It’s after three a.m. when Morris gets home. He quietly slides into the apartment, not wanting to wake his father. The door to the back room is closed; his father’s asleep. In his bedroom, Morris wrestles off his boots, strips his clothes, then heads to the bathroom for a short, cool shower. After, he slips on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, laces up his tennis shoes. He’s ready to hit the street if he wants. He doesn’t want to.
He’s ready for bed.
N.J. had repeatedly told Morris to break up with Stefani as he and Mrs. Cruxo worked through the Brie.
“There’s nothing to break up,” Morris replied.
“Just tell her it was a mistake,” N.J. advised. “Tell her it was an oversight, man.”
“An oversight?” Morris said. “You make it sound like it requires a congressional investigation.”
“Basically, man,” N.J. said, “you had sex. Two fancy animals doing what animals do. An act of nature. I’d get out of the relationship before the emotions get tangled. End it before it gets messy, man.”
But it’s already tangled, messy. Everything looks the same, but some silent, hidden change has happened, a chemical reaction that passed unnoticed to the naked eye. Something has happened that Morris can’t fully comprehend.
Morris sees the photo of his mother. It stares out at him from his bureau. Picking it up, he searches for Stefani in it. Even N.J. noted the similarity. But there’s no likeness, he tells himself, studying at the photo. None at all. Stefani is nothing like his mother. Still, he turns the photo face down, fearing that, like those determined to find the image of the Virgin Mary in a snowcapped mountain, he’ll start seeing resemblances that aren’t there.
Outside on the street, a woman brays a painful laugh, like she’s been stabbed and finds it funny. The city is still alive, awake and roaming, even in the last hours of the night. As a child, Morris believed everyone followed the same schedule as him, all around the world; when he slept, the world slept. When he ate, the world ate. Now he knows different.
The faded world map spans his wall, a map he’s had since he was fifteen. He’d saved his money to buy it, ordered it via mail from Rand McNally. It was compact, orderly, and tightly creased when it arrived. The whole world folded down to fit in a pocket. Excitedly he unfolded it. The map spanned most of his floor, the longitude and latitude lines cutting black arcs from one end to the other. Seeing the map spread open, he knew he'd never be able to put it back the way it’d been.
Now, twenty years later, the map’s secured to the wall with hundreds of colored pins marking the places Morris plans to go. Morocco, Madrid, Malta. He’s got the fliers and brochures describing the places; he’s going to visit them. Italy, England, Ecuador. They’re on his list. Lisbon, Lima, Labrador. Sometime this summer, or in the fall, or this winter. Paris, St. Petersburg, Prince Edward Island.
He studies the gray pin puncturing Prince Edward Island, Canada. Why’d he mark it? He thinks and thinks, hoping to recall. Anne of Green Gables. He’d read the book. It was set there, Prince Edward Island. But why’d he marked his map? He didn’t much like the story, or the setting, or even the character Anne. So why was the pin there?
Gripping the head with his fingers, he wiggles the pin back and forth until it comes free. “I’m never going to go there,” he says, flush with awareness. His vision runs the world. He pulls the pin from Jaco, Costa Rica, a place where the waves are supposedly incredible to surf. Or so Morris has read. But Morris has never surfed, never even rode a skateboard, doesn’t have the balance for such sport. Guinea, Africa? The place sounds interesting, and the lobsters there are incredible, he’s read, but he’s allergic to shellfish and sunburns easily. Caracas? Too much crime.
The pins fall from the map, one city after another, one country then the next, leaving a small, dark hole where each pin once was. Morris doesn’t stop, can’t stop. Never going there, or there, or there, he says to himself, pulling and pulling and pulling one pin after another, until none are left.
The last pin out, he quickly steps back, frightened by what he’s done. Nothing holds the map to the wall, but it holds. Sheer force of habit; it’s been there for years, for two decades, why should it leave now? Then the reality of gravity grabs it. The upper left corner of the map softly folds down, like a bed turned down for the night. Then the middle comes away and the map flaps to the floor, a large pelt torn from a long dead animal. In its absence is a perfect rectangle where the wall’s been protected, the paint a cleaner, lighter shade. Hundreds of tiny pinholes. A star field in negative, the black holes littering the whiteness. A constellation in reverse.
A sextant, Morris thinks. It makes him think of the sailors of old, charting their path by the dark sky. If only he had a sextant, then he could plot his course.
The map lies crumpled on the floor, punctured and old. He runs his hand over the tiny holes in the wall. They’re random, scattered. His mother’s photo is face down. In thirty-five years he’s never gone anywhere. Still, he feels lost.
Chapter 13