The Cartographers(75)
There’s so much we could tell you about that town. And we will—but that isn’t the point. The point is what it did to all of us.
We didn’t realize how long we’d been there until the sun started to set. That spooked us—it had seemed safe so far, but can you imagine being inside a huge, fully built, completely deserted town like that at night? We sped back down the dirt road that led out of Agloe and to County Road 206 as fast as we could. As I drove, wheel to wheel with Wally, for a moment I worried that somehow we wouldn’t be able to leave. That the road would end without meeting back up with the real world, and we’d be trapped inside forever. We all did—everyone’s eyes were as desperately locked onto that little scrap of old paper as mine.
But the map showed us the way out, just as it had shown us the way in. I don’t think Tam folded it back up until we were all the way to the house, on familiar ground again.
We stumbled up the porch as quickly as we could, eager to get out of the dark.
“I’m starving,” Bear said, as we all realized we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Let’s get dinner going.”
“Let’s get drinks going,” Francis replied. “I’m going to need a lot more than dinner after that.”
But when we made it inside, conversation stilled.
“I totally forgot,” I said.
“The Dreamer’s Atlas,” Romi added. “We got it all set up.”
We all looked across the kitchen, to the assembled workspace in the living room. To where our project, once an all-consuming passion, sat utterly forgotten.
Slowly, I went over and picked up the first map I’d started working on before Tam and the others had come back to get us. It was the Franklin, loaned to Romi by the Madison Geography Society for our project, one of the most valuable in our fledgling collection.
Except now, it seemed so . . . insignificant.
The entire Dreamer’s Atlas did.
How could it be important, after what we’d just discovered? How could we simply go back to working on mundane, ordinary maps, when we now knew about the secret this one held? How could we marvel at the invented places on the literary maps, nothing more than figments of imagination, when we knew there was a place like Agloe?
“Someone get the wine,” Tam said then. When I turned to her, I was surprised to see not the same confusion that was on everyone else’s face, but instead a fierce clarity—the same expression she always got when she was on the verge of a breakthrough back in Wisconsin.
“What are you thinking?” Wally asked, hesitant.
“You’ll see.” She grinned. “But we’re going to need to get really drunk first.”
I’m sure you can imagine what Tam had realized.
We decided to change our Dreamer’s Atlas project. It would no longer be about reversing the styles of fictional and historical maps so they mirrored each other, to evoke a sense of wonder and magic about cartography—rather, it would be about Agloe. About how it was possible that it existed, how there could be two places at once in the same geography.
We would produce only two maps now, but they would be the two most important maps in existence. One would be of the known world, the one that everyone could see and experience, and the other would be of Agloe.
And then we would show the world both places.
We were dizzy with the possibilities. We believed that by finishing our reenvisioned project, a whole new understanding of how maps worked, and their relation to the world, would open up to us. Our ambitions in the first place had been to revolutionize cartography—but how silly that grand idea seemed now that we’d found Agloe. How little we’d truly known about maps, only just hours ago. How little everyone knew, really.
Because as far as we could tell, no one else had ever found, or published, anything even remotely like this.
The day after we found Agloe, as Tam and Romi were brainstorming how to begin our project again from scratch, Francis and Daniel drove to the nearest college, the State University of New York at New Paltz, about an hour and a half away, where they used the catalog system to call for every book and academic journal that might be relevant—but there wasn’t a single mention of anything like this, anywhere. There were plenty of articles about psychogeography, and the concept of phantom settlements, from artistic and legal perspectives, but nothing about phantom settlements being real.
No one else knew about Agloe.
No one that was still alive, anyway.
While Francis and Daniel were at the college, Wally took the other car to do some research on the original makers of the map, General Drafting Corporation. They’d been incredibly productive in the early 1900s, the era from which our map had come, but by the time we’d stumbled onto our copy, their profits had been in decline for some time. The founder and his closest drafters—the ones who had made our edition—had all died decades before, and those running the company now seemed to have no connection to them, and knew nothing about the secret within their work, either. In fact, they seemed only concerned with revenue and were considering selling what remained of General Drafting to some big sightseeing guide conglomerate, where their work would dissolve into the existing structure.
“They told me all about the founder, Otto G. Lindberg, his top cartographer Ernest Alpers, and gave me a tour of the whole drafting room and the archives,” Wally told us when he’d gotten back from General Drafting’s sole remaining office in New Jersey. On the table, he’d spread out a huge pile of their maps and put them in order—General Drafting didn’t have backstock for every year for such a cheap, disposable product line, but Wally had brought back at least half of them. “I begged them to let me buy these as souvenirs. They were so tickled that anyone could be such a fan, they just gave them to me for free. If you look”—he opened each one, until there was no room left on the table—“Agloe doesn’t appear on any of them but our 1930 edition.”