The Cartographers(32)
“Or what New York would look like as Narnia,” Tam replied.
We all laughed again, but I could already see the first flickers of curiosity in their eyes.
It didn’t take long for the idea to take shape, or for them to tell us about it.
“The Dreamer’s Atlas,” Tam said a few weeks later, all of us gathered back in their living room again, wineglasses in hand.
The grand idea was an atlas. A collection of maps, both of real places and of imagined ones, but reversed. She and Daniel had come up with a list of books, fantasy novels famous for the beautiful maps created just for them—Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Le Guin’s Earthsea series; Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia books; Dragt’s De brief voor de koning, The Letter for the King; Pratchett’s Discworld novels—and another list of maps from our real world, famous for their cartographic significance. We would painstakingly research all of them, studying them from historical, scientific, and artistic angles, and then redraw them in the opposite style. Our recreations of the fantasy maps would be rigidly detailed and precise, and our recreations of the realistic maps would be embellished, expanded, and dreamlike, like their fictional cousins. Once complete, we planned to publish it in one giant volume. Readers would open it, expecting the same old type of atlas, but instead, they’d find previously familiar lands rendered in a completely unexpected manner, opening their imaginations to an entirely new way of looking at maps.
The idea was thrilling to us. A manifestation of the exact conversation that had consumed us for the entirety of our education and a perfect use of all of our talents. Daniel and Bear would research the novels and their invented maps’ cartographers, Francis and Eve would research the historical pieces, Tam and I would lead the drawing of the recreations—she’d tackle the fantastical recreations of real places, and I the realistic ones of imaginary places—and Wally would supervise it all, organizing the data, tracking every measurement and line, ensuring complete accuracy and faithfulness to the originals, like he always did.
We were all convinced of the idea within the hour—except, surprisingly, for Wally.
Normally, he agreed with whatever Tam suggested, no matter how busy he already was. I think the Dreamer’s Atlas idea was just too experimental, too strange, for him to understand. None of us thought about maps the way Tam did, but Wally especially so.
Luckily, though, they were also the closest to each other, and had known each other the longest. If anyone could convince him, it was Tam.
“Just think about it,” I remember her saying to him as we all shuffled out into the nighttime snow, tipsy and a little sleepy. “We can’t do it without you.”
A few days later, Wally showed up to our study group carrying his usual back-breaking stack of reference texts—and one more, much smaller book.
It was a science fiction novel from the 1970s, by one of the same authors we already had on our list. I don’t remember the title—something about heaven or a lathe—but Tam seemed to recognize it.
“Hey, I gave you that book,” she said when he set the stack down on the table and she saw it. “In high school.”
Wally picked it up and studied the cover. “I thought maybe we could draw some of the descriptions of future Portland,” he said hesitantly, as if still unsure he understood it all correctly. “Some of the differences are pretty stark if you compare it to a real city map.”
Tam grinned. “It’s perfect,” she said. “Perfect for our Dreamer’s Atlas.”
“Our Dreamer’s Atlas,” Wally repeated, finally smiling, too.
“He’s in!” Tam cried, and the rest of us cheered.
Everything was ahead of us, and we were going to do it together. We were going to stun our colleagues, amaze the public. We were going to breathe passion and life back into cartography and make it something no one had ever seen before.
The day we graduated, all seven of us together in our caps and gowns, holding our diplomas, was one of the happiest days of my life.
I thought we were going to be friends forever. I thought nothing could tear us apart.
VIII
The room seemed quieter once Ramona finished her story. Smaller, colder. The dealer looked even more nervous than she had when Nell had entered, if it was possible.
“All this time,” Nell murmured. The shop echoed softly, stealing the words. “You knew my parents—my mother—and he never told me.”
“We drifted apart. Your father and I haven’t spoken in decades,” Ramona replied. “None of us have, until now.”
“What happened?”
But Ramona just shook her head. “Please, Nell. Leave the past in the past, where it belongs. That’s what your father would have wanted.”
“Maybe not. He told me about the gas station map, after all.”
Nell tried not to let her lie make her uncomfortable. But was it a lie? She and her father hadn’t spoken in seven years, but he had put the map in the one place he knew she would recognize, hadn’t he? Or had he merely been trying to hide it from everyone else?
“Well, he shouldn’t have.”
“And he had your card,” she pressed. “So, why did he get back in contact with you again, after all these years?”
Ramona opened her mouth, but before she could speak, the thunderous crawl of a semitruck passing on the road outside startled her badly. She snapped upright, completely lost for a moment, as if she had forgotten there was traffic outside. As if she had forgotten anything at all was outside, beyond her dark, secretive little shop.