The Unmapping

by Denise S. Robbins

Arjun finds the building easily. Esme has complained about its ugliness, saying it looks like a concrete beehive. Arjun wouldn’t call it a beehive, more of a termite mound, with all those balconies dotting a mass of concrete, which he wouldn’t call ugly unless he had a particular fear of termites, but for him it’s the fact that the building is so huge, so very tall, that makes it look unnatural. After a building reaches a certain height, there are no reference points for measuring it. Nothing to compare it to. It would not be possible for Arjun to know that, for instance, it is about half as tall as the Empire State Building, or the fact that it’s the height of twenty tall tamarind trees stacked atop each other, like the ones outside his grandfather’s apartment. Tall is tall and the top is in the sky. It’s the only skyscraper in a three-block radius.

Inside everything is all shiny metal, including the empty concierge desk, including the floors, which are covered by a lemon-yellow carpet. So very different from the concrete exterior. He feels like he stepped from one planet to another, from the desert to outer space.

So Arjun was alone with his father in the city, living in increasingly large and tasteless apartments in buildings owned by his father, never staying put in one neighborhood long enough for him to get to know anyone.

She misses the quiet of the woods behind her father’s house. Not the muffled half quiet of her apartment building, where you can hear each neighbor cook and fight and watch their shows, but something larger, more expansive. Certainly nothing like the office at the Emergency Management Department, where a constant drumbeat of anxiety runs through everything. She loves working there, yes, the feeling of her brain at top gear, moving quickly and subconsciously while she monitors five videos and at least two text feeds, while responding to the messages that come in from her boss at the same time. She works so fast that if she stops to really think about it, she gets paralyzed.

When her mother died, there was no reason, and no matter how many times she asked why, why, why, there was no answer other than that, sometimes, there is no reason. Sometimes things just happen. And she spent her life trying to prove this wrong, to study cause and effect, to focus on things that made sense, and anytime something didn’t, she would move on. Why bother if there is no why? Why did Marcus choose her? Don’t ask the question. Why would he ever leave? He wouldn’t. Moving on. Why did she work at a job that made her wake up at ungodly hours in the morning? Why, indeed. It’s easy enough to come up with answers and repeat them until you believe.

It’s not that she didn’t believe her work was important. It’s that she believed it was too important. That it was the only thing that mattered, because she didn’t think to question it. If you see a fire, put it out. But how many fires do you have to put out before you stop to look around and see the man pouring gas on the tinder?

maintenance vs. revolution

The night is cool on her tiny balcony and the beer tastes better than she expected. She peers at the can. It’s an IPA, which she thought she hated, but the can says wet hops and maybe that’s the difference. The air feels wobbly. A gentle wind makes the building sway. Or maybe it’s Esme swaying, with her beer half drunk already. She closes her eyes and feels her body tilt back and forth. She breathes. She pulses. Her body readjusts itself to the gentle sways of balance. Something is always readjusting, re-finding the center. Life is churning. The river is flowing. Her thirst is increasing with every sip. She finishes the beer and goes in for another.

some of the best years of my life were in DC. It felt like everybody moved there because they wanted to change the world in some way. Not just respond to it.”

“How far exactly has the building moved each day?” “Half a block east. Just about.” “So in one more day, that would bring us to the center of the East River.” “It doesn’t work like that. Everything tends to map to where it fits. Piers map onto piers. Sidewalks to sidewalks. Foundations to foundations. So like I said, it’ll bring us to Brooklyn. That is, if this pattern holds. I’m sure it’s just random. Everything is random! There’s no meaning to anything!”

Franz tells the newsman that he hated growing up here. He hated that he was expected to be grateful for the world he’d inherited⁠—along with the fact that he was discouraged from making any changes or any decisions whatsoever. “They told me it was a utopia,” he says. “It was my father’s dream and he made it a reality. I remember being disconcerted when they said that. My father’s dream. This was all supposed to be my father’s vision. Not mine. Not anyone else’s. And yet they all acted like it was the most natural thing. To live in someone else’s dream. But that’s the problem with dreams. Only the dream’s dreamer can truly understand it.

My father’s dream. He loved trees, nature, the simplicities of life. Let’s start with simplicity. Management took that word to mean that everything should be the same, so they built every house the same and hired every worker to be the same. You can kind of understand their logic. The opposite of simplicity is complexity. The opposite of complexity is homogeneity. But in this case, a does not equal c. I don’t believe sameness is what my father wanted. The woods are the opposite of homogeneous.

