The Slippery Map Read online

  The Slippery Map

  by N.E. Bode

  Illustrated by Brandon Dorman

  This book is dedicated to the teachers of the world, in all of their various disguises, and especially to a few glorious nuns who saved my family time and again—with noble things like art and love. To name a few: Sister Rita Estelle, Sister Jean D’Arc, and Sister John Marie—and while I’m mentioning those of a holy calling, I’d like to mention one more, Father Szupper. Oh, what brilliant, heroic souls!

  Contents

  A Letter from N. E. Bode

  Chapter 1 The Awful MTDs

  Chapter 2 An Unslippery Map of Little Use

  Chapter 3 The Mapkeeper

  Chapter 4 Dr. Fromler’s Dentistry for the Young (and Aged)

  Chapter 5 The Silver Bucket in the Well

  Chapter 6 A Buzz in the Ears

  Chapter 7 Goggles

  Chapter 8 Meeting of the High Council of Perths

  Chapter 8½ A Brief Interruption…

  Chapter 9 The Imagination Has a Life of Its Own

  Chapter 10 Talking Through the Map

  Chapter10½ A Brief Interruption…

  Chapter 11 Growsels and Doggers

  Chapter 12 The Breathing River

  Chapter 13 Lawless Beasts

  Chapter 14 Ippy, Underground

  Chapter 15 More Lawless Beasts

  Chapter 16 The West Coast of Boneland

  Chapter 17 The Battle of Tongues and Arrows

  Chapter 18 Infestations, Attacks by Air, and Ancient Fire-Breathers

  Chapter 19 Eshma Weegrit’s Cures

  Chapter 20 Eshma Weegrit’s Keys

  Chapter 20½ A Brief Interruption…

  Chapter 21 An Unlikely Trail

  Chapter 22 Dark Mouth’s Inner Compound

  Chapter 23 A Broken Portal

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books by N.E. Bode

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A LETTER FROM N. E. BODE

  Dear Precious and Much-Adored Reader,

  You may think that the stories of Fern and Howard (found on the pages of my books The Anybodies and The Nobodies) are the only astounding stories that I’ve heard in my life. Not true! Let me explain: Every person on the earth—who, at this very moment, may be pruning a bonsai tree or eating a Ho Ho or even reading a letter at the beginning of a certain book while idling in a dusty library—everyone! has an astounding story to tell.

  But, you see, I’d forgotten this.

  Have you ever had a day where you say to yourself, Well, I’m a fake, a fraud. I’m not really very good at this thing I thought I was good at. I muddled my way through a bit of it, but really I’m a one-trick pony. (And I’d hoped to be at least a three-or four-trick pony!) I was just fooling myself and others. I should hang up my hat, because it’s over. Done.

  Have you ever had three days in a row like that?

  A month? More than a month?

  Well, I have. I was in a slump. I was slumping around in my slump, slumpishly. I was, in a word, slumpesque. I told a few people that I was all washed up, and one told the next and the next and the next until all of these writerly writers knew.

  At the lowest point of my slump, I found myself this winter at a bookish party in Baltimore where writers took turns rattling into a microphone for hours. Afterward, they came up to me, one by one, clapped me on the shoulder, and said things like, “Sorry to hear the news, Bode. Maybe you can go into some other business…perhaps selling cars? You could sell cars in a suit like that.” And, “Well, for someone who’s all washed up, you don’t smell bad. I mean, I expected you to reek of failure, but you actually smell like apricots.” I’d just gagged on some apricots, actually, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I slumped from insult to insult until I was outside, walking away in the snow. I was sure they were right, you see. I believe people, in general.

  (You should never believe people who tell you that you aren’t who you want to be! Never. They’re little thieves, that’s what they are!)

  I just kept on walking in the snow, walking and walking, thinking, You’re no writer, Bode. You got lucky and now you’re a fraud. (It didn’t help that I’d recently applied for a Fullbright award of some sort and I got a letter back stating that I wasn’t even quite one-eighth bright, much less full.)

