By Nico Martinez Nocito
Sketch, ink, color, polish. Repeat.
My pa likes to say, his curmudgeonly jaw working at the spoon he often inserts between his lips when he’s trying to suck the last vestiges of honey from the well-worn metal ornamentation, that when he was a boy, maps were static things, only changing when wars were fought and lost and won.
I usually like to remind him that we don’t have wars anymore.
Today, though, I know that old routine would just make him sadder, and so I tug the spoon from between his lips. He surrenders it grudgingly. His eyes are very tired.
“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m leaving.”
I own five pens, each a different color: black, red, blue, green, brown. I bundle all of them together into my cleanest roll of blue cotton and tuck them underneath my environmental science textbook, hoping that they won’t get crushed. They’re safer this way, I tell myself, but really, I don’t know the first thing about how to pack pens safely or how to pack anything safely. I’ve never truly left home before.
No matter what I’ve told my pa, I’m not ready for the city.
It’s been centuries, but Appalachia still isn’t fully connected to the transit lines; its status as the natural barrier blocking the encroaching Atlantic Ocean for all those years has rendered it still a historical landmark rather than a destination. I trek along the rutted dirt path for nearly a mile before I reach the Blue, the narrow, two-tier train nicknamed for its aqua paint coating that snakes its way over the Appalachian Mountains. The conductor looks vaguely surprised to see me, as if he didn’t believe he’d have a passenger here today despite the clarity of my earlier message.
He recovers from his stupor before I’ve fully entered to rattle off a string of safety guidelines.
“The safety straps are recommended but not obligated. Please find a vacant seat and do not stand or walk around during our trip. We will arrive in York in approximately thirty minutes.”
The other passengers shift, and a few snicker, and I want to feel resentful at the conductor for delivering what’s clearly an elementary lesson in Blue safety for a country bumpkin he assumes has never stepped foot on such a contraption before.
Unfortunately, he’s right.
I duck my head and find an empty seat in the back, squished up beside a red-haired man whose back hunches over a whirring holographic screen. He’s not wearing the safety strap, so I decide I don’t need it either.
The woman I’m going to have to be is far too capable for that.
The first lurch forward makes me wish I’d chosen differently. Breakfast eggs and honey rush back up my throat, and I barely suppress a retch. I press my head against the seat in front of me, drawing in a few scattered breaths. When I open my eyes again, I discover the man sharing the seat is looking at me and has angled his screen so I can read the words he’s scrawled across its center.
Welcome to York, Amanda Riverwood.
I look at the man again. This time, I see another face in the curious tilt of his eyebrows and small quirk of his mouth.
“Professor?” I ask.
He smiles.
When a city is drowned and then rebuilt in the sandy, built-up remnants of its old majesty, tradition dictates that it is only right to affix new to the beginning of its old name.
Evidently, my pa’s generation decided that two news cancelled out, a venerable double negative of urban nomenclature. And without those three-letter redundancies, only a single word remained:
York.
York, I soon find, is a city lost in the swells and ebbs of its own identity.
I step off the Blue close behind Professor Andrande, the man who found my doodled maps online and offered me an interview for a job I couldn’t pass up. We didn’t speak much on the Blue; he was buried in a book he flipped through on his screen, and I was lost in the vibrant, streaky hues that became a blur outside my window.
Now, I’m distracted by the city I’ve stumbled into.
I’ve never entered a city before, or, for that matter, any settlement larger than a few hundred people. Appalachia became a safe haven when the waters refused to stop rising, a new home for all the people in the northeast too stubborn or too sane to flee west further away from the rising ocean. When the water halted and began to retreat again, most people stayed put. My pa stayed put. When I was born, I stayed put.
I didn’t expect a city to look like this.
Half-finished buildings crowd together, narrow gaps for the Blues left between almost entirely solid blocks of wood and concrete. Construction cranes and yellow tape dot the horizon, and only the ocean, fluttering in the distance, appears pristine.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” says Andrande.
When I glance at him, he chuckles. “Don’t worry, that was a joke.”
I manage to laugh, but it’s a close thing.
“Why are you here?” Andrande asks at last. “You weren’t the first artist I reached out to. I didn’t think you’d be the last.”
I shrug, but the passion bubbles up into my words nonetheless, and I find myself unable to stay silent.
“Maps are not simply a way to get from point A to point B,” I say, my voice growing stronger with this familiar terrain. “They tell stories. Convey culture. Capture a moment in time for a person and a place. Maps are art, and for the first time in centuries we’re doing more than rehashing terrain that has been drawn and redrawn a thousand times over.”
“You’re creating something beautiful,” he says.
“Something meaningful.”
“And if your maps no longer mean anything in five years, ten years, because the sea has changed all over again?”
“Nothing is meaningless,” I say, “if it captures what was real.”
He seems satisfied by this answer, maybe because every sentence of it was true, if not in its entirety. Instead of further interrogation, he rises.
