mind, giving him one direction to look for: Lichfield.

  Alfred wandered down Lichfield Lane, going on the assumption that such a lane might lead to Lichfield, and for once his assumption proved correct. He emerged from the tree-lined lane in a small town with dirt streets and narrow wooden buildings raised on stilts. “Why the stilts?” he asked an old woman sitting in a rocking chair up on the porch of a supply shop for rocket scientists.

  "Better circulation!” the woman yelled down at him, apparently assuming he was hard of hearing. Alfred was about to reply, but before he could issue any words, the woman got out of her rocking chair, fired up a jetpack, and flew off into the clouds drifting across the blue and summery sky.

  It did not take Alfred long to locate Günther Lopez, whose office towered high above everything else in Lichfield. Not only were its stilts taller than any others, but it was the only lighthouse in town, although why a town so far from the ocean would need a lighthouse at all was (and remained) a mystery to Alfred.

  "Ahoy!” Alfred called up to the lighthouse. “Günther Lopez!"

  After a moment, a man with a bright white, clean-shaven face and sensitive green eyes peeked out of an open window toward the top of the lighthouse tower and called out, “Wie ist das Wetter heute?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "No creo en los signos del zodíaco!"

  "I am in need of a cartographer,” Alfred said.

  Lopez held his hands to his face and suddenly his entire countenance erupted with a bright, idiotic smile. He gestured for Alfred to ascend the iron stairs spiralling around one of the stilts.

  The inside of the lighthouse was spare, a single round room with brightly-colored plastic chairs and a large glass table in the center. At the far side, a bookcase sprouted rolls of maps.

  Lopez greeted Alfred by pretending to shake hands with him from across the room. Alfred watched with growing frustration as the man carried on a lively, silent conversation with himself. Finally, Alfred said, “Shi-gatsu ni Amerika e kaerimasu!"

  Lopez froze when he heard the words. His face sank like wet clay. “How did you know?” he said quietly.

  "How did I know what?"

  "Don't be coy. My mother's ancestry is a precious secret to me. I had no idea anyone else knew she was Finnish."

  "I have come here with a purpose,” Alfred said. “I am allergic to non sequiturs, and I can already feel my nose stuffing up. Please, can we talk cartography?"

  "Upland planetable rectification alidade bathymetry hachure monoscopic isopleth!” Lopez screamed, then fell to the floor, where he gasped and panted with great élan.

  Alfred turned away so that Lopez would not see the tears welling in his eyes. This road, too, had led to nothing. The muscles in his back tensed, whipping memories across his skin.

  From the vantage of the lighthouse tower, Alfred looked down at a clearing in the middle of a dense forest. On a rock in the clearing sat a man who rested his head in his hands. While the cartographer continued to chatter behind him, Alfred stared at the man, wondering if what he saw were alive or, instead, a particularly skilled sculpture. The answer came when the man glanced up at the lighthouse. Sorrow-laden eyes, indisputably alive, met Alfred's own eyes for one blink before the head returned to the hands.

  Without looking back, Alfred climbed down the spiral stairs and walked away from Lichfield toward the forest. He trudged through the undergrowth and between the trees, pushing his way into the lightless woods. When darkness engulfed him he saw a sparkle of light coming from the clearing at the far side, and he made his way toward it.

  The man still sat on the rock. Alfred looked at him and felt compassion growing in his heart. He wanted to speak, to offer words of consolation or sympathy or hope, but language seemed suddenly too blunt, too barbed, too barbaric. Gently, tentatively, he set his hand on the man's neck. The skin was soft and warm. The man turned and looked at Alfred. He had a dark face with a prominent nose and small green eyes, their whites crackled red, having run out of tears.

  "I'm looking for a cartographer,” Alfred whispered.

  "My mother is a cartographer,” the man said. “Her office is in the lighthouse. Her name is Günther Lopez. She is insane, but she is a good cartographer."

  "She's not the kind of cartographer I need,” Alfred said, but he wasn't sure why he said this or how he knew it was true, and so he decided to tell a story: “I once spent some time with a civil engineer, surveying places to put new roads and buildings, but I could not make the compass work and I could not draw straight lines. He stopped talking to me and would scream when anyone said my name. He accused me of being a poet, and he said that I would ruin him."

