Mr. Goud dropped the massive stack of index sheaths on Casey's tiny desk. Both Casey and the desk groaned.

"It's only your second week at Originpoint, Casey," Mr. Goud said, wiping his thick brow from the exertion. "You don't really have a place to complain."

Casey leaned back in his chair, trying not to sigh. His job as an editorial assistant, so far, was extremely boring. Of course, right out of college, he didn't expect much with a quasi-useless degree in English. Originpoint seemed the most promising of his potential jobs because of vintage cartography, a field he didn't know much about but at least sounded exotic. That hint of excitement was quickly squashed by sheer volume and relatively arbitrary nature of the paperwork: bills, client databases, purchase orders. Most of his office workers were twice his age and aloof. The air conditioning barely worked, which wasn't a strong point in D.C. in late August.

The bone-crushing reams that his boss deposited on his desk, however, seemed the coup d'grace. Casey, reluctantly, nodded.

"That's the spirit," Goud said. Goud looked like a cross between a Renaissance bursar and a turn-of-the-century prizefighter. His ties was velvety, his teeth were crooked, and he wore four to six ruby rings at any given time.

"Look, I don't know if you're ready for this yet. But it's time for you to salt the index."

A few co-workers looked up at Casey from their computers and quickly looked away.

"Salting the index?" Casey loosened his tie a bit.

"Or salting the map. Same thing. You see, Casey..." Goud already began to enter into his already familiar Corporate Lecture Mode. "Originpoint is the leader in vintage cartography. Our atlases are second to none in historical accuracy, geophysical skill, and artistic elegance." Nearly verbatim from the company propaganda, Casey realized. "Therefore, we have to make sure that our competitors don't steal our ideas, particularly through our indexes. It's been known to happen before that fly-by-night competitors scan a few uncopyrighted maps from Victorian travelogues and photocopy our indexes, only recoding the coordinates. And then they sell the product to WalMart."

"WalMart?"

"Or wherever. The point is, that if we salt the map with cities that don't exist, we can cross-check our enemies--I mean, competitors--" Goud cleared his throat. "--to ensure that no one's stealing from us."

Casey didn't like the sound of this. "So I have to..?"

"Sow this. About every other page, I want you to make up some placenames. Just sprinkle them here and there."

"What if they're from a place in Germany? I don't know German."

Goud gave a toothy grin. "Just make them up. Use your imagination. It can't do any harm; the atlas is so big that a few grains of salt won't destroy the field."

Casey nodded again. "All right. I'll see what I can do."

"By tomorrow morning."

Casey couldn't help laughing. "What?"

"Tomorrow morning. If you can't get it done here, you'll have to take it home with you."

Restraining a groaning sigh, Casey flipped through the thick ream. "I'm on my way."

Someone in the office snickered, but Casey couldn't tell from which cubicle the noise came from. The ceiling fan droned on, pushing the sweltering air from one end of the office to the other, which didn't do a lick of good.

Casey stared at the motes of dust caught in the beams of window light (though the windows themselves, arched with gray stone, were high and small) before turning to the first few pages, the A's. His red correction pen hovered over page 3. His hand shook a little and his whole body was tense, like he was about to jump off a high dive platform. Casey was never good at artistic license; his papers in English classes were steady and methodical. "Silly me," he muttered to himself, before lowering the pen onto the page. ABTACAS, he wrote, pg. 455, C3.

Not a bad start. He flipped through a few more pages.

ARGH, pg. 59, F9. A town name that summarized his state of frustration. He was definitely a full time resident in the town of Oargh.

Goud passed by with a cup of coffee in one hand, a cornucopia of donuts in the other. "Don't forget to put the population figures down."

"What?" Casey's heart, which was already ground-level, sunk into the basement. "But that's not in the atlas itself." Casey didn't even know the name of it; all he knew was that it was- allegedly--their "big project," soon to be released.

"You're right. But we have a separate database where the population figures DO enter into the equation. For our CD-Rom. Sorry I forgot to mention that. Get to it." Goud stuffed a donut into his mouth and kept walking.

"Shit," Casey said to himself. He flipped back to the first few pages.

ABTACAS, population 4122. He wet his fingers on his tongue and found the listing for ARGH. Population 310,210 he scribbled.

He decided Argh needed a lot of inhabitants.

After Brogen (pg. 75, E5, pop. 12560), he went to the coffee machine for a desperately needed midmorning fix. A woman who he'd seen before only vaguely, and only from a distance, slammed her fist against the side of the coffee maker. The machine eventually spewed black blood through the filter and into her rainbow-colored cup.

She wore thin wire rimmed glasses perched delicately on her nose. She looked twenty-five or so, slightly older than Casey, wearing two silver bracelets, a carefully smoothed green dress, a squeegee in her strawberry blond hair.

"Sorry for the ruckus," she said with a sheepish grin.

"Don't worry about it," Casey said, running his hand over his face. "Once I get some caffeine in my blood, I'll be more cogent."

She laughed. "I like that word, cogent." They exchanged names. Vanessa. "You're the new guy, aren't you?"

