Dan Turkel

Mapping Mr. Quist

I’m making something real. He looked down at his paper. Had he been staring at it for the entire morning or had he just woken from a dream and, on opening his eyes, found himself newly transfixed?

Now, looking over his ever-expanding canvas of taped together printer paper, he took it in all over again, inhaling it and letting it course through his veins: the streets, avenues, alleys. The fields, rivers, ponds. The central route through it all: a developing curve through the rough grid of the pre-city. The desk covered with mechanical pencils, lead, block erasers, French curves, rulers, t-squares, compasses, and protractors. The floor around him strewn with hardcover tomes of encyclopedias, satellite photos, atlases, prints of the bloated Robinson and the mangled Goode homolosine, road maps, globes of different sizes, uranographic charts. Histories: the world, America, New York, Manhattan. All of this tossed about as if by a child searching for that one hidden toy. The aging Robert Quist had not been able to find anything of use to him in the jetsam of objects external to his own creation. It was all within him: the details, the plan, the history, and the map. 

Quist slouched in his cushy, old desk chair. He closed his heavy eyelids and felt his own face with his hands: bags under eyes, new crows-feet (or had they been there before?), lips chapped. The only aspect of his physiognomy not marred by the abuse of his recent constant labor and unstable sleeping routine was an unnameable glint of the eye that seemed to suggest a still-keen grasp on inexpressible meaning. 

The walls of his study throbbed but one could hear the drop of a tack in his Morningside studio. 

Lately his work was beginning to invade his every waking thought and consume his every minute. Meals brought noiselessly by his loving and dedicated wife, Mrs. Cathy Quist, née Ryder. Three slices of ham, each folded once, two slices of provolone, interleaved, on rye with the crusts cut off, cut diagonally. 

It had been perfectly reasonable to take a sabbatical from his position as a history professor at Columbia University for a personal project and when he pitched it to the department they seemed equally enthused.

“A map?” 

“A map,” Quist was glowing, “of Old New York. Or, rather, just Manhattan.”

The head of the department, white-haired, bespectacled and respectable but anonymous in appearance, bit his lip before he spoke.

“Exactly what time period are you trying to map? And what features do you want to highlight? Do you have any experience in cartography and will you have any undergraduate or graduate assistance?”

The room was a bit too warm and humid, unseasonably so, and a bead of sweat tickled his temple, meandering at an inch an hour down the wrinkle of his forehead—he wiped it away with a handkerchief. He had foreseen this line of questioning and nevertheless found some difficulty in answering the interrogative barrage. 

“Firstly, I will be pursuing this project alone. Previous assisted research efforts have shown me that I...” he trailed off. 

A face half-smirked. A mouth swallowed loudly. Eyes blinked.

“—That I work best independently. And as for the nature of the map and my experience, well, it’s just that. The nature of the map is such that my lack of experience should not present a problem.”

“And how, may I ask, is that?” The director flashed a toothy smile, though his teeth should dissuade him from further such smiles. Regardless, his question lingered in the air for a moment and Quist glanced around the room, person to person, aged face to face, bored expression to bored expression.

“I’ve come across, through channels I cannot currently reveal, a source never-before assessed for cartographic purposes...” Simultaneously studying his newfound trove of data and learning cartography, he explained, he would make a chronological atlas of the expansion of New York city from its birth until, say, 1850. 

The lies tasted hot and awkward in his mouth. However, Quist continued on lying to his colleagues, to his wife. Now, three seasons later, on the floor near his desk was a pile of envelopes with Columbia return addresses. His phone’s red light blink-blink-blinked that he had an untold quantity of voicemail. 

Quist picked up an unopened Columbia envelope and used it to fan away eraser shavings from The Map before tossing the envelope aside again. He scrutinized The Map from head to toe. Guitar-string avenues curved in nested arcs. Broadway’s gash warped in the north. Something was developing though he could not yet say what. Downtown oddly, impossibly barren. Unfinished or perhaps destined to sparsity. Quist closed his eyes and rubbed them through his eyelids. 

The image was dim. In waking hours, the images always appeared dim. Revelations only came in his dreams. If only he could explain to the Columbia history department the logic through which his island was developing from the island behind his own eyes. Or rather it was not developing at all. No, the consistency was too profound. He was not developing it, he was discovering it. Quist was sure of the map’s legitimacy, authenticity (though authentic to what, when?), because the image in its moments of greatest lucidity unfolded with profound illumination. Every block crisp cut into the urban wilderness. Every building erected clearly out from the realm of foot-step dirt, chewing-gum spit. 

