Everything has a price tag. If you do not see it, you are the most likely person to be sold. I have spent my life weighing things: sacks of grain, crates of silk, and the heavy hearts of men who have run out of luck. Most men are worth about fifty bucks on a good day. That is the cost of their clothes and maybe their gold teeth. Ike was worth less. He was a disgraced map maker who had ruined a king’s borders. He walked with a limp and smelled like cheap gin and old paper. He was a man who had lost his name, and he wanted it back.
Ike had a partner named Maya. She was a scavenger who did not speak. She had a face like a stone and eyes that had seen too many dead bodies. She was the muscle. She was the one who could find a needle in a landfill. Together, they were looking for a celestial compass. It was a golden ball that supposed to point toward a city made of treasure. But the compass was buried in the Deep. The Deep was not just a cave. It was a hole in the earth that changed its shape. It used your memories to build its walls. If you thought about your childhood home, the tunnel would start to smell like your mother’s cooking. It sounded like fun, but it was a trap. The Deep only took. It never gave.
They started the descent on a Tuesday. The air in the hole felt like breathing wet wool. Ike was sweating, his fat fingers clutching a blank piece of parchment. He wanted to map the Deep. He thought if he could map the place that could not be mapped, the king would forgive him. He would be “Sir Ike” again. He would have a chair at the big table instead of a crate in the alley. That was his vital need. He did not just want gold. He wanted to be a person again.
Maya led the way. She moved like a cat. She did not have memories she wanted to share. Her mind was a vault. But Ike was a leaky bucket. As they went deeper, the walls started to change. The gray stone turned into the wood paneling of Ike’s old office. He stopped and touched the wall. He started to laugh. It was a dry, hacking sound that made his chest heave.
“Look at this, Maya,” he said. “It even has the coffee stain on the rug. I remember that day. I was happy then. I thought I was the smartest man in the room.”
He was laughing, but his eyes were watering. He was looking at a ghost. The merchant in me knew the trade was happening. The Deep was giving him a nice view, but it was taking the oxygen out of his soul. Every time Ike smiled at a memory, his face seemed to get a little thinner. His skin turned the color of a dead fish.
They reached a wide room that looked exactly like the library where Ike had made his big mistake. The shelves were filled with books that were actually just cold stone. In the middle of the room, sitting on a pedestal of marble, was the compass. It glowed with a soft, blue light. It was beautiful. It was worth more than a city.
Ike ran toward it. He was crying now. “I found it,” he choked out. “I’m not a joke anymore. I’m a hero.”
But the compass did not want gold or blood. It wanted the map inside Ike’s head. To pick it up, he had to give the Deep the memory of why he was there. He had to trade the very thing he wanted to save.
Ike grabbed the golden ball. It was heavy. He let out a loud moan, and his body folded like a card table. He hit the floor hard. Maya ran to him. She pulled him up, her hands shaking for the first time. She pointed toward the exit. The walls were already shifting. The library was melting back into jagged, sharp rocks. The ceiling was groaning.
“Who are you?” Ike asked.
His voice was thin. He looked at Maya like she was a stranger he had met at a bus stop. He looked at the golden compass in his hands. He did not know what it was. He thought it was a yellow rock. He had forgotten the king. He had forgotten the maps. He had even forgotten his own name. He had the treasure, but he had lost the man who wanted it.
The walk back out was long. Maya had to pull him by the arm. Ike tripped over every pebble. He kept asking if they were going to get ice cream. He talked about a dog he had when he was six. He was a hollow shell of a man. He was like a book with all the pages ripped out.
When they finally crawled out of the hole, the sun was hitting the trees. It was a beautiful morning. Maya sat on a log and put her head in her hands. She did not cry, because she did not know how. She just sat there in the silence.
Ike sat next to her. He was playing with the golden compass, rolling it in the dirt like a toy. He looked at the blue glow and giggled. “It’s a pretty marble,” he said.
I stood at the edge of the woods and watched them. I am a merchant. I know what things are worth. That golden ball could buy a kingdom. It could buy armies and palaces and ships. But as I looked at Ike, I realized he was finally broke. He had traded his entire life for a piece of metal he couldn’t understand.
He didn’t know he was disgraced. He didn’t know he was a failure. But he also didn’t know the woman sitting next to him had saved his life three times in the dark. He was just a man sitting in the dirt, waiting for a tomorrow that he wouldn’t remember when it arrived.
Ike looked up at the sky. “The lights are pretty,” he whispered, pointing at the fading stars.
He used to know their names. He used to know how to use them to find his way home. Now, they were just bright dots. He was lost, and for the first time in his life, he didn’t even know he needed a map. That is the worst kind of poverty there is. I walked away and left them there. You can’t put a price on a man who has nothing left to sell.