The Atlas Of Elsewhere

By the time I turned seventy-three, I owned two hundred and forty-seven guidebooks. They occupied an entire wall of my apartment: Morocco, Peru, Mongolia, Iceland, Japan, Namibia, Patagonia. Cities with names that sounded invented. Villages accessible only by river. Mountains that required three days of climbing and lungs younger than mine.

Every shelf was arranged by continent. Every guidebook was pristine. Not one had ever left the apartment. I told myself, every year, that later would come.

Visitors often mistook them for souvenirs.

"They must bring back memories," the nurse said one afternoon while checking my blood pressure.

I glanced at the books.

"No," I said. "They bring back possibilities."

There is a difference. Memories belong to things that happened.

The nurse smiled politely, the way people do when they suspect old age has made you eccentric. Before leaving, she asked whether I needed anything.

"Another decade."

She laughed.

I didn't.

The doctors had become annoyingly specific about time. For years they had spoken in broad, comforting estimates. A few years. Several years. We'll monitor the situation.

Now they spoke in months. Sometimes weeks.

One of them had actually drawn a timeline, as though death were a train and we were discussing arrival platforms.

What haunted me wasn't dying.

It was geography.

People expect dying people to regret relationships, lost loves, old arguments, career choices. Those things barely made my list. My great regret was that I would never stand in the Atacama Desert and look at a sky untouched by city lights. I would never sit beside a fisherman on some Greek island and discover that we shared no common language but understood each other anyway.

Years earlier I had stumbled across a word in an obscure article.

Onism.

I read it and felt diagnosed.

At twenty-two, maps covered my bedroom walls, and I could still recite the capitals of forty countries the way other boys knew football scores. At twenty-five, I postponed a backpacking trip because my father became ill. Three years later my mother followed him. At thirty-one, I married Clara. I still believed, back then, that time was something that replenished itself. At thirty-three, we bought an apartment. Promotions arrived at thirty-six and forty-one. Somewhere in a drawer I still have two plane tickets to Lisbon — a honeymoon we cancelled twice and then simply stopped mentioning. They've gone soft at the corners.

Then Clara became sick.

She was forty-eight when the diagnosis arrived and fifty-three when she died.

At fifty-four, I decided it was finally time to travel.

At fifty-five, I discovered how lonely an airport can feel when the person who was supposed to stand beside you is gone.

So I postponed.

At first for a season. Then for a year. Grief settled into routine, routine hardened into habit, and habit quietly transformed itself into decades.

That evening my granddaughter visited.

Emma was seventeen. She found me sitting in my armchair, staring at the globe that occupied a small table beside the window.

"Planning a trip?" she asked, dropping her backpack on the floor.

"Running out of time."

"Everyone is."

"Not like this."

She studied me for a moment. Emma had inherited Clara's habit of looking directly at people when she thought they were avoiding the real subject.

"You've been thinking about it again."

"Thinking about what?"

"The fact that you'll never see everything."

I laughed.

"Everything?"

"Fine. Most things."

She glanced at the wall of guidebooks.

"You know what your problem is?"

"I suspect you're about to tell me."

"You think life is a collection project. Like Pokémon. My friend Sanne says the same thing about her mum and shoes, but it's basically the same idea."

"You compare my existential suffering to your friend's mother's shoes?"

"Basically."

"It isn't a collection project?"

"No."

"What is it then?"

"I don't know."

"Excellent philosophy."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

She walked over to the globe and spun it with one finger. When it slowed, she placed her finger somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

"What's here?"

"Mostly water."

"Have you seen it?"

"No."

"Do you regret not seeing this specific piece of water?"

"That's different."

"Why?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. The answer felt obvious until I tried to explain it.

Finally I shrugged.

Emma didn't look triumphant, the way I'd half expected.

"I don't know either," she said. "But it feels different, right?"

I didn't answer. But it did.

After she left, I couldn't sleep. Not because she had solved anything. For decades I had imagined the world as a catalogue of missed opportunities. I kept thinking about that patch of blue with nothing on it, and why it didn't hurt the way Fez or the Serengeti hurt. I didn't have an answer. I just couldn't put the question down.

Near dawn I pulled a guidebook from the shelf. India. Markets overflowing with colour. Crowded streets. Temples. I sat reading until the sun came up, then reached for another. For a few days I kept at it, hopping between continents the way I always had. It felt good for about an hour each time. Then it felt exactly like it always had: information about places I would never see, filed away next to the possibilities.

The next doctor's appointment went badly. Badly enough that even doctors stopped reaching for careful language. Badly enough that timelines disappeared altogether. The doctor mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that long-haul flights were now firmly off the table — the pressure, the altitude, his phrase was "not advisable in your condition." I nodded as though this were reasonable information to receive calmly.

I returned home carrying a folder I never opened.

The guidebooks waited on their shelves. Outside, summer sunlight spilled across the rooftops. A plane crossed the sky. I watched it until it was gone.

Then, before I had properly decided to, I was in the hallway putting on my coat.

