“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?