Free Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer Page B

everywhere. Great swathes of the city were being demolished and redeveloped but wherever they went they saw cafés they intended, one day, to return to. Roller-bladers, solitary or in packs, roamed swiftly through the dream-time of the city. Stoned, Luke found himself looking forward to a time when not having learned to roller-blade would be one of the major regrets of his life. They followed buses, cut through parks, crossed over railway lines, annoyed drivers, skirted traffic jams and orbited churches whose names they made no attempt to establish. After two hours they were hopelessly lost.
    ‘Let’s go in here then,’ said Nicole, pointing at a shop specialising in maps and atlases.
    ‘How convenient. Like having an accident outside the hospital or getting robbed outside the police station.’
    Inside, variously projected maps of the world were arranged in large V-shaped racks. They turned the polythene-protected posters as if they were choosing a picture of Che or Hendrix in an Athena shop at the dawn of the poster era. The selection was vast: maps showing population density, per capita incomes, political boundaries, mineral deposits, annual rainfall and physical features. In the standard Mercator projection the world looked swollen and robust, bursting with prosperity and confidence. Great Britain was slap bang in the middle of things, about half the size of India. In a newer, alternative projection the world looked sad and thin, dripping towards Antarctica. Little Britain on this projection was barely visible, a streak that looked hardly worth invading.
    ‘Where would we be without maps?’ Nicole asked rhetorically.
    One rack held only antique reproductions, olde maps drawn in different versions of the same buried treasure aesthetic, zephyrs blowing galleons across the whale-crowded sea towards jagged coastlines of indeterminate exactness. Another held maps of the oceans, great stretches of contoured blueness; in another were maps of space: the Moon, Mars, the stars.
    There was also a selection of globes which were immune to the vagaries and distortions of projection. Some were actually lights, contained their own suns, glowed from within. The Moon was uniformly grey, nothing like as nice as the Earth which was greenish and deep blue. Still, it was the Moon and, as such, they felt drawn to it.
    ‘The Sea of Tranquillity,’ read Luke.
    ‘Easter Sea.’
    ‘Ocean of Storms.’
    ‘Bay of Dew.’
    ‘Sea of Crises.’
    ‘Sea of Nectar. It makes you wish there were places on Earth with names like that,’ said Nicole, but there was no disguising the fact that, names aside, the Moon was a pretty crummy place. ‘Look,’ she said. High up on one wall was a satellite photo of the Earth seen from space. Flattened out to show the entire planet, it looked exactly like a map of the world.
    ‘That’s the only thing the Moon’s got going for it, really,’ said Luke. ‘You get a great view of the Earth.’
    ‘It’s the best planet, isn’t it? We’re so lucky to live on it.’
    ‘None of the others come within a million miles of it.’
    They had succeeded in putting the afternoon in a massive, dwarfing context. Re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, they went down to the basement where the maps of individual countries were kept, maps showing regions within a country, states and counties, folded street plans of crowded cities – London, Rome, New York, Cairo, Moscow – that showed every avenue and street, every cul de sac and alley of the city they were in. There was even a diagram, on the wall, of the shop itself, a map of maps with a red arrow saying, ‘You Are Here.’
    ‘I feel better able to face the world,’ said Luke. Better able, he meant, to face the journey home – not the Ancient Egypt section of one of the city’s daunting museums.
    ‘Why on earth do we want to see that?’ he said.
    ‘It’s very interesting,’ said Nicole. ‘It was a civilisation in which nothing ever happened, a culture which