"Isn't it obvious?" he said, taking a scalding sip of coffee. It burned his tongue, but he didn't want to appear unseemly.

"More than you know," Vanessa said, taking a similar sip. He asked how long she worked at Originpoint.

"Ages and ages." She looked away briefly, but her edginess was smoothed out after a few seconds. "What are they having you do? Follow the elephants in the parade to clean their shit?"

This time he laughed. She didn't look like the person who would use the word "shit" and he appreciated that he was actually having a conversation with someone from the office. A few co-workers in camel-colored suits passed by in a caravan, speaking in hushed tones, as if there was a funeral in the break room and can you please quiet? Casey did his best to ignore them. "A lovely task called salting the map."

She looked pleased. "Ahhh...I imagine they're getting close to finishing the project then."

"That's what they're saying at least. So if you're not working on this atlas, which are you working on?"

"Oh, I work in Room A."

A silence followed. Should he have known about Room A? He looked into her eyes and figured, no, I don't care if I look stupid. "What's Room A?"

She stepped away, and leaned against a filing cabinet, looking dashing without really trying. She raised her chin and looked dashing. "It's a special project. Kind of hard to...explain. So I'll see you, OK?"

"OK, Vanessa." His brain was a mash of imagined place names--Kipling, Gessepy, Dandyolio, Barktempest.

The smell of her hair (lilacs, maybe) kept with him as he slumped back to his deck, barely out of the Gs.

By closing time, he'd only reached the Rs. Goud gave him a sour grimace as he left, but luckily didn't provide another corporate pep talk.

Casey gathered his bundle of remaining index pages together, and left the building, which on a rainy day could have been mistaken for a mausoleum. The entrance was a heavy stone arch, done on a larger scale than the windows, set with glass doors. A chilly breeze hit him as passed through. No motions or sounds on quiet M street just a few blocks from DuPont Circle; for an instant, all was silent in the frenetic city. Casey blinked. Then the sounds and motion of pedestrians, cabs, and boom boxes leaked into the block. He walked the dozen blocks to his flat in Adams-Morgan, already beginning to swell with the early evening dinner crowds, yuppies from Maryland mixing with the Salvadorian vendors selling roses and baseball caps.

Once at his apartment, he arranged the atlas pages on his orange sofa. The musty couch--if it could even deserve that name--simmered against the wall like a melted horse carriage.

Cooking some ramen noodles, he started the Rs. Retinal, pg. 670, A1, pop. 344.

Hmmming, he added two zeros to the end of 344.

The phone rang. An old friend from George Mason was supposed to call two days ago to go drinking. Instead, he received a raspy voice on the other line.

"Is Casey Van Houssen there?"

"Um, speaking." Listening to a telemarketer with a voice from the grave was not on his list of priorities.

"Casey, you have the spelling wrong on your last entry. It's supposed to be Retinul, not Retinal. With a u." The man gave a spewing cough that lasted for a few seconds.

Casey was tempted to hang up, then and there, but the last statement by the stranger caught him by surprise.

"Is this Mr. Goud?" The only quasi-conceivable explanation.

"I'll make you eat your tongue, boy, if you say that again. Now get it right. Retinul. And the population is 344, not some crazy 34 thousand. Get your factuals straight, would you?" The person hung up.

Casey sat there in dead silence, holding the receiver on his lap until it started beeping. Not knowing how to process the last conversation, he did the only thing that made sense to him. He added the "u" to the village name and erased the extra zeros with whiteout. The whole project made no sense to him, and yet it was a jumble he didn't want to let go. He finished the entire thing at 3am and he dropped asleep on the couch, reggae music blaring from the street outside. He dreamed of being a saddlebag doctor and visiting each place he invented.

What surprised him when he woke up was that he remembered, in the dream, each place name in the dream, as he planned his long itinerary for his visits of the sick.

When Casey was ten or eleven, and was socially inept, his Dungeons & Dragons playing often led to imaginary world building, scribbling maps on the backs of his father's abandoned inventory logs from the teddy bear factory. Most of the maps were never used in his adventures, with his usual cadre of introverted friends. Growing up in Vienna, Virginia--the farthest ring of suburban hell away from D.C.--wasn't always easy. Casey retreated from his own life; coping with a hobgoblin in a dank dungeon was always easier to deal with than getting a swirlie by a seventh grader much larger than him.

The names of continents, rivers, mountain ranges, and cities would roll off his number 2 pencil in a cavalcade of mediocrity: Mountains of Tears, Teal Ocean, Forest of Elves, Gehenred River. Geographies with no correspondence to the real world. How could there be a rain forest adjacent to a desert? How could this city of half a million souls exist, with no roads, in the middle of the mountains?

He knew that, in the end, he shouldn't have been so hard on himself. When his parents called him "precocious" at dinner parties they hosted, he took it as a compliment. Only years later, when he bothered to look it up in a dictionary, did he understand his parent's slightly disparaging use of the word. But by then, all of his Dungeons & Dragons material was sold to garage sales. That part of his personality withered away, like it did with most of his friends. Casey's life took on real qualities, and although he wasn't the most successful at his friends in acclimating to "real life," the goals in his high school existence became more concrete than the ones during middle school: losing his virginity, smoking pot, and reading Dylan Thomas.

