No matter how hard he tries, the cartographer cannot keep to ground truth, cannot render the streets and landmarks in precise relation to each other. No cartographer can. Rendering a three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional space means that purposeful errors are necessary to complete the drawing. Even worse than the change in perspective, there are lines that must be shifted, moved out of the way so that names can be affixed to symbols, so that these identical markings can become specific places instead of generalized symbols. Denoting one (basement apartment E5, where she lived when they met) from another (the third floor walkup 312, her last apartment before they moved in together) requires space on the map, requires the physical world be made to accommodate the twin realms of information and emotion, the layers of symbols and abstractions necessary to represent the inhabitants of these parallel universes.
In even the best maps, all these short distances add up over time, until the city depicted is hundreds of meters wider than it should be. This is the second way he loses her, the way he feels her slipping away. He fights for accuracy by creating new symbols and more complex keys, each designed to end his reliance on language, on descriptions now unnecessary, obsolete. He saves his words, stockpiles them for the day he and his girl will be reunited, when his map will lead him to another skinny, another crack like the one she fell through, where he might follow her to the place she has gone.
After one of her late episodes, the girl laid across their bed and asked, Do you ever imagine there might be a place that would be just ours? That no one else could get to?
The cartographer often imagined such places, but when he told her of his own imagined hideaways—a cabin in the mountains, or a ship floating in the middle of a vast, unknowable ocean—the girl only shook her head.
That’s not what I mean, she said. I mean somewhere no one else could ever get to, no matter how hard they tried.
No one, she said, and no thing, either. Where we would be untouchable and safe.
He hadn’t known what she meant then, but he did now.
What scares him even worse than not being able to find her is this: What if he finds her, only to discover that this secret place is just for her, that he can’t follow where she has gone?
This symbol is any hospital she went to before he met her, while this symbol stands for the hospitals and specialists she went to later, after the sleepwalking began, after the seizures got worse, after she had something to hide.
The cartographer has been to all these places. He has talked to her nurses, her doctors, her fellow patients. He has shaken the hands of these men and women and introduced himself, explained his relationship to her. Although they remember her with fond laughter and sad smiles, none of her caretakers have ever heard of him. This is how thoroughly she had protected him. This is how she kept her illness a mist-shrouded country, barely even imagined from across a vast sea.
This thing killing her the whole time they were together, it might have taken her away, but the cartographer doesn’t think so.
He thinks—he believes—that there is somewhere else, some place she has escaped to. Some place where she is safe from this thing that chased her, that invaded her body, that turned her own cells against her.
He believes it took hundreds of sleepwalks for her to find this place, but that she did find it: Her skinny, the place where everything got thin enough that she could walk right through, where whatever was hurting her couldn’t follow.
It has been years, but in his heart, he is still true to her. He has doubts, but he does not allow himself to express them. To do so would be the end of him, of all that he has become, of all that he has reduced himself to.
He is only the cartographer now, and so he must continue to believe.
The cartographer once thought this would be the last map he would ever create, that his profession would end with the culmination of this quest, but he knows that it might not. What awaits on the other side of the skinny might be another world, unmapped and unknown. He imagines it as a limbo, a purgatory, a place neither as bad as this world nor as good as the one they are truly destined for. It will take another map to escape that place, to complete the destiny he feels in his bones, in his sextant, in his many compasses. In their many needles, each aching to point the way.
X:
X is the store where he bought the ring he never got to give her.
X is the place where he planned to propose, where he had already made the reservation.
X is the speech he rehearsed, that he practiced saying slowly, carefully, so that she would not mishear even a single syllable.
X is nowhere, X is now, X is never mind.
X is everything that ever mattered.
X is all he has left.
What follows the realization of his mistake is as intuitive as breathing, as involuntary as sleepwalking. He spreads his map before him, messy with a thousand corrections, and then, eraser in hand, he tries, tries again. One by one, he eliminates all his symbols, destroys them and replaces them with words. Mere words, great words, words that denote and words that describe and words that will direct him in the way he needs to go. Ground truth disappears, is replaced by something else, by truth as meaning, as yellow brick road, as key to a lock to a door to an entrance. He widens the error in his map one phrase at a time, each annotation requiring its own accommodations. He writes their truth upon the city, and the city bends to it, its streets and avenues warping around his words: This is the place where we met. This is the place where we kissed. This is the place where we fell in love, and so is this one and this one and this one. This is our first apartment. This is where we bought our first bed, the first thing we owned together. This is where we went for breakfast on Sunday mornings. This is our favorite restaurant, our favorite coffee shop, our favorite movie theatre. These are all the places I found you when you were lost. This is the storefront where you bought the red scarf you cherished so much, that you were wearing the day you disappeared. Where you shopped while I stood outside smoking, where I looked through the window glass and saw how beautiful you were. Where I decided I would marry you, that I would be your man forever.
This is where I was going to tell you what I wanted to tell you, where I was going to ask you the question I wanted to ask.
He annotates until the city appears as a bloated, twisted thing, depicted by a map too full of language and memory to be useful to anyone but himself. Until there are spaces that simply do not exist scattered everywhere, one of which will be the right one. After he finishes, he upends his bag on the floor of his apartment. He rifles through the spilled pile of his tools until he finds his favorite compass, the one she bought him for Christmas their first year. He holds it up, sees true north for the last time. He slips it into his pocket beside the only other thing he needs, the small black box. He puts on his coat, then steps out the door with his map in hand. He looks like a tourist, but he’s not. Somewhere the city opens, like a fissure or a flower, and inside, she is waiting.
This story’s formatting originally included several graphics which could not be included in this eBook version of How They Were Found. To read the story as originally formatted, please download the PDF version available at http://www.mdbell.com/storage/The%20Cartographers%20Girl.pdf.
THE RECEIVING TOWER