The Cartographers


 
 
 
 
 
 
 This story is about life in all its confusion, and how it feels to be both exhausted and exhilarated by its relentless pace. It grapples with suicidal ideation and recklessness as a form of self-harm. Please read with care.
 
 
 Dedication
 For my parents and grandparents
 
 
 Epigraph
 There is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little.
 —SØREN KIERKEGAARD,
 Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 
 If You Give a Rat a Coffee
 The Bad Place
 Strangers and Friends
 The Train of Theseus
 Untitled Document
 Hell and High Water
 Word Games
 Mind the Gap
 Animals
 The Infinite Q
 In the Black-and-White Room
 Waking Life
 The Peculiar Agony of Containing Multitudes
 The Gutter
 Purgatory
 Judgment Day
 Ariadne’s Scarf
 Epilogue
 
 About the Author
 Books by Amy Zhang
 Back Ad
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 If You Give a Rat a Coffee
 On the subway, I worried I was already dead. Everything about New York City transit felt like the afterlife—not hell but some kind of middle place, where all the trains ran late or stalled between stations. I had only been living in the city for a month, but for thirty days straight I saw things on the subway that made me dizzy with vertigo: men in loose boots pole dancing in crowded cars, dogs dressed in twenty-gallon grocery bags, pigeons that boarded without paying the fare. No one looked me in the face, and every rat on the platform knew its way better than I did.
 The feeling was worse late at night and in unfamiliar stations. Now, alone, higher up in Manhattan than I’d ever been before, I knew for certain I was dead. It was well past midnight. I was alone because my roommates had gone home to hook up with each other. Or so I had heard—neither had bothered to tell me they were leaving. I was only uptown because my roommate Georgie, the occasional comedian, had scored a gig at a decrepit bar and dragged us with her for moral support. But the show ended without Georgie ever taking the stage. I searched the bar for half an hour before another comedian told me Georgie had gotten so jittery that Tashya, my other roommate, had to make out with her in the bathroom until the two of them disappeared into the night. It didn’t surprise me, exactly. The sexual tension between them had been thick enough to cut with a plastic knife.
 There was no telling when the next train would come. The electronic display was down. It was a shabby station, and most of the light bulbs were broken, which made everything barely dimensional. There was no one else on the platform. I looked down to the tracks and saw a rat dragging a cup of coffee across the third rail. Though the rat should have been thoroughly electrocuted, it bore on stubbornly. I thought, That’s it, I’ve died. Both the rat and I were dead. I felt full of despair, to be infinite in the subway.
 “Hey. Hey!”
 I jumped. Then I looked up and saw a boy across the tracks, on the uptown platform. He was outrageously tall and waving both his arms.
 “Hey!” he called again. “The trains are down.”
 I blinked. What little light there was refracted strangely off the grimy surfaces. Waving as he was, the boy looked exactly like a wind turbine. It was so surreal.
 “What?” My voice was raspy. For sure I was dead.
 “The trains!” he bellowed, like he was several hundred yards away instead of maybe fifty. Then he held up a finger—wait—and ran back through the turnstiles, then disappeared up the stairs. A minute later I heard footsteps thundering back down, and then he was jumping the turnstile on my side of the station. My stomach dropped to my feet.
 “The trains,” he said. He wasn’t out of breath at all. “They’re not running.”
 He was much taller now that he was close, looming over me. There was a crackling sound from the tracks. I looked down to see the rat struggling to pull the coffee cup through a crevice.
 “I heard you,” I said. “I meant, like . . . what?”
 “No trains,” he insisted. “The power’s down. Look.” He pointed to the train display, as if it were normally a reliable source of information. “The whole city’s blacked out. You don’t know? How long have you been waiting here? Haven’t you seen the sky?”
 Nothing he said made any sense. The sky? I had no idea how long I’d been waiting—somewhere between five and forty-five minutes. My sense of time was abysmal even under normal circumstances.
 “You have to come see,” he said, extending a hand. I didn’t move. His hand hung there between us, preposterously larger than mine. I wasn’t going to follow him anywhere, this stranger with his strings of words that meant nothing at all. I glanced again at the display.
 He let his hand drop. He scratched the back of his head. “Okay, I get it, I’m coming off a bit strong, huh? I’m not a creep, I swear.”
 “You should get that tattooed,” I said. “The creep motto.”
 He laughed. His laugh surprised me: unabashed and echoing across the empty station, as though I were not a stranger but a friend.
 “I guess that’s true,” he said. The laugh was still on his face. I gathered my courage and looked directly at him for the first time, though only for a second, so that I got a smattering of impressions rather than a good look: strong eyebrows and high cheekbones and a wide forehead, planar and strange. His nose was crooked, but his teeth were very straight. He was wearing a black windbreaker that was too big, even on him.
 “Look,” he said, “my name’s Constantine Brave.”
 “No way,” I blurted.