The City Under the Skin

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Book: The City Under the Skin Read Online Free PDF
Author: Geoff Nicholson
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 he’d bought the store on a whim, when he’d seen how desperate the previous owner was and how much he’d lowered the asking price. The deal included the premises, the stock, and Zak, the store’s 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 area’s gentrification would peak, then he’d sell up and make a killing. Exactly where this would leave Zak had never been discussed, but the chances were that he’d 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 wasn’t remotely collectible or important—mostly things they’d 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 There were boxes of out-of-date road maps, a job lot of school atlases, a few dozen cheap and cheerful illuminated globes.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 store’s 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 he’d ever had, probably the best he could hope for. He wasn’t enjoying precisely the life or career he’d imagined for himself, but then he’d 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 wasn’t any kind of academic; his interests were way too eccentric and personal for that—Leon Battista Alberti, eighteenth-century “dissected maps,” the debates surrounding “information primitives.” He wasn’t 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 stores—if 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 woman’s 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
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