Lenz starts demapping animals (p. 539)
He always thumbs along with somebody else and adds to the crowd in their car. And then he always has to sit in the northernmost seat in the car, for some reason, using a compass and napkin to plot out what the night’s major direction of travel’ll be and then figuring out what seat he’ll have to be in to stay maximally north.
Context
Lenz's carpool ritual on the way to nightly meetings: an actual compass, an actual napkin-chart, the night's route plotted in advance so his body can be kept "maximally north" inside a moving car. Cartography of self at its most literal — a man managing terror by keeping himself pinned to a private coordinate system, staff and residents pressed into tolerating the survey work.