“I’d like for you to draw a map of this coastline. A commission, call it, like in the old days. Someplace to stay and a hundred dollars—”
“Two hundred.”
He blinks at me, like he wasn’t expecting me to negotiate. I meet his gaze with steady intensity and smile when he looks away.
“Two hundred,” he agrees.
“I’ll start immediately,” I say.
A good map is a living thing. Its every line hums with meaning: failed experiences, suppressed beauty, elegance, and deceit.
I tell myself, and I tell Andrande, that I am exploring York to better draw the terrain.
As I said: every good map contains at least a small lie.
I ink a swooping line down the coastline, one that ends down by the harbor, where the narrow, infinite towers peer up into the darkening sky and pump carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere into the reservoir that bubbles and shifts beneath York’s stately walls. The crescent moon has swallowed the last vestiges of daytime, and when I take a breath, the shape of the horizon looks different upon exhalation.
When I knock on the door, my uncle answers immediately.
I haven’t met him for years, not since he left Appalachia and my pa and I, and trudged down to York to rebuild when the sea levels fell again. They needed engineers, construction workers, scientists, coders. The farmers and the artists, my pa and I, we were useless to them, and so he left, and we stayed, and now I’m here again.
“You’ve only got two months left,” he says, without preamble.
“I’ll have it before that,” I reply.
By the time I finish the first map, two weeks have passed, and the coastline has already changed. A sandbar has emerged down in Florida, a long spit of land dragging itself from the waves and onto my carefully inked paper. When I tell Andrande, he smiles and suggests I start on my next map.
The next map makes it easier to forget the debt, and my pa, but when the next payment arrives, I still send it off to my uncle in ten minutes.
Nine hundred dollars. A years-old loan made to keep my pa alive through the winter, a plea to my uncle, the only person making the kind of money we needed to get a doctor from down in York.
Nine hundred becomes seven, becomes five, becomes one.
The night the letter comes, I break.
My pa’s shaky handwriting crowns the front of the paper. It’s dated two weeks ago, the Blue operator clearly having no idea what to do with a paper-form letter sent to be delivered to someone without an address. I slit the top with one shaking fingernail, and when the letter emerges, I can’t breathe.
The entire landscape of the world can change every week, every day; I might be the one chronicling the new coastlines and unexpected isles; and yet this, this, will not change.
Sick again.
Two weeks, two long, long weeks for him to wonder where I am, why I haven’t come, if I’ve forgotten him. Two weeks for his illness to get worse and for his stock of medicine to get used up. Two weeks, two weeks, two weeks.
The next morning, I tell Andrande, “I need to go home.”
He has every right to fire me on the spot.
Instead, he asks, “What do you need?”
Some maps have sharp and unforgiving lines, and others all the gentle curves of a summer leaf stirring in a plaintive breeze. Some maps recall what is, or what was, and others imagine what could be.
The map of my journey home is a hurried one, every line an accident, slurred and spun over the pages with the kind of intensity that leaves you reeling from step to step until every inch of your being is crowned with disorientation.
When the Blue slides to a halt at my stop, the one the conductor isn’t used to pausing at, I leave and then I do not walk, I run, my footsteps pounding over rough pine needles and disjointed stones and every memory I’ve ever had of this place I’ve called home, of this man I’ve called pa, of what I left and what I’ve longed for.
The door yields easily, and I stumble inside. He gazes up at me from the bed. His eyes are wide and tired but bright when they catch on my startled gaze.
“I thought you were like him,” he murmured. He sounds half-feverish, half-despairing. “I thought you’d gone off to the city and left me here, that you’d forgotten what it meant to care for someone.”
I sit next to him and hold his hand. I’m there when he drifts off to sleep.
I’m there, too, when he wakes up again.
I draw my maps from home now.
Our little house, built in the rush of settlement in Appalachia with little regard for how well it would last, has become a studio. I head to York for a day, a week only, to collect the latest satellite projections and propose my latest project ideas to Andrande. Else, I stay in the mountains with my pa. He’s refurbished the big old table I used to play on as a child, and now it’s where I spread out wide sheets of off-white paper and ink black, green, red, blue. When I finish a new map, I match it up with my previous one and hold the two together up to the light to admire the different lines, the wavering paths, the changes from one day to the next.
A miraculous world, a changing world, and I will commemorate its every step.
At nights, I put away my pens and my philosophy, and I sit on the back porch with my pa and sip honey tea as the fireflies dance and spin and make music with their motions. I imagine I am in York, and I smile, because I’m not.
York is a city finding a path to survive. It needs its engineers, its coders, its builders, its electricians. It needs the men like my uncle, who are willing to do whatever it takes to get through the next day, week, month.
The mountains are different.
The mountains will endure, their craggy faces mounting a forever-dazzling vista against a quiet, blue-speckled sky.
One day, we two worlds will find our way back to each other again, where science can be a thing for beauty and not just survival, and when art is no longer an obscure category of luxury.
Until then, I will draw my many scattered maps, and I will chronicle our ever-changing world.
Leave a Reply