The elevator opened into a long narrow hallway decorated with the same tiled floors, plus floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the Armitage-Racine intersection. The hallway led to two suites of offices, one on either end of the building. Taer tried the doors to both of the offices; they were locked. Taer paused in front of the huge windows and spotted Nix, who was still outside, trying to find a way into her building. Taer watched Nix with renewed warmth and sympathy. She appreciated the tenacity with which Nix tried to pry open the building’s windows. She noticed the perfect coordination of Nix’s gloves and hat. She admired Nix’s faux fur coat, even though she usually thought the coat was pretentious.
Taer felt any sense of urgency fade away. She didn’t want the exploration of the buildings to feel like a competitive game between them. She didn’t want to hold herself back from Nix anymore; she didn’t want to fight; she didn’t want Nix to sleep on the couch. Alone at the top of an office building, Taer decided to dedicate herself to Nix, to love her, and to wait for her to find a way into her building before Taer started looking around hers.
Taking the building’s silence as evidence she was alone, Taer took off her mismatched gloves, sat down in front of the window, and started writing in her journal. She began by recounting the progress of her investigation: “I don’t know if the openness of this building is the sign I have the right one, or if the locked-up-ness of Gina’s building is a better sign. Maybe there’s a janitor in here who propped open the door and will have a lot of fun kicking me out when he finds me. The building is so silent, though. I can’t believe I’m seriously about to write this, but I wish the floors were carpeted so I didn’t make so much noise walking around.” As she wrote, Taer veered off into erotic daydreaming, in which Nix lay naked, except for her fur coat, in an igloo made of warm snow. In the fantasy, Taer had her own fur coat, which was held closed by a series of small buttons. Nix crawled across the igloo’s ice floor, kneeled at Taer’s feet, and started undoing the buttons.
She glanced out the window and saw Nix pressing all of the call buttons on the panel outside of the door. A few seconds later, Nix lunged for the door, pulled it open, and went inside. Taer thought someone working on a weekend, or even Berliner, had probably buzzed Nix in. Either way, she wasn’t worried. Nix still had the gun.
With Nix safely inside, Taer searched the building, looking for traces of Berliner. All the offices on the eighth and ninth floors were bolted.
As Taer continued down the stairs to the seventh, sixth, fifth floors, her frustration mounted. The naturally anxious part of her personality took hold and she struggled to maintain a quiet, systematic exploration of the building.
Like a terrified rat in an impossible maze, she scurried from floor to floor, sometimes lingering for several minutes, yanking on the locked doors of the offices and searching the walls for hidden doors. Sometimes she only stayed on a floor for a moment before hurrying to the next. After half an hour of racing around, Taer paused to catch her breath and meditate on her failure. She walked glumly down the stairs, dragging her hand along the dirty railing until it was smudged with black grime.
Taer didn’t realize it until she had reached street level, but the staircase she was walking down was built strangely. From the second to the tenth floors, the stairwell functioned normally, with concrete stairs connecting each level and plaster doors leading to each level’s foyer. However, at the street level, the stairwell didn’t have a door. The concrete wall continued, unbroken. There was no way to enter the building’s lobby through the stairwell. Also, the staircase didn’t stop descending when it hit the first floor. Although the elevator didn’t have a “B” button, the stairs descended into a basement level. Taer hadn’t considered a basement, even though most buildings in Chicago have one; Chicago is tornado country, and basements are where people hide from them.
As soon as Taer reached the bottom of the staircase, she knew she had found something. The door to exit the stairwell was abnormal; instead of wood and plaster, it was made of heavy steel and required a code for entry. Against the wall, there was a small keypad. She considered her obstacle for a few moments, then pulled out Berliner’s sketchpad and opened it to the page with the strange series of numbers. She punched “1142015914520205” into the keypad and, with a lurch, the door unlocked itself.
Taer stepped into a long, dim hallway. She paused, taking a moment to prop the door open with her coat, frightened she’d be trapped inside. Then she took a few tentative steps forward, cursing as a floorboard creaked under her foot. The strange basement hallway had wooden floors.
The hallway was lined with white wooden doors, all of them reminiscent of the front door of a suburban house. Between each door hung a map, sixteen in all. At the very end of the hallway, opposite the code-locked steel door, was a final wooden door, the same as the others but painted red. Taer inched toward the red door. She looked at the maps, each of them illuminated with their own small lamp, the only source of light in the hallway. Although Taer saw the similarities in the maps, she didn’t know that the type of map had a name; they were called Edge of the World maps. Popular from the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s, famous mapmakers drew Edge of the World maps as decorative alternatives to navigational cartographic maps. Their popularity arose with the excitement surrounding the news of the discovery of New Worlds. They were made to entertain while they educated, although the maps taught moral rather than scientific lessons.‡
On the left side of Edge of the World maps, the artist/ cartographer drew all the known continents, rendered with as accurate detail as possible. While it could be lovely, the left side of the map was perfunctory. Artists who didn’t want to take the time to draw the continents could buy stencils or just copy another person’s map. On the right side of the map, where all the action is, the water suddenly plummets over the edge of a flat earth, a giant waterfall into nothingness, the edge of the world. The real artistry of the maps was in the middle, near the edge of the falls. Guarding the edge of the world, each cartographer depicted a sea monster, or whatever creature was en vogue when the map was drawn: gluttonous whales, preening sirens, giant snakes, and krakens drawn as large as Africa. Occasionally, the cartographers would create their own monsters and give them names, like Ziphius or Steipereidur.§
Sometimes, the drawings showed the sea creatures crushing ships that dared to sail too close to the edge. In one of the maps that lined the hallway below the Racine building, a kraken held ten men in a single tentacle, crushing the life out of them. One particularly inventive mapmaker, Gérard Fournival, the “prodigal son of cartography,” drew two sailors cooking their dinner on the back of long-toothed whale so large they mistook it for an island. Fournival only colored the surface of the sea, so the map’s viewers could see the whale’s submerged tail covered in spikes. The whale’s similarly submerged head twisted as it looked over its monstrous shoulder with unveiled fury. The caption under that drawing, translated from Italian, reads: “In the moments before they realized their terrible mistake.”ǁ Ten of the maps Taer saw in the hallway were originals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seven at the end of the hallway, near the red door, were colored screen prints signed ANTOINETTE MONSON.