Mapmaker

by Jamie Killen

There is a man with a map in a dusty attic. Every morning he goes up the ladder and adds a few lines: shrinking the banks of a river here, shifting a storm front there, tracing a tiny expansion of a major coastline. This is done with dark blue ink from a silver fountain pen. You might think he was writing on crumbling yellow parchment, but you’d be wrong. The paper is crisp and white, and always has been. Every new stroke of his pen looks as if it has always been there. As soon as a new line is drawn, the one it replaces fades away. No trace of it is left behind, not even an indentation where the pen pressed into the paper.

The man makes his changes, watches as the ink dries, and carefully places the map under a layer of glass on the desk. Then he goes downstairs and wraps his arms around Emily’s waist and kisses her cheek while they wait for the coffee to finish brewing. Sometimes she will ask him about how the new map is coming along, and he has to fight the urge to tell her it is so much more than a simple hobby. But he says only that it is going fine, and they drink coffee and read the paper. For over thirty years he has done this, ever since his father took him into the attic and showed him the map.

The man goes about his day, rarely if ever thinking of the map in the attic. He stands in his bakery’s kitchen, measuring and sifting countless cups of flour, cracking God only knows how many eggs, rolling acres of dough. Occasionally he comes out from the back to greet his regulars, cops and firemen who have been buying his muffins and bagels since the business opened. He has polite smiles for the young men and women in smart suits who rave about his scones but seem puzzled at the simple choice between regular and decaf coffee, large and small cups. At the end of the day, he cleans up and prepares for the following morning. By now he is dusted with a fine layer of flour and confectioners sugar. Emily says it’s like being married to a Russian teacake.

At home he listens to Emily’s stories about the students at the school while they make dinner together. Every year he learns a new set of names, delinquents and stars, and those rare cases where Emily is able to transform one into the other. He loves the excited smile on her face when she tells him of some breakthrough with a sullen teenager. She has always had that alchemy, that way of coaxing out potential no one else suspected was there.

After dinner, Emily grades papers while he reads or watches TV. Thoughts of the map sometimes creep into his mind at this time of the day. He avoids the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, with their explanations of volcanoes and earthquakes and hurricanes. Discussions about the science of hurricanes and tornadoes make him shake his head and sigh. Even worse is the talk of global warming. He wishes he could tell these frightened people that their dire predictions will not come to pass, that he will not allow it. He wants to tell them of all the cataclysms that never happened because of him and those who came before him. He wants to watch their faces go pale and their eyes wide as they hear stories of the disasters that were narrowly averted, the ones no one would have lived to tell about.

These thoughts sometimes lead to ones of Kathryn and TJ. He knows the time is coming when he will have to choose one of them and show them the map as his father showed him. He knows, even without testing them, that they both have the potential; everyone in his bloodline does. Both have the natural ability to read the map, to recognize the complex relationships between the land and water and air, to predict the consequences of any given change to the system. The question is, which is the better choice? Kathryn is the calmest person he knows, running her business and her household with cool precision. But that level-headed practicality will make it hard to convince her of the truth. TJ was always the one who believed in everything, in ghosts and magic and Santa Claus. He would believe in a second. TJ is impatient, though, and spontaneous. The man knows how easily his son could act without thinking, make a fatal miscalculation.

Who knows, he thinks. Maybe he can wait for one of his grandchildren to grow old enough.

He checks the map again before bed. There is always some change from when he left it, large shifts in the weather patterns and smaller differences in the earth and the sea. He makes note of things he will have to change the following morning. More often than not, this involves some level of sacrifice: allowing a minor earthquake here to stop a larger one later on, a hurricane in a sparsely populated area to prevent it from hitting a major city. Every once in a while there is something truly devastating that can not be prevented, can not be redirected without throwing the whole system into chaos. This used to trouble him, but now he accepts it as an unfortunate necessity. He spends a few minutes looking at the map before joining Emily in bed, happy with the knowledge that he will get up and do it all over again the next morning.

Then comes the day he gets a call at the bakery. The day he has to go down to the hospital to identify Emily’s body, the gray streaks in her black hair hidden by clotted red-brown. The doctor tries to tell him the details, but the man is not interested in how the brakes malfunctioned or what her car collided with. He turns around and walks away while the doctor is in mid-sentence. An empty, detached feeling comes over him. It seems as if he is watching himself fill out the paperwork, signing anything they place in front of him. He calls Kathryn and TJ, and mechanically repeats what the doctor told him. Both say they will come down from Phoenix immediately, Kathryn promising to drive TJ because she knows her younger brother will be crying too hard to see.

The man goes home, removes his coat, and hangs his keys on the small hook next to the door. As he steps into the living room, his eyes fall on a stack of half-graded midterms from Emily’s class. In that moment, the distant, hollow feeling he has carried with him all day vanishes and the loss rips through him like a bullet. He crumbles into his armchair, tears pouring from under his closed eyelids. For a moment he feels as though he will lose consciousness, but instead he just holds his head in his hands and shakes. He wants to scream, curse, sob, but can’t seem to get enough air in his lungs to do so.

After a while and without knowing why, the man stands and goes upstairs. The tears have stopped by the time he reaches the ladder. In the attic, he turns on the small desk lamp and stares down at the map. He sees that some things have changed in the twelve hours since he added to it, but not much. He uses his magnifying glass to look at the little patch of earth he and Emily shared. Nothing is different. Same mountains, same desert plateau. He tries to think of some change he could make, some stroke of his pen that could fix what has been broken.

The man in the attic tries to imagine a map of the world without her in it, and cannot. For the first time in thirty years, he realizes that the world is beyond repair. All the disasters he once considered necessary sacrifices now stand out in stark relief. Those things that he had dismissed as mere blemishes become almost unbearable look at. The man stares at the map and feels nothing but revulsion and shame.

The realization of what he must do next cuts through the grief. The only thing left to do now, he thinks with calm clarity, is start over.

He digs through the clutter in the desk’s top drawer. Loose change, staples, a marble TJ left lying around. Outdated stamps, envelopes he will never use. Three decades of random, unclassifiable junk is hidden away in this drawer, but he is certain that what is looking for is there. He finds it. The name on the matchbook is a restaurant he and Emily went to on their anniversary five years ago. He stops for a moment to remember the delight on her face when he gave her the simple peridot ring, the best he could afford on what he made at the bakery. He remembers unwrapping his gift from her, a slender box containing the beautiful silver fountain pen now sitting next to the map. Engraved on the side is a simple message: “For my mapmaker. Love, Em.” The man holds the pen in one hand and strikes the match with the other.

There is a man with a map in a dusty attic, and the map burns.

fantasy