Index of Absent Places

The first edition of the Atlas of Provincial Errors contains no maps. This peculiarity escaped its reviewers, who praised the accuracy of its coastlines and deplored the smallness of its type. I have examined three copies. Each consists of an alphabetical index followed by three hundred and eleven blank pages.

My uncle owned a fourth.

He had been a surveyor in a country whose name changed twice during his employment. Boundaries interested him less than the narrow strips omitted when two surveys disagreed. He believed that a man might live quite comfortably in such a strip, paying taxes to neither government. His superiors considered this an administrative rather than a geographical ambition.

After his death I found the atlas beneath his bed. In the index, between Alder Crossing and All Saints, stood the village of Alephbridge. Its page reference was 86.

On page 86 my uncle had written: I was happier here.

I knew the district. No village of that name existed. Nevertheless, among his papers I found an innkeeper’s receipt, a photograph of a bridge, and a letter from a woman who signed herself Elena. The receipt bore no date. The photograph showed my uncle at perhaps thirty, although the bridge behind him had been demolished when he was a child.

The letter concerned the weather, an injured dog, and his failure to return.

These are poor materials for a supernatural investigation. Their very poverty persuaded me.

At the national library I consulted another copy. Alephbridge appeared in its index, but referred to page 143. On that page a reader had drawn a door. Beneath it was written, in a hand I recognized as my own: Do not improve the road.

I had never before seen the book.

The librarian, a courteous woman with unusually black fingernails, explained that the volume had been donated by a society for the preservation of cartographic mistakes. The society had no address. Its annual reports occupied a shelf between atlases of extinct empires.

According to its founders, a place incorrectly recorded on a map acquires a provisional existence. Repetition strengthens it. A village copied through six editions may have a church; through twelve, a cemetery. Once travelers begin to remember it, deletion becomes dangerous.

One report described a nonexistent island removed from a naval chart. Three retired sailors immediately lost the memory of their marriages.

I took the train north.

At the station a driver asked whether I wanted the old road or the improved road. I remembered the warning and chose the old. He seemed disappointed.

Alephbridge consisted of eleven houses, an inn, and a bridge over a dry channel. The innkeeper knew my uncle. He brought out a bottle reserved for his return.

“Elena has gone to the city,” he said.

“Which city?”

He looked embarrassed, as though I had asked an intimate question.

In my room lay a copy of the atlas. Its index listed my birthplace. The corresponding page contained a detailed account of my childhood, including an incident involving a silver coin that I had never told anyone.

There were two errors. My mother had not died in winter. I had no brother.

I slept badly. In the morning I remembered my brother teaching me to whistle.

At breakfast the innkeeper asked whether I had decided to stay. I said I had work elsewhere.

“So had your uncle.”

I returned by the old road. During the journey I tried repeatedly to recall my mother’s funeral. I remembered snow on the umbrellas.

The national library had no society reports. The librarian’s fingernails were clean. She told me the atlas had never been in its collection, although she admitted that its catalog was incomplete.

I have spent the subsequent years comparing maps. Occasionally I discover a town removed from a later edition, and for several hours I experience the grief of a man who has forgotten someone he loved.

Yesterday a publisher sent me proofs of a new provincial atlas. He requested that I check the index, mentioning my uncle’s reputation for precision.

My birthplace was absent.

I have restored it in the margin. I have also added a brother. I cannot say whether this was an act of remembrance or of fear.