He is making something real. 

He was startled out his thoughts when the grandfather clock in the hall, a gift from Cathy’s father, loudly chimed three in the morning. As his heart restored its resting rate, he resumed his work and began to sketch furiously. 

Cathy heard the ding, ding, dingof the clock in the hallway as she stared up at the ceiling from their bed, in the dark.

He’s making me crazy. The ceiling fan spun, whoosh, whoosh, and when she closed her eyes the colors and shapes beneath her eyelids still spun as if by inertia.

Cathy had thought that perhaps a night out could return a sense of normalcy to her husband. He had been unwilling at first but had yielded to the rising of her voice. She brought him to an Italian restaurant. 

“So how is your work going?” she asked.

He sipped his glass of water and the ice left a moisture-mustache which he patted off with a handkerchief. 

“It’s coming along.”

“Tell me about it. I want to hear about it.”

“Well,” a breath, “I realized that the copy I’m working on just does not convey all the information that I’ve come across. I need to start over on a new version using different colored pens.” He looked nervous, or perhaps excited. “That is, multiple colors for indicating different features.” She could have sworn she saw his lip tremble or quiver but he bit it for a moment and upon release it was still.

“Starting over? But you’re almost done! What do you want to show with colors? Can’t you just color over the current one?”

“I’m making it perfect. It will show which tribes are where and what’s what.” He let out a long but weak smoker’s exhale.

“Tribes?” She folded her menu. “Perfect, honey. I know.”

“And I wasn’t almost done.” He folded his.

He was making her crazy. Or perhaps making himself crazy. She closed her eyes for a moment imperceptible—a blink, but infinite. Scientists had once thought that perhaps dreams only lasted a fraction of a second. A lightning flash of character, scenery, intrigue. A cacophony of conflict and dialogue. Uninterpretable chaos only sorted into some semblance of form upon waking when all the feelings and words blended into a surreal narrative, confabulated ad hoc during first recollection.

In this same way, a memory reappeared to Cathy Quist, its entirety compressed into an instant. First just his eyes, blue-gray towards the pupil blending to gunmetal near the egg-white sclera. Then what he had said, followed by the scenery, his face, the sweaty boy-dorm smell. He was sitting at a type-writer, working on his thesis. The monospaced type came to mind’s eye and then the title, “The Consequences of the Grid: Street Layout as Social Plan.” The nerdy baggy pants. Her nerdy pencil skirt, appropriate in high school and suddenly so conservative in college, though she could not bear to part with it, even now, senior year. A thunderstorm outside the window: he, typing furiously, each violent carriage return a startling ding and she, reading “The Waste Land” in his bed; she beckoning come here to the coarse, unwashed sheets, then—a voice? 

“Ma’am, may I interest you in a wine?”

The waitress looked at her concerned or impatient. Cathy had been lost in her thoughts again.

“Yes please, what do you have?”

His project had required a large amount of adjustment on her part. She had wanted to assist him, help him research, do whatever she could to be a part of the endeavor in which he had lost himself so thoroughly. In response to her attempts to aid him, he was hostile, irritable, and secretive. She resigned herself not to clipping paragraphs from textbooks and aiding with citations but to cooking for him, cleaning for him. So she folded the ham. So she cut the crusts. The banality of the domestic perhaps slightly offset by the sense of nurturing she began to develop for her husband—he had become, with respect to needs, the child he had never given her. There had never been the time. After his dissertation. After he got settled teaching. After. Now when? Her child, the one she had asked for, had been replaced with students for 34 years before retiring the summer before last. Now her child husband had ungraduated school, come home to her.

But there came a point when the magnitude of Cathy’s curiosity overtook her. Quist had been clear: his documents were private until they were finished; “A composer does not perform his symphony-in-progress,” and she, mumbling: “Well, he might for his wife...” 

