Maps
It’s night and raining when the airplane takes off, but after two hours they fly into the
clear next day. He watches the landscape below. He sees forested hills, farm fields, roads. From the air the land is unmarred by political frontiers. There is nothing to indicate that language and laws change from one city to the next. He searches for the river that marks the boundary of the country he is flying over. He sees a river that he is quite sure is not the one. Then he sees another that might be it, but might not be, then another that isn’t it.
The cities have no labels. Even though he has visited most of them and has seen their
streets and neighborhoods, from an airplane he can’t tell one from another. None of the landmarks in the tourist brochures are discernible from this height.
It feels important to him to be able to tell when he has entered his own country. Even
though the border is younger than his parents, in his mind, as he searches for it, it seems older than history, a threshold protected by ancient curses.
He trusts that the pilot knows where they are and where they are headed, but he feels
that where he is now, in midair, so far above the world, he has no location at all, that the route he follows, so clear on a map, is an illusion, that he is not moving. His location is as indeterminate as the state of the cat in the quantum box, whose life is decided in a single instant when the box is opened. It is only when he exits the anonymous airport building at his destination and puts his foot on the ground of the city of his birth will he have moved, as if by magic, from one place to another on the earth.
Lou Conover has no formal training as a writer besides failing a creative writing course in high school. With degrees in music, mathematics, cognitive science, and teaching, Lou is a practicing musician, an engineer, a mathematics teacher, and, by accident, for the last eighteen years, an artist. Lou has a gender neutral name, no pronouns, and two children.