“The point is, there is no sameness in nature. And everything they’ve been doing has taken us down the wrong path from the beginning. Such sameness can make a man go mad. It’s no wonder they broke reality.”

“It’s the TruTrees. You know how they’re made? They’re made out of actual wood pulp. And oil resin and a whole lot of other stuff, chemicals that I can’t pronounce, but I do know the jury’s still out on whether they cause cancer. But that’s beside the point. They’re made out of real trees! I can’t tell you how I’ve complained about this. The whole point is to preserve trees. Not cut them down and put them in a blender with cancer-causing chemicals! But Management says everything they produce takes materials, and the TruTrees are still immortal, therefore in line with my father’s vision of reducing clear-cutting. ‘Immortal.’ You hear that? Immortal! They think they’re gods. The more we try to simulate nature, to print it in a factory, the further away we get.” Franz stops walking, crouches down, and picks up a handful of soil, uncovering a warren of worms. “To immortalize a tree is to blaspheme it. That’s what it is. I don’t believe in God but I do believe in Nature, like my father, and we’ve blasphemed. We created something we shouldn’t have. Something that defies the laws of nature. And now here we are. One thing leads to another. Nature’s laws have been broken. We created something terrible, and now there’s chaos in every major city in America. Soon, the world.”

It’s where I recognized what I already knew.” “What did you already know?” “That reality is a dream, and at the same time, your dreams spill over into reality.

I finally learned to love this city before I realized anything was wrong. You have to really look at a place, for a long time, to see it clear.” “I guess.” “I know the opposite is also true. I’m guessing it’s that way with you. You loved this place so hard you turned blind.”

The problem is they are up so very high. Standing on that balcony earlier with Esme, he had imagined himself falling into the river, over and over, and each time he imagined it, it became more real, until it felt almost like an inevitability, something he should just get over with so he wouldn’t keep torturing himself⁠—no. Even now, while he’s safely sprawled on the couch, gripping its fabric, he feels as if he’s barely hanging on.

The city is a map before him, a detailed painting on a thin piece of paper, and this paper is now growing larger, but he is not falling; the world is coming to him. The world is flat and it is coming. This city, or this paper that looks like a city, rising up to greet him, as if he were falling, but he’s not; he’s in the air perfectly still, stapled to the sky, as the buildings rush up at him. But he’s not scared; it’s just a photograph, one piece of glossy paper rising up to the clouds. A rough wind comes and bends the photograph; he can see its edges, its flatness, how it moves and swirls. The wind grows harder now, in all directions, and the photograph bends and rips in two. It rips again and again until the photograph is a million different photos, each building in the city on its own piece of paper that shudders and swirls with the others like fake snow in a snow globe. The pieces begin to fall, one by one. When they land, it is quiet. He watches where they go.

“It’s just like you said. The building has a trajectory. Remember?” He lifts up the notepad that he found on Esme’s side table with the GPS coordinates of Gleamwood Gardens. “You found out it’s been moving a half block eastward every day. The next stop is the East River. We have to evacuate. We have to leave now.” “No,” she murmurs. “It doesn’t work like that . . .” She pulls the blanket back over her head. “Who are you to say how things work? We are in a world where impossible things are happening. Wake up and let’s go.”

“Shit.” She puts the notepad down on her lap. “There are about two thousand people in this building. We couldn’t evacuate everyone ourselves. We’d need to call into the department and convince them. Who’s in charge right now? Not Commissioner Tully . . . Not important. Whoever it is would need to send a mass text to evacuate everyone in this building, but it would be imprecise, it might reach our neighboring buildings . . . so we’d have to specify Gleamwood Gardens. Only people from Gleamwood Gardens need to evacuate. But people would sleep through their texts. We’d need to run through the hallways and wake people up. Bang on every door and scream, what? What could we say?

Sending a mass text to get people to evacuate in the middle of the night because their building may turn to rubble? I can only imagine!

We’d have to carry people out of their beds. Tell them to stop packing all their framed photographs. They can bring their pets, though. How will we fit all these cats in an elevator? They’d get loose and run through the halls. They’d start fighting. We have to evacuate and you’re asking me to break up a catfight?”