He was lying face down on the couch at two in the morning on a Monday night when she decided to bite the bullet. He could plausibly wake up any minute as he had been prone to seemingly random naps bookending inordinately long waking hours, but she took the risk, the only choice she felt she had left. What could be driving him to distraction, to madness, that he could be transformed from her husband to an overworked shell of a man slaving Sisyphean, starting again, tracing over, coloring, plotting, shading? Perhaps if it was only his work that he had been concealing then she could have stayed on her side of the walls and moats he had built to keep her out, but there was something inside of him that he was guarding just as heavily. His eyes glazed over, impenetrable to her own pleading pair hid parts of him she knew were there. So she stormed his castle, seeking something vague and unknown and yet anticipating only the worst. She let herself into the study: 

It was a map of New York, that much he had been honest about, but from any temporal point in reality? No. She had pulled it out of the tied portfolio, one of a dozen and growing, maybe a weeks-old draft, maybe the newest one. Something was wrong. It was Manhattan, but what were the concentric arcs? What did the shades of gray signify? A note in the corner said “RETRACE 14B / ALLIANCE BORDERS FUZZY / CROP INDICATORS NEAR-FINAL.” Features she half-recognized were all slightly off. Everything seemed distorted, otherworldly. The city seemed skewed and bent, inverted and wrong. The place she had lived her whole life was alien, unthinkably faraway-wrong in the same way that the man she had loved since her sophomore year of college, known since two years after that, had turned into this distorted copy of himself. 

She grew twitchy and jumpy. It was as if she were in the house of a stranger whose next move she could only hope to predict. She rushed the map back into its place, retied the portfolio as it had been, and walked briskly into the kitchen. 

En route she caught a glimpse of her husband, still asleep. He looked mortal, or was it fatal? A taxidermied replica of the man for whom she had fallen so cripplingly in love. She used to stare into his eyes and feel as if she could fall into them and lately they seemed so flat, painted onto pale pink marbles sunken into his face and instead of falling into them, she was landing right on their hard surface and bouncing back, hurt.

And what was he doing? Her history sense was not up to par with her husband’s but anyone could tell you that there was no period of time where the island of Manhattan was called “UNKNOWN(?) KINGDOM,” or had some sort of drugged spider’s web for a grid and a big black circle where the radii converged with a question mark in white. There was no era that she knew of where from the site of the would-be Holland Tunnel to that of the would-be Williamsburg Bridge there were not several bridges but a dozen or so docks jutting off interspersed with chinampa-style floating bucolic mazes (labyrinthiform aquaponics, to further wax poetic). 

Cathy sat down at the kitchen table and poured a glass of wine. A radio alarm clock sounded from the room where her husband slept and she jumped in her seat at the sound of it. She took a gulp of wine.

At once, his eyes and ears had turned on and he saw the ceiling fan spinning above and heard “...major traffic on the Tappan Zee, expecting delays, but nonetheless a bee-eau-tiful day...” before he found himself turning off the alarm without so much as turning to look at it. He had slept like a baby. He thought of Cathy. He would make her smile today and she would be proud at what he had accomplished. She would understand why he had been so dedicated.

Quist walked to his study and up to the desk. He gathered 1) a months-old draft, covered in eraser marks, with nearly everything scribbled over in marker, 2) a quick draft from yesterday morning drawn mainly in magic marker showed a curvilinear lattice of a number of concentric arcs divided evenly by long straight radii carefully drawn out with a few dots on it, sections of the lattice shaded elegantly with pastel highlighter in blobs, the whole thing on a large transparency with the desk’s wood grain showing through, 3) a scattered stack of one of his earliest maps he had made, printed in different sizes with different croppings. For the first time in months, he could see through the disarray surrounding him and he knew exactly what he had to do.

Quist rifled through the stack of scaled maps, comparing them to the lattice on the transparency, and carefully stacked a number of them in a new pile until he found one that, without even touching the lattice to it, pleased him immediately. He gently set it aside and walked to the kitchen where Cathy was sitting, eyes heavy but not for long. He filled a tall glass with ice and water from the tap and let the bubbles settle before he brought it to his mouth. Remembering a joke his father had once told him, he smiled and sat down across from his beloved. My parents are in the iron and steel business. My mother irons while my father steals! The blinds were half drawn and the sun was bright on his dress shirt but cut into diagonal slices across his face. He squinted at her, light in one eye.

“Robert.” Cathy could not remember the last time she felt undignified in front of her husband. She wore a camisole and a pair of athletic shorts bought for a new year’s resolution, eye makeup smudged on cheek, unbrushed teeth. Her husband stood in a wrinkled dress shirt and creased dress pants, covered in eraser shavings but exuding pride. She blinked. “Robert, what’s going on?”

“Cathy, I slept well.” He looked as if he might either burst into tears of sadness or cries of hilarity at any moment, so foreign was his blinding expression of serenity to Cathy’s watering eyes.

