The Cartography of Erasures
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The mapmaker's daughter discovered that erasures left shadows, and the shadows remembered what the ink had forgotten. Thus whenever something was crossed out, an invisible presence or trace remained. An alternate reality. Or in the flowery wording of a pamphlet she later read: So in life at least one step can be taken, not forward, but backward, contrary to the direction of flow of the river's current; backward to the check mark on the calendar on the 20th of August, 1941, to the 33,630 bras made that day, ensconced somewhere, when it is best forgotten, and once again, when it can be most heartbreaking, to the mapmaker's daughter, who in the present never ceases to leave visible marks on a paper that have now become invisible to two men traveling on a train. It's a makeshift paper map, or maybe a sheet cut from her sketchbook, a faint drawing of the area marked by a single word. A name found in something her father wrote long ago by way of explaining a foreign city he once tried to recreate on his blurred maps: Svetnetsk, a name that to her father's eyes must have seemed as familiar as a lover's name. To her only dates from the summer her father died and she suddenly saw something, a name and a date, in the author's corner of her father's hideaway drawer, two months too late. The shadows do move, but the mapmaker's daughter lives in the moment when time and earth cross over, so that error becomes the image of a faithful city to discover, to hold on to for dear life in the present, in the world of far-off places, and write a book to sustain oneself in exile. It strikes her now as proof that another somewhere is a world we can recognize ourselves in, that at some point the land drops away below us and unspools like a length of orange ribbon and we will the waters below a discreteness we can name. Traveling from memory and geographic roots and from one place to the other, she all of a sudden notices, holding onto her filled suitcase with one hand and blasting with the other into the steam, that she traveled from an orange ribbon to the Encyclopedia of the Earth. At the farthest limit of land is not a wall or a line of telephone poles, but an invisible field where the end of what you know turns into the beginning of what you don't. Like a map, the world does not totally cover the Earth. Waves fold the edge of the ocean waves in its very nature a form meant to fold faithful unfortunate us. As if it were also a work in progress. Here, she knows, this tenuous margin that shimmers in the heat radiating from the streets and flowing, in waves, across the furthest periphery of the city, is also the outside edge of the world, formed in turbulent air, the furthest limit, the banal limitation of the entire Earth. When shadows, she realizes with sudden clarity, reach to the water's edge, it means that something has crossed over. Returning to her neighborhood, she feels as though she's gone somewhere else, and taking down a photograph from the wall, she marvels at recognizing the details of a street whose building here she cannot identify. She's never actually been here before, but she is certain she has been betrayed. Without looking, she takes out another photo, sees the part of a bicycle sticking up from parked outside a row house, the same transmission lines, and the same winter trees. No, God help me, it's impossible. But to her dismay, this is where she lives, where she always lived, the spot directly beneath the telephone wires and the blueprint for a row house in the photograph. She could swear she lived in this brownstone once, but now these tower lines denoting not a possible future, but the end of what you know, and with a shudder she knocks on her front door just to make sure. The sound of nails on wood. Deadbolt slides up, and the door swings open to the left, just the way it always does.
Hello?
The mailman! Svetchnitsk, are you here?
Yes, here I am.
Svetchnitsk?
He smiled as his arm flattened waves of hot air and wove through the broken glass pane, squeezing himself through the opening. He reached out to the blue printed telephone towers and said, "Svetchnitsk, is that you?" Smiling from both sides of the glass. He reached out to stir the broken shards with his other hand, seemed to detect some irregularity in the breaks, and turned in both directions. "Yes, Svetchnitsk," he◆ About the ending
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