“You have one minute to grab everything you can, and then leave the rest behind. Everything else will become rubble. The photographs, the coffee mugs, the books. The books! Oh, god, these books have been with me for as long as I can remember, and now I’m going to leave them? Some of them were my mother’s!”

yep!

“We’d wake up two thousand people for something we’re not sure about, force them to get out of bed, and scare them into evacuating, without enough time to sort through their things, to just get outside, and wait around on the streets until, what?

We’d have to hope no one gets sick of waiting and goes back inside, we’d have to hope that the building really will crash into the river, to make all of this worth it, because if it didn’t, there would be two thousand sleep-deprived people on the streets, angry and possibly ready to follow suit if someone starts to protest, or smash windows, or . . . no. No, I don’t think that would happen, I think they would be pissed, but nothing like that. They’ll just want to go back to sleep.” “Everyone has been through a lot.”

“If it does happen, it will be big. This will change things. The city will suddenly seem a thousand times more dangerous. If one building falls, what’s to stop another? People will run away. They’ll move away. Some for good. And I don’t blame them. I mean, I’m already planning to leave. But if I weren’t? And this happened? I’d definitely think about it. You might want to, also. But where will you go? Where will everyone go?”

Incredibly relatable. And where, indeed

“And what about people who stay? What everyone has been through . . . Like you said. It’s been relentless. There’s only so much we can take. Every day a new emergency, but somehow we believed we were handling it. It’s already hard to know what to believe. Who to believe. We’ve had to ask everyone to forget what they thought they knew. To trust us. And now this.”

“Even if we save every single person who lives in Gleamwood Gardens, we might still lose them. And others, too. It might be too late. They might get swept away somewhere . . . somewhere we wouldn’t be able to reach them. They’d be lost. They’d be lost in a place where they couldn’t find their way back.”

Someone nearby will try to pass the time with music or the news. Most others will ask them to turn it off. Like me, they’ll want to wait in silence. With respect. Like at a funeral. All of us in our own private world between worlds. Time will stop. We won’t be sure it will ever start again. Have you ever seen two thousand silent people? It won’t feel real. And it will feel more real than reality. A reality we can’t escape no matter how we try.

so real

Then it will be 4:01. Then 4:02. The others will grip each other’s hands and hold each other close. Shut their eyes and count to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty. No one has told us what happened. Where is Gleamwood Gardens? Is it in the river? Or is it safe? Nothing matters until we know. Before four, the wait was slow and full of grief. After four, it is infinitely painful. I squeeze your hand so hard you get bruises. The need to know is overwhelming. It feels like a pot of water about to boil. It breaks the silence.

“And then we forget the very idea of silence. The crash. We only hear the crash. It’s very loud for a very long time. What is time anymore? The water⁠—the water! It hits the shore in waves. Maybe ten feet tall. We’re still safe three blocks inland; we may see the water dribble up the streets to our feet. For some people, that’s the breaking point. How can we live in a world where this happens, if it’s not due to the wrath of God or the collapse of reality?

Esme won’t deny that it feels a little like purgatory. Like the world is in between things. Waiting for what’s next. For many people, life has been put on hold.

On the one hand, people have been learning how to adapt. On the other, how do you adapt to a reality that doesn’t make sense? Every resident in New York City still wakes up every day with no idea where they are.

!!!!

It’s crazy, these explosions in his head. And makes him feel crazy but also very sane, like, how much is always happening beneath the surface? How little can we hear? He goes inside himself and he can hear. He can hear.

It’s hard to say when things started turning around for the better. Is it possible to pinpoint a particular moment when everyone stopped running around trying to live in a broken world and started instead trying to fix it? No⁠—not everyone. There are still those who’ve thrown up their hands in surrender to whatever may or may not happen, without the will, interest, or time to care. But it certainly feels as if everyone is thinking about this⁠—the Great Fix, the Remapping, any of the many names used for it⁠—and people are not only thinking about it, but doing something about it, so many people it feels as if we’ve reached a tipping point.

Impossible though it may be, Arjun, social media associate at New York City’s Remapping Department, has been tasked with finding the beginning of our story’s end.

Before that, JR had gotten used to the idea that he’d never go home again. “I had a new home. Riverside Park.” He was willing to pretend that was where he wanted to be. But then, right before his eyes, his family’s apartment building showed up, with his name scrawled on the wall-mounted mailbox.

