The Cartographers

by Peng Shepherd

She could hardly fathom it. This was academia, for crying out loud. Rivals wrote counterarguments and published rebuttal papers. They didn’t kill.

“There’s value in every failure,” a voice behind them said then, as if on cue. “It shows us what doesn’t work, and gets us that much closer to understanding what will.”

I imagined I understood better than anyone, after all. Wanting something to be true that never could be, and not wanting it to be true even more, because of what it would cost.

“If you have the map, the town will appear to you,” he said. “You can go there.”

No one else knew about Agloe. No one that was still alive, anyway.

I don’t know how it happened—isn’t that what everyone who betrays someone says? But I don’t know how it happened.

“I just wanted one thing,” he finally said. “Daniel and Nell could have her love, all of you could have her friendship, the whole world could have her brilliance. I just wanted one thing that could be ours. That’s all.”

“The paradox that even if our map could be perfect, every bit of data completely measurable and knowable . . . the world it represents isn’t.”

Cartography, at its heart, was about defining one’s place in the world by creating charts and measurements. Nell had lived her life by that idea, that everything could be mapped according to references and thereby understood. But she could see now that she had been paying attention to the wrong references. It was not a map alone that made a place real. It was the people.

It felt like the whole world was off by one degree. Everything in its right place at first glance, but tilted ever so slightly.

I’ve always believed that the purpose of a map is to bring people together. We forgot that with the one Wally and I found, but maybe I can change that. Maybe I can save things. I hope someday, this one I will make here for you will bring us all back together again.

Maps were love letters written to times and places their makers had explored.