The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
path from the piano to the door: it was littered with fresh mud treads, but
except for the ones under the piano, they were light enough so that we
wouldn’t have seen them unless we were looking. “Should’ve brought a camera.
Shit,” he said, standing up and grimacing. “Lug all this stuff in my pockets
all the time and forget the one thing we really could have used. Oh, well.”
He stretched with one arm, yawned, and shoved me out of the way, gently but
firmly, with the other. “Here, let me crawl under there, long as we’re here.”
He wedged himself into the space between the floor, the pedals, the piano
bench, and the piano’s body so tightly that he seemed to have reshaped his
body to fit the space. “Hey, quit looking at my ass and get over here on the
other side of me. What do you make of this?”
I crawled toward him from the other side of the piano, trying to balance
with closed fists so that I avoided getting fingerprints anywhere else. He
shone his light on a patch of carpet that seemed to me no different from any
other patch of carpet and glanced up at me. I shrugged and shook my head.
He sighed, looked at me as though I might evaporate from sheer dumbness,
and traced a line with his finger in the carpet. “Here. What’s this?” A
barely discernible line ran parallel to the keyboard, from my hands to Joe’s.
He dug a finger into the line and raised a flap of carpet, revealing the hardwood
floor beneath. “What do you think of that?” he asked. I sensed that
there was a right answer. I sensed even more clearly that I didn’t know it.
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s how he installed the carpet?”
“Oh, you think? Flap like this, this size, just right here. So tell me, what
does it join? What does it do?” I just shrugged again. “Here, let’s try this.”
Joe pounded on the carpeted floor behind him, then on the bare floor in front
of him: the bare floor sounded hollow. “See? Here, hold this, and shine it
onto that patch of floor. Good. Now, see how the grain goes in this floor? All
left to right, all short lines. Now look at that one long groove in the opposite
direction. I’ll bet—” He stopped speaking, stuffed his fingers into the groove,
and pulled up a perfect square of wood. “Still think he just installed the carpet
like that?”
Joe held the square foot of floor above what looked like a corresponding
square of pure emptiness beneath it. I think it was a combination of my
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