“Well I can imag—” She cut herself off upon seeing a profound pain strike his face at what she had not realized was an interruption. She stared at his eyes for a moment. Had they always looked this alive? Either afraid or crazed or lucid for the first time in so long. He smiled again.

“Last night I had the most revelatory dream,” He eyed her inquisitively as if unsure as to why she was not smiling back, so she did so halfheartedly. “My work is finished, or, I should say, had been done all along. I saw everything and I can finally see it now in waking.”

“What do you mean? Have you finished it?” Her heart was racing. That signifier “it” so far removed from any object she could place...

He gestured to her and rose wordlessly, guiding her into the study. He turned around and met her eyes, she followed.

“Look,” he gestured towards the desk at his waist. Cathy walked over slowly. Quist lifted the transparency and placed it on the map he had left out, rotated it for a second and it seemed to suddenly snap into place.

She watched as he beamed with intensity. Months of his “work” had come to this and it was, apparently, perfect. This cartography highlighted in segments by the transparency, refined day after day from unknown inspiration, fit perfectly with the borders that flown equally mysteriously from the aether to his hand to the paper. The concentric arcs gently caressed the street plan, nudging streets into their round edges. The radii followed natural geography to meet at the point, former question-mark, which had been so hard to pinpoint. The focal point whose indeterminable locale had led to countless resketches, countless tear-ups. The radii converged in that northwest corner, surrounded by the densest cartographic activity. The radii converged towards their Morningside Heights apartment. Even she could see beauty in his results and yet neither reason nor...meaning.

“It was here all along.” Now his eyes were watering. “I found it. I’ve been here all along. At the center. A king maybe!”

Cathy’s hands were shaking, but he was vibrating. Months of obsession, tragedy for her, had come to this. A madman’s paint-by-numbers map of never-eth century Manhattan. A deluded man’s image of his own surroundings, universe, radiating around him in concentric curves. The city, kingdom, mapped out was orbital, nested, had a quality of motility, flow, despite its fixture on the page. Colors seemed to point to nothing at all, fitting only roughly the geographic features. She looked up at her husband, her stranger.

“Robert,” she looked to him and he filled her pregnant pause with an inquisitive smile as if to plead for her to continue, “I don’t understand.”

He looked at her, mouth actively fighting the grin that seemed to be melting off of his face. He looked so old, skin like the worn edges of the just-as-old books around the room. His eyes vibrated with excitement, fear. A tear fell down her face and her mind raced: my fault, missed the signs for how long?, what did I do wrong?, who is this?His mouth shifted rapidly, imperceptibly, between tragic smile and ecstatic horror. His eyes flamed. 

“Cathy,” he pleaded as he reached for Cathy’s hand. Her bottom lip was trembling and she withdrew as he approached. He had expected her to be there for him, her hand there for his, and as she pulled back he fell on the ground landing on his knees and a hand. He looked up like a struck dog.

“Cathy, don’t you see?” He gestured at the desk. “Don’t you see?”

“Robert, please, calm down,” her voice cracking into near-scream. All this time, struggle—the room was spinning around her. He was crawling towards her, put a hand on her bare foot and she flinched at this animal in her home, in her world.

“Cathy,” he cried with such horror at her reactions. He groveled at her feet, face up, terrified mirth on his face. With the hand not grabbing his wife’s ankle, he grabbed the map from the desk, the transparency sliding off and drifting to the floor, his hand gripped in a fist around its edge, crumpling a tectonic fissure through the barren downtown. “It’s always been me,”—voice rising—”I’ve always been there, here,”—with anger or profound sadness—“and you, we’ve been here the whole time!” He released her ankle as he threw his pointer finger to the spot on the map, the black circle at the center of the map’s radial formations, where in reality lay their home. Anger now. “It’s me! It’s always been me!”

She screamed out loud, with her eyes wide open staring at the thing at her feet. He closed his eyes and looked at peace, far away. She began to lose her breath but could not stop herself from shrieking again and again.

Tuning out a bothersome noise, Quist had never been happier. He would call the university tomorrow. They would love his work. He could hardly wait to present it. Finally, he could take a well-deserved break. Cathy probably missed that relaxed, old side of him, not that he had been overly absorbed in his work. Frankly, it seemed that she was the one who could use a little rest and relaxation—she was starting to grow quite restless.