  Eventually I realized that I was lost. The snow was coming down thick, and I had no idea where I was. I saw an iron gate, and I thought to myself, I could use a miracle right about now. A miracle would certainly help. And that’s when the gate creaked open and a round face popped out. The round face was connected to a round body. It was a nun. She looked at me. And I looked at her.

  My head capped in snow, I said, “I’m surely lost.”

  And she waved me into a courtyard and then into a doorway. I followed her down a hall and into a kitchen. She pointed to a seat and I sat down. She handed me a cup of tea and then scribbled a note on a pad of paper. It said: Are you an author?

  I didn’t know how she knew this, of course, but I was still wearing a name tag that said: AUTHOR: N. E. BODE. She pointed to my chest. I shrugged. “I dunno. I used to be.”

  She scribbled again. “I have an astounding story to tell you.”

  I didn’t really believe her, because I’d forgotten that everyone has an astounding story to tell. But stories are carted around in every single person’s heart like—well, like what? Like an extra heart, I suppose—or, no, it’s really part of the main heart. Maybe it’s an under-heart, if you get me, an under-heart just for keeping stories.

  And so I sat there while this nun told to me her astounding story on small scraps of paper, one after the other torn off of a pad. The story started to take root in my imagination. (I’m a writer after all! I have a strong imagination!) The nun couldn’t talk—or, could, but had promised not to. And she is the kind of grand but humble person to keep a promise.

  And because I’ve made some promises to her, I hope I’m that kind, too.

  With love, admiration, a little sloth, and gratitude,

  N. E. Bode

  CHAPTER 1

  THE AWFUL MTDs

  (BALTIMORE, SOUTH OF PRATT STREET)

  It had been a fearful summer. Mrs. Fishback had told the nuns so. She got her news from the mini-TV that she brought with her each morning when she came to work in the nunnery kitchen.

  “The Awful MTDs,” Mrs. Fishback told the nuns over lunch on this one particular day. Her pudgy nose flushed with agitation, and maybe a little joy, because Mrs. Fishback was the kind of person who enjoyed a fearful summer. “Mysterious Temporary Disappearances. Kids, always kids, disappearing! Poof! Just gone! Then time passes and poof! They’re back!” She explained with great relish how one girl had disappeared into her Hula Hoop. She was from the next town over and went missing for thirty minutes. Her mother was holding the hoop in her living room, weeping, with the police all around, and then the girl bounced back out of the hoop, like she’d been given a good shove.

  Mrs. Fishback continued on from her perch on a kitchen stool near her mini-TV and the phone where she made all official nunnery calls, patting the fatty rump of her dog, a dachshund named Leatherbelly who had a narrow snout and labored to breathe. “Two more kids disappeared into tire swings, another into her grandmother’s sofa cushions. Four minutes gone for one. Three minutes missing for another. A boy in Arbutus was gone three hours after stepping into a box that had packaged a refrigerator.” She smiled brightly through the tender description of the whole town gathered around the box, keeping vigil till he was belched back into the world. “Alvin Peterly. Poor boy!” She shook her head. “And who knows what will happen today? Maybe one will disappear for good!” A
nd then she added, with terrible glee in her voice, “Wouldn’t that be awful?”

  Mrs. Fishback hated children even though she had seven of them. (Or perhaps because she had seven of them; it’s hard to say with some folks.) If she wasn’t spouting off about something horrible on the news, she was complaining about her children, who were all grown now and lived far away—as did Mr. Fishback. That didn’t stop her from griping that the children and Mr. Fishback had always been too messy, too loud, too costly, too rude, too runty, too slow, too feisty, too dull, too whiny, too piggish, too foul. She often said, “I should have thrown all of them out on their ears!”

  She had taken the administrator job in the nunnery a few months earlier because, she assumed, there would be no children in it.

  She was wrong.

  This nunnery was home to thirteen nuns and one ten-year-old boy named Oyster.

