People Who Don't Smile

Wei Lin arrived at nine-oh-three. In a taxi. A yellow one, with a sushi delivery ad on the side and one of those pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the mirror.

I don’t know what I was expecting. A portal, probably. Or a black car with no plates. Or teleportation—snap, flash, and you’re in another dimension. Instead—Yandex.Taxi, driver named Arsen, 4.99 rating, and the smell of artificial vanilla. If the Academy was a space “where the laws work differently,” then so far the only law working differently was my expectations.

— Get in, — said Wei Lin from the back seat.

I got in. Arsen looked at me in the mirror. I looked at Arsen. Arsen turned on the GPS. Off we went.

— Where are we going? — I asked.

— Out of the city.

— That’s—an exact address?

— That’s—a direction. The address will appear later.

— The address will appear?

— Yes.

I decided not to press the point. There are questions whose answers you’re not ready to hear at nine in the morning in a taxi with a pine-tree air freshener. Instead, I looked out the window. Moscow slid backward behind the glass—familiar, gray, November, made of concrete, traffic jams, and unspoken grievances against the universe. My city. Twenty-eight years.

(Funny thing—saying goodbye to a city. You think it’ll be dramatic: one last look at the Kremlin, a tear, music from a Tarkovsky film. In reality, you’re sitting in a taxi, staring at a McDonald’s on Leninsky Prospekt, thinking: “I never did try their new burger.” That’s what a real goodbye looks like: to the small. To a burger you never ate.)

Arsen turned onto the Ring Road. Then onto the Novorizhskoye Highway. Then—somewhere. I lost track after twenty minutes, when the GPS started showing roads I didn’t recognize, and then—roads that, according to the map, didn’t exist. Our car’s dot was moving across an empty green field that had not a single street and not a single label — nothing at all.

— I think the GPS is broken, — said Arsen. Without alarm. Like a man whose GPS breaks regularly.

— Everything’s fine, — said Wei Lin. — Turn right in three hundred meters.

— There’s no turn there.

— There will be.

Three hundred meters later—a turn. A dirt road disappearing into the forest. I could have sworn it wasn’t there when we passed this spot a minute ago.

Arsen turned. Didn’t seem surprised. Or maybe he was surprised but decided that maintaining a 4.99 rating was worth tolerating some weirdness.

Here I want to take a detour and talk about maps. Navigation maps, mind you, not Tarot cards. Yandex, Google Maps, those old paper atlases our parents used when GPS was military technology and not a free app.

A map is a model of the territory. A model, not the territory itself. Everyone who’s ever driven “by GPS” into an empty field instead of a shopping center knows this. Maps lie. Because they simplify. They take a three-dimensional, living, constantly changing world and flatten it into a diagram of lines and dots. And we call this “navigation”: the art of moving through a simplification.

All of our science is navigation. Physics is a map of the physical world. Biology is a map of the living. Psychology is a map of... well, whatever psychologists consider the psyche, and everyone else considers chaos with a diploma. Every science is a model. A simplification. A diagram that works as long as you don’t veer off the plotted route.

I’d just veered off. Literally: we were driving down a road that wasn’t on any map, toward a place that appeared “because it will.” My GPS—my entire worldview, all twenty-eight years of education, experience, and conditioning (not Yandex)—my GPS was showing a green field. Empty. “There’s nothing here.”

But here—there was. A dirt road, forest, a turn. My map just didn’t know about it.

(How many other “turns” have I driven past because the map said “there’s nothing here”? How many dirt roads led to places I never saw because Yandex didn’t show them? The answer, I suspect, is a lot. Considerably more than I’d like to know.)