Silver Lake Read Free Page A

his apartment very much and somehow passed his caffeinated hours fiddling therein, and the days fell away more rapidly than he would have expected, the weeks, for there was much to learn and there were many things you could teach yourself to do in a musty studio apartment in the San Fernando Valley, and naturally when he needed to go out at night and get in some trouble, he could still do that. He lived as if he were waiting for something in particular to happen, for some inevitable turn, although what he couldn’t say, when he certainly could not say.
    “Why am I telling you all this?” Tom asked. “You couldn’t possibly care, although you are very kind to listen.”
    The puzzle of it was that Robbie did care. He had no idea why, but he did.
    He said, “But you came out into the city today. You’re here now.”
    “In daylight no less. Do you have a map?” Tom asked. “I’m all turned around.”
    Robbie invited Tom back to his desk and pulled open a deep file drawer that was indeed packed with maps—the top one was the city guide for Los Angeles—but while Robbie was flipping to the worn page for Silver Lake, the page pulling free from the spiral binding, Tom stared at all of the other folded maps and pocket atlases and was smiling again at Robbie in his goofy sidelong way, and it was Robbie now who had to ask, “What?”
    Tom took the liberty of reaching deep into the drawer with both hands to take out the pile of maps, which given their variable size, couldn’t be sustained as a single heap atop Robbie’s desk and fell in a landslide, displacing a few sheaves of discarded sketches. Tom sifted through them, the municipal guides of European capitals intermixed with pleated plats of properties Stein Voight had worked on, all of them soft at the fold. California road maps and tourist maps for archaeological sites. Canal cities, hill cities—a London A-to-Zed—river cities, island cities. There were train schedules for points back East and maps of the Moscow Metro and the Berlin U-bahn/S-bahn. Tom seemed drawn to one pocket guide in particular, the wine-dark brick called
Paris par arrondissement
with its gilt lettering nearly worn off the spine. He flipped to a random page, the particular neighborhood delineated in canary yellow, the streets white, places of note in pink, with the surrounding neighborhoods all a vague mint green, and he flipped the guide around as if he might actually step outside and try to head off for a certain rue or quay.
    What Robbie didn’t say was that this little guide was his sentimental favorite. With his family, he’d gone to Paris as a child,then back as an exchange student his junior year of high school. It was the one foreign city he had made his own without Carlo.
    Tom looked again at the Los Angeles map open on Robbie’s desk. He said, “You can study a map of a city you’ve never been to and think you know the place, but when you finally go there, you’re always a little disappointed the actual city isn’t quite as neat or logical as the map led you to believe it would be. That’s not the case here. That’s one good thing I will say about Los Angeles—it looks like its map. The grids are grids and the squiggles are hills.”
    This was true. “When you get up in the hills at night,” Robbie said, “and you look back at the basin, you see the city lights and the traffic and it’s like you
are
looking at the map.”
    Tom glanced around at all the sketches on the desk. He sighed. He said, “I’ll tell you something. For a long while, I wanted to become one.”
    “A what,” Robbie asked, “a map?”
    “This,” Tom said. “An architect.”
    “And what happened to that?”
    “Do you have a cigarette? Keep it quiet that I asked though, because in theory, I quit.”
    “We don’t smoke.”
    Tom ran his fingertips across the open Los Angeles page as if encountering braille.
    “I’ve been re-reading the Bible,” he said. “Or not reading it but listening to