  As you know, ten-year-old boys aren’t supposed to live in nunneries. Right now you might be saying to yourself, “Nuns are supposed to live in nunneries; that’s why they’re called nunneries!” Well, yes, true, but life is odd, you know, and you can’t be overly rigid about the English language. (Nurses don’t live in nurseries! Novels don’t live in novelties! No, no. And they don’t just live in novelists either; they live in hearts, you know, and everyone’s got a heart.) Plus, it wasn’t strange to Oyster to be living in a nunnery, even this nunnery where all of the nuns had taken vows of silence. He’d lived in a nunnery ever since he could remember, ever since he was an infant dropped off at the nunnery’s gate wrapped in a Royal Motel towel and placed in a Dorsey’s Pickled Foods box. This was his home.

  And he was in the kitchen this very day, putting his soup bowl in the kitchen sink, in a row of nuns who were also putting their bowls in the kitchen sink. And it should be noted that when Mrs. Fishback had said, “Maybe one will disappear for good!” she’d looked at Oyster, her eyebrows bearing down so that her eyes—a cold, vicious blue—looked hooded and shadowy in a grim way.

  Mrs. Fishback had it in for him.

  And at this point, Oyster didn’t need anyone having it in for him. You see, the nuns had quite loved Oyster when he was a baby and when he was a cute little boy. But he was now ten, and that was a different thing altogether. He’d gotten older and antsier every year, and this summer he just couldn’t stand his quiet nunnery life anymore. He wasn’t able to hold himself back.

  For example, when no one was in the chapel, he jumped the pews front to back like a hurdler. Once, because he could resist it no longer, he pulled the rope on the giant bell in the belfry and went riding back and forth and all around under the bell’s skirt, flying, feeling like he himself was being rung and not the bell at all. Another time he’d pumped the organ—which was off-limits because it was much too loud. He simply couldn’t resist it any longer. Dust spouted up from its pipes until the long notes rose in a sonorous mishmash. And he was growing a tadpole in the holy water. It was wrong, yes. But the tadpole was so happy!

  The nuns, on the other hand, were not so happy. There was a complaint box drilled to the chapel wall, and the nuns filled it each week with complaints about Oyster, which were discussed in a flurry of note-scribbling at a weekly meeting that Oyster wasn’t permitted to attend. He would read the notes later, however, because he was the one in charge of dumping wastebaskets, and he would sort through the notes in his room. The main thing was this: they wanted him to be more nunlike.

  One had written: Does he see us jumping pews, pumping organs, riding the bell cord in the belfry? No, he does not!

  There was only one nun who always stuck up for him: Sister Mary Many Pockets, as he’d named her early on because of the many things she always had in the many pockets hidden in the long skirt of her habit—rosaries, peanuts, scissors, tape, cough drops, a tennis ball—anything, really, that you might need.

  She was there in the kitchen, too, this very day. In fact, when Mrs. Fishback said that awful remark, “Maybe one will disappear for good!” Sister Mary Many Pockets patted Oyster on the shoulder, pulled a peanut from one of her pockets, cracked its shell, and looked at Oyster in a way that said, Don’t pay her any mind!

  But there was something shaky in Sister Mary Many Pockets’s gaze these days. She was nervous about a revolt against Oyster, too. And so, just below the look that said, Don’t pay her any mind! there was another look that said, Can’t you be just a little bit more like us? Just a little?

  Oyster shuffled quickly out of the kitchen, but not quickly enough to miss Mrs. Fishback saying, “It’s not natural to have a boy in a nunnery, you know that. Not natural! And there’s something wrong with him, don’t you think? Something off about that little newt.”

  Oyster ran upstairs to his bedroom, knowing she was right. He had no parents, for one thing—or he had but they’d wrapped him in a Royal Motel towel, plopped him in a Dorsey’s Pickled Foods box, and dumped him at a nunnery gate. Sister Mary Many Pockets was the one who’d found Oyster in the Royal Motel towel and Dorsey’s Pickled Foods box, and she had kept him safe ever since. She was the one who’d named him Oyster R. Motel: Oyster because his heart was a pearl, and R. Motel for Royal Motel, because she figured it might be important for him to have these clues to his beginnings embedded into his name.

  Since Oyster hadn’t known how he’d gotten here, he’d assumed it was a miracle of sorts. The only birth story he really knew was of a miracle birth and so it didn’t seem unusual. He was just born! He’d just arrived!

