Zola had been mapping the city for two years without knowing why.
It was not her city. Or rather: it had her city's bones, the river in roughly the right place, the hills to the north, the long flat stretch east, but the connections were wrong. Streets met at angles that didn't match. The district near the old port had an entire quarter that Zola could walk in her sleep and did, most nights, but could not find on any map she had ever consulted in her professional life.
She was an urban planner. Her professional life was maps.
She kept her own map in a notebook, the dream city accumulating in the margins around her work notes. The corner of Lansen Street and what she called the Long Perpendicular, because she had no name for it, because it didn't exist. The fish market that was not a fish market. The square with the large tree: she had been in that square forty-three times by her count, could describe the tree in detail, had no idea what kind of tree it was because she always dreamed it in winter.
On a Tuesday evening, on the train home, the man beside her opened a book and she saw the map.
It was hand-drawn. Pencil. The scale was different from hers. But there was the river and there were the hills and there was the district near the port with the quarter that shouldn't be there, and she could see even at that angle the corner: not labeled the same as in her notebook, but recognizably the same intersection, the same angle, the same turn.
She said nothing for thirty seconds. She watched him read.
"Excuse me, " she said finally. "Can I ask where you got that map?"
He looked at her with the expression of someone caught doing something private. "I drew it, " he said.
They talked for twenty-three minutes. He was a ceramicist; she was a planner; they had no obvious reason to have dreamed the same city. He had the tree in summer. He had not been to the fish market, or rather he had and it had sold something other than fish but he could not say what. The long perpendicular street he knew as simply the long street, also unnamed.
At the stop where he got off he gathered his book and his bag. He paused at the doors.
"I've never shown anyone the map before, " he said.
Neither had she. She watched the doors close.
She rode three more stops to her own and walked home in the rain with her notebook in her bag, the map she'd been keeping for two years resting against what she now knew was someone else's map of the same impossible place, the two of them not touching, the distance between them shorter than it had been that morning.