Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Insomnia Diary of a Cartographer
A map-maker who cannot sleep records the streets he draws during the sleepless hours, and finds that the roads he has marked on the survey sheets begin to appear in the city the next morning, with the names he gave them in the wrong order.
- dated: The four weeks before the survey was due
- narrator: Felix Anders, cartographer
- reliability: unreliable
Night 1. Could not sleep again. Gave up at three and went to the drawing office in the cellar to finish the Ostmark sheets. Scale 1:2500. The new bypass is marked as a dotted line in the draft but it will be a proper road by spring. I inked it in solid, to be safe.
Night 3. Dreamed of the bypass. In the dream I was driving along it at dawn and the road kept turning back on itself, past the same petrol station, the same bus shelter, the same woman with a pram. Woke with the taste of diesel in my mouth.
Night 6. Went out at four with my notebook and walked the route of the bypass to check it against the sheet. The road exists. It is there. The painted lines are fresh and the streetlamps are lit. But the names on the road signs are different from the ones I gave in the drawing. Where I wrote Carrow Lane there is a sign that says Lane Carrow. Where I wrote Pell Crescent, Crescent Pell.
Night 9. Checked the sheets again. My handwriting. I did not write the names backward. But the lettering on the sheet is slightly crowded, and the ink has run in the places where a hand has been held too long over the same letter.
Night 12. Slept for an hour. Woke to find a new road on the sheet, drawn in pencil in the margin, leading from the bypass to the river. I did not draw it. The line is steady and clean and perfectly straight, and at the far end, where it meets the river, someone has written a small name in capitals, FELIX, and below it the word *ALLOW*.
Night 14. Went down to the river at four in the morning. The road is there. It runs down the bank to the water, between two warehouses that were demolished in 1980. It has no traffic and no streetlamps. The surface is wet and dark and the painted line down its centre glows faintly.
Night 17. Drove the bypass again. The petrol station has moved. The bus shelter has a new timetable, and the times on it match the times I wrote in my notebook last week, every one of them, to the minute. The woman with the pram was there. She waved at me. I did not wave back.
Night 21. I am going to hand in the sheets this week. The survey will be printed and the bypass will be opened. I have been asked by the council to add a note to the margin explaining the new names. I have written it. It says that the roads on this sheet were surveyed in full, and that any road not on the sheet should be considered provisional.
Night 24. The sheets are gone from my desk. In their place is a fresh copy, drawn in my hand, with every road in the city marked. The river road is there. And at the end of it, where the water meets the bank, the note I wrote is printed in my own neat capitals, and under it a line I do not remember writing: *Survey complete. Please come down to the water now.*