  But that spring, he’d started asking questions. How exactly did I get here? Why don’t I have parents? Sister Mary Many Pockets, it turns out, had been waiting for such questions, and she scribbled down the real story on slips of paper, dragging out the Dorsey Pickled Foods box and the Royal Motel towel.

  Oyster tried, at first, to fit it in with the miracle. “Maybe I was born from the box! Already wrapped in a swaddling towel!” he said.

  But, no, Sister Mary Many Pockets shook her head, and she wrote it out again.

  Nowadays, Oyster sometimes imagined that his parents were normal parents who lived on a quiet street and that he lived with them and often played on a backyard swing set. But he had trouble with these imaginings. First of all, they made him feel guilty. These imaginings would have hurt Sister Mary Many Pockets’s feelings, he was sure. But also Oyster had trouble with the logic of the imaginings. What kind of people would leave a kid in a towel in a box at a nunnery gate? What kind of people did Oyster come from? The abandoning variety. And Oyster wondered if his naughtiness this summer might just be a result of the stock he came from—the unavoidable nature of his true self.

  And so Mrs. Fishback had a point that Oyster couldn’t argue against, because he believed it too. There was something off about him, and even though he would try to be good—very, very good—he couldn’t. The main problem was that Oyster was lonesome.

  On this particular day he’d spent the morning with the only friends he had collected. Firstly, there was a sickly baby bird that he kept in his bedroom closet and fed unconsecrated hosts, worms found in deep holes he dug in the nunnery garden, and water from an eyedropper. Secondly, there was his moth collection. He’d collected most of his moths in the nunnery attic, putting them in a cardboard box with a mesh lid that he’d made himself. Lastly, he’d take time to feed the tadpole in the holy water.

  Now he sat on the edge of his bed with an electric fan pointed at his head and looked out his window at the street beyond the nunnery gate—as he did every day after lunch. Oyster wasn’t allowed beyond the gate. He didn’t even go to school. He was educated by Sister Mary Many Pockets from mail-order textbooks. The only time he ever left was to get shots at the doctor’s office.

  From the window, Oyster could see the Chinese restaurant Dragon Palace, with its painted red dragon. Every day after lunch, the owner would put out a little chair, and a boy with leg braces would be plopped in the chair. He held on to a blue paper umbrella. Oyster waved to him, and the boy spun the blue paper umbrel
la and smiled. It was a small signal to each other that they’d developed, not having ever met.

  He was the closest thing Oyster had to a real friend. But Oyster wanted more than just waving and umbrella spinning from a friendship.

  Next to Dragon Palace sat Gold’s Fancy Pawn Shop and Cash Store, where an old graying dog guarded the front door at night. Its greasy front window was crammed with dented silver heirlooms and old saxophones and jewelry boxes, which sometimes caught the morning sun and shone like mirrors. As its name states, it was also a cash store where people could buy money. This made no sense to Oyster.

  Above Gold’s Fancy Pawn Shop and Cash Store there was a billboard that read: WE BLEACH TEETH. It was Dr. Fromler’s billboard: DENTISTRY FOR THE YOUNG (AND AGED). At the bottom of the sign, there was a list of Fromler’s special line of MIND AND BODY PRODUCTS: BRAIN ENHANCER TABLETS, MR. PUMPED-UP MUSCLES NOSE SPRAY, CHILD-CALMING MENTHOL DROPS; PLUS: HIGH-SCHOOL-DIPLOMA-IN-A-BOTTLE KIT, FISHING AND HUNTING LICENSES, AND COUPONS FOR HAIR WEAVES.

  The nuns went to Dr. Fromler when their teeth went bad. Oyster had never been to a dentist. But the billboard reminded Oyster of the outside world—and how it could have good things: enhanced brains, pumped-up muscles, calmed children, hair weaves! Oyster wasn’t exactly sure what it all meant, but he loved the set of sparkling teeth on the billboard smiling down on him. At night the smile was lit with big white bulbs. The smile made him feel less lonesome.