So he wanted his house back, and he wanted the park, too. He wanted both to stay together. On top of that, JR wanted to figure out a way to save the city.

“Everyone was talking about big picture ‘how do we stop the Unmapping,’” he says to Arjun, who is still dutifully recording, “but why not the little picture? One building at a time. When I saw our house, I wanted to do whatever we could to keep it here.”

It was 4:01 and, even though every building around him was different, he was still in one piece. His house was still there, and the park was, too. And the chain remained unbroken.

But for the most part, they were able to put their neighborhood back together, building by building. Or at least a neighborhood. Sometimes this new neighborhood broke apart, with entire blocks moving to Manhattan, but when that happened, they’d just keep building, making the city whole again.

“My girlfriend keeps talking to me about ants, so I’ve been watching them,” JR told Arjun. “Their anthills get kicked down every day and they just keep building. Each one doesn’t know what they’re building, exactly, they just know where the next grain should go. We don’t know what we’re building, exactly, or what it will look like when we’re done, but we believe in the next grain of sand.

“Oh, right.” JR uncrumples a piece of paper from his pocket. “When we rebuild,” he reads, “we need to make sure to do it right. Duct tape is step one. Step two, thanks to the city, are the concrete stabilizers. In the meantime, we’re installing solar, microwind, and storage batteries wherever we can to make the grid more resilient. We’re researching ways to remap the city every day. New York is becoming a model for the rest of the world, from Rio to Cairo. From Rio to Cairo? No, sorry, I can’t do this. Can’t you put that in a caption or voiceover or something?”

“I wonder, though. What you said about the new neighborhood. What will people call it? Hunts Point? Or New Hunts Point?” “Maybe, yeah, and we’ll all be in New New York.” “Or Double-New York.” “Newer York. Newest York.” “But who will call it that? Tourists or locals? Like, tourists always call my home city New Delhi, when all of us who live there just think of it as ‘Delhi.’”

But if JR does run a gang, what does that mean in a world with no concept of territory? Even with the remapping efforts, the city continues exchanging neighborhoods with neighborhoods. But certainly there seem to be fewer shootings in this new world. Arjun wonders what it would be like to grow up thinking you had no option other than to join your local gang. And then you move somewhere far away. Suddenly anything seems possible.

His family quelled Arjun’s continuing concerns⁠—what if you run out of water; what if there are riots?⁠—with a weekly video call, telling him of new life in “New” Delhi, making it sound just fine. To a city of chaos, what’s one more drop of chaos? It doesn’t hurt that so much of the city is made up of interwoven parts. There are the massive compounds of the wealthy that have everything they need inside, and the labyrinthine alleys and slums with walls bleeding into each other, so that entire neighborhoods move together and stay together.

Some companies have been working with concrete, others with a strong epoxy-based glue. Others study the question of what moves and why. They have no unifying theory as to how this all works, no simple answer, so they test as many things as possible. The big “why” is still up for debate, although many have agreed upon global warming as the answer, so while the city responds and adjusts to its unmapped reality, the world needs to do more to draw down greenhouse gas emissions, and Arjun is generally aware that world leaders are trying to come to an agreement on just this, but haven’t they been trying this for decades? Will they really do it now?

Arjun tries to focus on the here and now. And right now the city needs to be fixed, and that takes work, and he’s working hard⁠—which, yes, involves social media,

There is no feeling like the feeling after a hard run, laid flat out on your bed, waiting until your body regains composure. For several minutes you feel the cells in your body move back and forth and everywhere. You can feel your shoulder connect to your stomach. Your head pulses with blood from the toes. The city is alive in the same way. It is coming back together.

His worries still live in his head like tiny little friends who urge him on: Look at me! Look at me! But there are many other things he’d prefer to look at. Like the redbud trees in the park behind him. Like the nice breeze that cools the sweat on his neck. A wet, misty breeze that tastes like salt.

“Maybe I should do what that guy Franz says. I believe this video will go viral!” he shouts to the sky. “If I believe it, it’ll happen! Isn’t that what he’s saying now? He caused the Unmapping by getting people to believe in it. And now people can stop it by not believing it anymore.”

“I don’t believe you can replace a belief with the lack thereof. It can only be replaced by a different belief,” says Arjun. “Like what?” Arjun shrugs. “Don’t know. That’s the problem.”