transformed by population shifts, property development, and marginal gentrification. Neighboring businesses included an outsider-art gallery, a seller of French horns, a designer of one-off wedding dresses. None of these enterprises were conspicuously thriving, and neither was Utopiates.
For the time being, that was okay with Ray McKinley, who regularly made it clear to Zak that the store was the most minor and most trivial of his many, many business ventures. He had a mild enthusiasm for maps and antiques, so heâd bought the store on a whim, when heâd seen how desperate the previous owner was and how much heâd lowered the asking price. The deal included the premises, the stock, and Zak, the storeâs single, poorly paid employee; though Zak had no idea how long the current arrangement would last. For now the store remained open, but Ray McKinley insisted the value was in the site not the business. Before long the areaâs gentrification would peak, then heâd sell up and make a killing. Exactly where this would leave Zak had never been discussed, but the chances were that heâd be left jobless, and homeless too.
Zak lived above the store, in a small apartment made smaller by the excess stock kept there. This was the stuff that wasnât remotely collectible or importantâmostly things theyâd got stuck with while acquiring genuinely desirable items. There were boxes of out-of-date road maps, a job lot of school atlases, a few dozen cheap and cheerful illuminated globes. Zak made the best of living with the storeâs leftovers.
Having to find another job and another apartment would hardly be a novel experience for him, but he was tired of it, and in many ways this was the best job heâd ever had, probably the best he could hope for. He wasnât enjoying precisely the life or career heâd imagined for himself, but then heâd never been overburdened with ambition or specific goals. His education had been a patchwork of only marginally related courses: anthropology, nineteenth-century history, avant-garde film, museum studies, archival management, and, of course, cartography in various forms, including historical, critical, planetary, and radical.
It was hard to see what this had, or could have, prepared him for. Despite a certain scholarly manner, he wasnât any kind of academic; his interests were way too eccentric and personal for thatâLeon Battista Alberti, eighteenth-century âdissected maps,â the debates surrounding âinformation primitives.â He wasnât going to study for a Ph.D. or write a book, and he was certainly never going to teach. And although there were days when he imagined himself as curator or custodian of some magnificent, highly specialized, and possibly clandestine map collection, he also realized this was pure fantasy. Most days he was content to think of himself as a map nerd, and map nerds ended up working in map storesâif they were lucky.
Now he sat at his desk and stared out the window into the street, his gaze as idle as a gaze ever gets, and when he saw what looked like a bundle of rags moving along the sidewalk, he needed a moment to realize what he was looking at. Naturally he knew the bundle wasnât moving under its own steam, that there must be somebody inside it, crawling along. There was still a small population of tattered street people in the area, but that didnât seem to be quite what he was looking at here. For one thing, these rags had obviously started out as fine fabrics, perhaps as a cape or velvet curtains. They were dirty and matted now, but they still had an air of ruined luxury.
The bundle came to a halt, was still for a moment, and then began to rise, as the person inside stood up. A head emerged, a womanâs head, the face young but not youthful, drawn, with long hair the color of wet newspaper: she might have been beautiful once, but not recently. Her eyes looked up at the
James Dobson, Kurt Bruner