  The man nodded. “When I was younger,” he said, “I told my mother I didn't know where to go or how to get there, and she said she would draw me a map, because she hated to see me in pain. I followed the map to the edge of the world, and when I got there, all I found was silence. I w
rote a play, because I thought that might alleviate the silence. It didn't help. When I dragged myself home, my friends stole the play and read it to each other and after they woke up they said well at least I'd learned to amuse myself."

  Alfred leaned down and kissed the man. “My name is Zachary,” the man said.

  Zachary and Alfred sat together in the woods until the sun went down and the stars came up and the sky filled with old ladies wearing jetpacks, out for an evening flight. Zachary whispered words from his play into Alfred's ear, and Alfred laughed many times, amused.

  Here is the last speech in Zachary's play:

  ZEUS: Tales from the unpublished autobiography of Zeus, god of everything, part one. Ahemmm. When I was just a wee little deity, crawling about in some ethereal nook or cranny, I found a map of the Everywhere, and I studied this map until the stars went out for the night. When light returned, the map was gone. No one could tell me where it went. I was lost, destined not so much to wander as to stumble from point to point, thing to thing, and where to where. Forever finding hosts of theres, never finding a single here. Waiting, always, for the stars to go out again, and for my map to find me, to press itself against my skin in the momentary darkness.

  By the clocks, it was tomorrow when they left the woods, and even the clearing was dark. The forest itself was so dense as to be more than dark, to be the very antithesis of sight, but Alfred and Zachary had four other senses left, and used them well to touch and hear and taste and smell their way back to Lichfield.

  "Can we go anywhere other than the lighthouse?” Alfred asked. “I'm not sure I'm up for another encounter with—.—.—."

  "My mother won't be there now,” Zachary said. “She goes home at night, because the light bothers her."

  Alfred looked up and saw a thick bolt of light swirling through the sky from the top of the lighthouse. It caught clouds and moondust in its journey from one side of the night to another, illuminating the way for the ghosts of unmoored boats potentially floating lost across the land.

  Alfred said, “Let's go there then,” and so they did.

  In the round room in the center of the light, Zachary showed Alfred map after map: maps of fertile and infertile lands, maps of entangled roads, maps of divided continents and lonely islands, maps demonstrating the movement of authoritarian medical discourse from urban centers to rural outlands. “This is her favorite,” Zachary said, pulling a small vellum map from the bookcase and unrolling it with care and respect on the glass table.

  Alfred scrutinized the map, but did not know what it showed. The outlines of areas looked like towns of some sort, with hills and rivers between some of them. But none of the words made any sense to him. “What is it all?” he asked. He pointed to words: gynecomastia, feminae barbatae, androtrichia, androglottia, gynophysia—.—.—.—

  "She said it was a map of the states of desire. Or maybe disappointment. I don't remember. I've never been able to understand it, myself, but I find it entrancing, nonetheless."

  After looking at the maps, they lay together on the wooden floor and let the light spin around them. Zachary told Alfred about his father, a linguist, and how he was certain it was his father who drove his mother mad, filling her with words she could not mime, an entire ungesturable grammar. His father died in an act of conjugation soon after Zachary was born. Alfred told Zachary about his own parents, his father who had always regretted not dying in a war, his mother who became an architect after years spent studying accounting. He spoke of his apprenticeships and of his time in the monastery and his life with the coffee pickers and in the sewer fields, and he said he had come to Lichfield to find Günther Lopez because foreigners in plastic rags had whispered it would be best for him, and so he'd run down yet another road, and arrived here at this place that seemed to him more vivid and specific than any other he'd encountered, though he could not say how or why, and the mystery of it all pleased him and helped him feel, for now, alive.

  Zachary said he had once had an older brother who was somewhat simple-minded, who got what jobs he could here and there depending on the season, now and then collecting some money from the worst sorts of labor, now and then stealing some pennies from their mother, but he seldom came home and mostly slept in barns and stables. Eventually, someone turned him over to the authorities, because someone had seen him in the clearing in the forest with a young girl, and the young girl had given him some caresses, the sort of caresses he had seen other men his age receive from girls not much older than this one, and that he himself had received when the bigger boys from town made him play the game they all called “curdled milk.” The authorities brought Zachary's brother to a judge, and the judge indicted him and then turned him over to the care of a doctor, and the doctor gave the boy to other doctors, specialists, who asked Zachary's brother many questions and then wrote up a report that was published in a well-known journal. They measured his brainpan, they studied his facial bone structure, they inspected his anatomy to find degeneracy, and they made him talk and talk about his thoughts and ideas, his inclinations, his habits, his feelings. In the end, in terms only lawyers could understand, the judge pronounced Zachary's brother not guilty, but the doctors kept him for themselves. “He is still with them,” Zachary said, “in their asylum, but we are told we cannot talk about it, that he no longer exists and never existed. I heard boys in the schoolhouse trying to tell the story, and the schoolmaster told them to watch their language and never talk about these things ever again, or they, too, would end up like my brother."

