An unintelligible announcement crackled over the loudspeakers. Angélica glanced at the digital screens hanging from the paint-chipped ceilings. Accident at East Broadway. No service at Delancey/Essex, 2nd Av, Broadway-Lafayette. Take alternate route.
A collective groan arose. The woman next to her said to the air, “Dios mío! Third time this week.”
“Si,” she agreed. “What a pain.”
Most of the commuters bubbled en masse up the stairs, like water backwashing from a blocked drain. With a smaller group, Angélica tap-tapped her stilettos over to the subway map, a goalpost in the middle of the platform.
She always felt like she was lost, no matter her years in the city. The fear of the non-native, perhaps. One of her friends who grew up in New York teased her about her constant reliance on maps. Most of Manhattan was easy; it was those brief forays into the warrens of the old city—Greenwich Village, Tribeca, Chinatown—where the streets were unnumbered and ran at all slants across the island. She knew enough that she could point herself north, south, east or west, but she sometimes got turned around and would need to run to reach her destination, trying to laugh off being a knife-edge away from a tourist.
The subways were perfumed with old urine and oniony body odor, and she breathed through her mouth while studying the map. It would be a hike through the streets, but she could get to the West 4th Station in ten minutes and transfer to the next train downtown.
The flight of stairs was black with millions of dirty footprints. She sidestepped a stinking puddle and came out of the hot darkness into late spring. The weather was similar to the desert: dry heat under the glare of sunlight, with a softer night and morning. She splashed into the tides of pedestrians, her practiced lope proving her New Yorkness with the length of her stride and the angry click of her heels.
Caged indoors for the blink of three years, brushed by air conditioning or caressed by radiators—thousands of miles from that faraway place of scrub brush and endless spaces, where three houses together would be called a town. A city of cockroaches, her mother had told Angélica when she said she was moving to this city.
She dodged smears of dog shit and charcoal spots of gum decorating the sidewalk. Sometimes she thought about getting a dog, but it seemed cruel to coop up a creature in a four-hundred-foot studio apartment in the East Village. Her pet-owning friends lived in Brooklyn. They always tried to get her to come out to their cheaper, larger apartments, but the maps, so detailed and precise for Manhattan, tended to blur and sag at the edges when it came to the boroughs. Distances skewed. The short spaces of the island looked long, while the long distances of the boroughs were drawn short. She couldn’t rely on the maps to guide her.
Click-click-click uptown a block, sharp turn left to head west. She passed a Cuban eatery and a pie shop and a shuttered bar, all roofed over with tiny, pigeonholed apartments. After the last bar, the space next to the sidewalk opened up into silver maples and sky.
A cemetery crowded by multistory buildings: a pulse of hesitation, and then a longer pause. She dodged out of pedestrian traffic to reach the iron spikes of the fence. She leaned forward and put her hands around the cold metal bars.
The faded markers exuded centuries, and held an unnameable gentleness. Birds shuffled through the grass, and squirrels lolled on the graves with territorial pride. People walked behind her—the ebb and flow of voices and speakers blared, but no one else stopped, no one else looked. She felt a scooping realization inside that left behind an absence, even as her temples beat with the refrain of places to go. She had never seen this squeeze of green on any map.
A vibration woke her from the trance. Her electronic boss—her cell— relaying communication from her flesh-and-blood one. Her manager was middle-aged, raising two kids with a colorless wife who talked incessantly about animal charities at the holiday party each year. Angélica couldn’t even remember the wife’s name.
For one moment, she could see herself coming home each night to a tepid person—or, worse, transforming into a nameless one. The twisting and colorful snakes of the subway lines flared in her memory, a warren of people needing to be somewhere else. The map from underground with the long heads and tails of the snake-trains coming to abrupt terminations. End of the line, arrived too soon.
Angélica stuck her arm out towards the street, and a yellow cab swerved. She opened the door and sank down onto the tired springs of the backseat. The cabdriver, one Mohammed Amari according to the posted sign, caught her eye and smiled in the rearview mirror.
“Where to?” he asked in a voice as musical as running water—like her, from half a world away.
Angélica’s job was waiting, and an apartment filled with pretentious books and Zen furniture and wireless gadgets and the expensive and overpowering perfume she had bought as a treat to herself last month.
“The airport,” she said.
The driver pulled into blaring traffic. The cemetery faded away behind parked cars and pedestrians.
She remembered the tangle of wind instead of streets. The flare of heat over hurry. Slow words spoken in cadence to the blowing sand.
In the desert, all maps were blank.
Alison McBain is an award-winning and Pushcart Prize-nominated author with work included in Litro, Tiferet Journal, and Quail Bell Magazine. Her debut novel, The Rose Queen, received the Gold Award for the YA fantasy category of the 2019 Literary Classics International Book Awards. She is lead editor for the small press publisher Fairfield Scribes and associate editor for the literary magazine Scribes*MICRO*Fiction. More info can be found at her website: alisonmcbain.com.
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