I told myself I was only going to look. Buy a ticket at the counter, somewhere, anywhere — Lisbon, if I was honest with myself, though I didn't let myself think the word. I grabbed an old shoulder bag from the top of the closet, one I hadn't touched in years, and while I was shoving a jumper into it my hand found a postcard tucked into the lining. Blank. Addressed, in Clara's handwriting, to nobody, stamped but never sent. I keep telling him I'm too tired to plan it. I'm not tired. I'm scared of dying somewhere he can't get me home from. I read it twice at the door, coat half on, and then I put it in my pocket and left anyway, because if I stopped to think about it I wouldn't go at all.

The taxi ride to Schiphol took forty minutes. I don't remember most of it.

I remember the departures board, too bright, the names of cities sliding past like a joke at my expense. I remember standing in the queue for the ticket counter and the floor tilting very slightly, the way a boat does before you've admitted to yourself that you're seasick. I remember a woman's voice asking if I was alright, and answering that I was fine, and not being able to find my own name for a moment when she asked for it. I remember sitting down somewhere that wasn't a chair. After that there is very little, until a paramedic was crouched in front of me asking me to follow his finger with my eyes, and I felt, more than anything else, embarrassed.

They called Emma. I don't know why they had her number and not my doctor's. Perhaps I'd written it somewhere in one of the guidebooks, on some form nobody was supposed to read.

She arrived before the ambulance had decided whether to take me anywhere. She didn't ask what I'd been thinking. She sat next to me on the plastic bench and said nothing at all for a long time, which was, I understood later, its own kind of answer.

At home she made tea neither of us drank.

"You could have told me," she said finally.

"I didn't tell myself."

She nodded slowly, like that made a strange kind of sense to her.

For the two weeks after that, I saw almost no one. Emma called most days; most days I let it ring out, and when I did pick up I gave her one-word answers until she gave up and said goodbye. I didn't open a guidebook. I didn't leave the apartment except for the mandatory follow-up, which I sat through without really listening. I was angry, though it took me a while to work out at whom — the illness, mostly, but also, unfairly, at Clara, for the postcard I now carried in my pocket everywhere and couldn't put down and couldn't look at for more than a few seconds at a time.

Then, on a Tuesday, Emma turned up anyway, without calling first, carrying a cardboard box.

"I don't know if this will do anything," she said, before I could ask. "I just didn't want to keep sitting there doing nothing." Inside were hundreds of folded slips of paper. Places. Every place she could think of.

I disliked the whole idea immediately, and said so.

"Fine," she said, and left the box on the table anyway.

For over a week I ignored it. She didn't push. She'd visit, glance at the box still sealed, and talk about something else entirely. On the ninth day, mostly out of boredom, I opened it.

Hundreds of folded slips stared back at me.

I unfolded one.

"The Isle of Skye."

Another.

"The world's largest ball of twine."

I looked at Emma.

"You got creative?"

She shrugged.

"I ran out of countries."

I smiled despite myself.

Then I reached in again.

Reykjavík.

She handed me a notebook without comment, the way you hand someone a tool and trust them to figure out what it's for.

The experiment lasted three months. Every day I selected a place, sometimes a city, sometimes a village with fewer people in it than my apartment building, and stayed there. One place. Not twenty.

I learned, that autumn, three words of Portuguese from a fisherman's blog entry, and said them out loud to the empty apartment one evening, feeling foolish, and said them again anyway.

Not every day went well. One afternoon I pushed the box away before Emma had even sat down.

"I don't want to pick anything today."

"Okay."

"I'm tired of pretending a slip of paper fixes anything."

She didn't argue. She sat with me in silence, then left without the notebook. I felt petty about it for days — snapping at a seventeen-year-old who had lugged a box across the city because she didn't know what else to do with an old man who'd tried to run away from an airport. She came back the following week as though nothing had happened.

Autumn arrived, then winter. The doctors stopped scheduling appointments very far ahead. The guidebooks gathered dust because I rarely reached for them anymore.

One evening Emma asked whether the experiment had worked.

I considered the question carefully.

"No."

"No?"

"No. The world is still impossibly large. And I'm still only one person."

"And?"

"But maybe that was never the problem."

The final entry in the notebook was written on a quiet February afternoon. Snow drifted beyond the windows. My hands trembled more than they used to. Writing took longer.

I stared at the blank page for several minutes. Then, instead of the island I'd read about that morning, I found myself writing about Lisbon. About the two tickets in a drawer. About a postcard I still hadn't shown anyone, that I now kept in that same drawer, because it seemed like the two things belonged together.

I will never see the place I meant to see with her.

For a long time that truth would have devastated me.

The world was never a book I was going to finish anyway — not because it's too big, but because it always needed two tickets, and somehow I only ever kept one.

I placed the pen down. Outside, snow kept falling.

Somewhere on the other side of the planet, dawn was breaking over oceans I would never cross. A fisherman was beginning his day, in a language of which I somehow knew three words.

The thought no longer filled me with sorrow.

Only something quieter, harder to name — closer to wonder than to grief, though not entirely free of either.

The world was larger than I could ever know.

And somehow, at last, that felt enough.