  Alfred kissed Zachary's cheek. They lay side-by-side in silence. Zachary began to unbutton Alfred's shirt, but Alfred pushed his hand away. “Not while there is light,” Alfred said.

  "Why not?"

  "My skin will repulse you,” Alfred said. “It was ruined by the lash and by the sewer fields, by every place that I have lived and every person I have known."

  Zachary looked into Alfred's eyes and smiled and kissed him, then continued to unbutton his shirt. Alfred began to object again, but stopped, and soon Zachary ran his hand gently over Alfred's chest and back, feeling the landscape of welts and scars, while Alfred sobbed. Zachary removed his own shirt, revealing smooth and perfect skin, a blank world. He pulled off his trousers and underpants, and Alfred did the same, and they lay together in the very center of the room, arms and legs entwined, breaths intermingling, skin against skin, while the lighthouse light swung around them, reaching out through the unmapped darkness to the stars.

  Just before morning, a breeze blew through the room, and all the maps on the table, and many of the maps from the bookcase, danced into the air and settled on Alfred and Zachary's bodies. The sight might have horrified Zachary's mother, who prided herself on the care and organization she devoted to her maps, but she didn't come to the office in the lighthouse until the afternoon, because in the morning she woke from a dream of Zachary's brother with the sudden knowledge of how to reach the asylum, and so that morning she walked to the other end of Lichfield Lane to a perfectly square building made from obsidian bricks, and she spoke to an army of doctors and demanded that her son be released to her, and he was. The moment she saw her son, his mother began to unwrap the plastic the doctors had bound him with. She wiped his eyes and scrubbed his face and gave him water to bring back his voice, which, after years of breathing medical dust, had all but gone away. His skin was hard as sun-baked clay, but it softened slightly beneath her touch.

  Zachary and Alfred spent the morning cleaning up the room and teasing each other, and by the time Günther Lopez arrived with Zachary's brother, the maps seemed to be unruffled and unbreezed.

  "This is Muriuki,” Günther Lopez said. “He is your brother."

  Muriuki was a short, plump man with a bald head, perfectly round eyes, and exactly the same nose as Zachary. Günther Lopez said, “I am going to teach him to make puppets. We will be a family again. I will perform as a mime and cartographer, and you and Muriuki will put on a puppet show, and we will all be happy
and world famous."

  Zachary said, “Mother, this is Alfred. He and I are moving on from here and we will never return."

  Günther Lopez said, “Well, wait till we get some puppets made. We can't leave until then."

  Zachary held Alfred's hand and led him toward the door. “Goodbye,” Zachary said to Muriuki.

  "I'm sorry we didn't get to spend more time together,” Muriuki said.

  "You're welcome to come with us if you want,” Alfred said.

  "No,” Muriuki said, “I think our mother needs me. But I'll send you postcards."

  "Where will you send the postcards to?” Zachary said.

  "The moon, of course,” Muriuki said, his eyes wide, serious, and poetic. “He'll see you, wherever you go, and he'll write my words into your dreams."

  Zachary and Alfred climbed down the spiral stairs and walked slowly through the town, letting each building inspire imaginary memories for them of where they might have first caught a glimpse of each other and where they might have first touched hands and where they might have first watched a movie together and where they might have first kissed.

  As they passed a diner in an abandoned boxcar, Zachary said to Alfred, “You're too thin!"

  Alfred said, “It's been a long time since I had anything to eat."

  "We must eat!” Zachary said, and he led Alfred into the diner. They sat in a booth with wooden seats and a marble table. A waiter dressed in a tattered tuxedo brought them menus written on fig leaves and told them the special of the day was broiled anaphora. Zachary ordered a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of coffee. Alfred ordered a garden salad and a tofu burger.

  "I've decided to become a vegetarian,” Alfred said.

  "I've been a vegetarian for a long time,” Zachary said. “I don't like to hurt animals. They know more about the world than we do, but the knowledge disappears when they die."

  "I just like being a member of minority cultures,” Alfred said.

  After they finished their food, Alfred said, “Where should we go from here?"