The world of invention could hold no surprises for him. In college, books had clear beginnings and endings, and the etymology of words were cast in soldered iron. He wanted, eventually, to go to law school in a few years, delve into the hard-edged nuances of justice. He was positive in what he believed--until he salted the map.

After lugging and depositing the now salted index on Mr. Goud's desk strewn with miniature tablets and smooth orange stones that Casey assumed were souvenirs from trips to Crete or Micronesia, he went to the receptionist, a bone thin old man that tended to scowl at Casey when he entered for the day.

"Is there a map for the building?" Casey asked.

The receptionist, balancing a stubby pencil on his thumb and index finger, squinted at Casey. "Why?"

"I want to know where the fire exits are. You know, if the whole place goes up in smoke. Poof." He made a David Copperfield-esque wave of his hands.

The old man, who smelled like beet juice, rattled his head. "What's your security clearance?"

Was this in his employee handbook? Something that he forgot to commit to memory?

Casey paused. But the receptionist cut off his pause. "Evidently it's not high enough to secure the map." The man turned back to his tattered copy of Archaeology magazine.

"All rightey," Casey said, going back to his desk. Thank God his medical and dental coverage was good. On the back of a Chinese menu that he'd found in his desk--the place must have closed ages ago, for he had never heard or seen of this place, even though it was supposed to be across the street from Originpoint--he sketched a large island in the shape of an ibis. Along the island-continent's neck, he devised a series of coastal city-states, seven of them, each with names from a secret alphabet that couldn't be written in anything but invisible ink. This exchange between pen, paper, and hand left Casey breathless.

"Casey, can you see me?" Goud said on the fizzy intercom. Reluctantly, Casey set his pencil down and went over to Goud's desk. The color of Goud's tie was dolphin gray. Casey, trying to cut the verbal horses off at the pass, said, "So what's in Room A?"

Goud let out a long, bellowing laugh that was pretty unpleasant. "Consider that your Antarctica. Your terra incognito."

"Don't you mean incognita?"

"If you say so, Casey. If you say so." Goud sank lower into his chair. "Anyway, I'll be reviewing the salting tonight. We're going to get you back to tasks more up to your speed."

"But--"

"There's a disk of a client database on your desk, Casey, as we speak. You know the drill."

Casey was twenty-two, and too old to whine or simper, but it was damn tempting.

After two hours cranking out letters to clients, lunch break nearing, he got up from his desk to go to the bathroom, with its olive ceramic urinal. When he sat back down at his desk, his continent doodle was missing. He scoured his entire desk, but couldn't find it. "What the hell?" he muttered. He knew he didn't misplace it; someone had snitched it, but he was too afraid to accuse any of his co-workers who, incidentally, wouldn't meet his eyes.

Goud would meet his eyes, but many times it would be to add effect to a sneer.

Vanessa would have met his eyes, but she was nowhere to be found as he left the building for the day. On K street that night, still bitter that his map had been stolen, he stopped at a stationary store, and purchased a sheaf of onionskin paper and a thin, elegant ballpoint pen. Back at home, the entire apartment building eerily quiet, Casey rolled out the onionskin on the coffee table that was branded with burn circles from the mugs of previous owners. He took off the cap of the pen; he could almost hear the ink swish, like tree branches in a steady breeze. "Fuck off, Goud," he muttered, and he began to draw the building he worked in, drew the map that he was denied. He drew the straight lines freehand. Some of the rooms he knew from memory, but many he had to improvise. "Hello, Room A," he said, and he devised it--a narrow room with vast windows facing east, letting in actual, usable sunlight, a utopia compared to what the building actually was. Long tables for mapmaking, of course, and lots of globes of the earth and moon. An hourglass in the corner large as a giraffe, which he placed in the corner. His marks were swift and precise and right. Casey knew it.

Finally, he was careful to put the proper amount of fire exits throughout the building.

The next day, firetrucks barricaded the Originpoint building.

Casey stopped with his mouth open in front of the stone arch doorway. There was a faint smell of ozone in the air. The firetrucks didn't have D.C. insignia; they were painted red and only red. The drivers to the firetrucks waited, blank-eyed, tapping their fingers on the steering wheels.

As Casey entered, he heard a hustle and bustle that he'd never encountered before at Originpoint. People, to put it in the vernacular, were freaking out. His anonymous co-workers, calm and cold on every other occasion, gossiped rapidly and ran from cluster to cluster, up and down the spiral staircase along the opposite wall. Casey clutched the onionskin map he held in his sweating hands.

Goud, or Vanessa for that mat ter, were nowhere to be seen. Some of the co-workers gave passing glances at him, but rather than seeming disdainful of Casey, they seemed almost afraid to meet his eyes.

A hush came as four firemen, in gray uniforms and gray plastic hats, came down the stairs with grim faces shoulder to shoulder. They pointed at him in silence.

"Casey!" Goud's voice boomed from across the room. Casey walked to Goud's desk, and silence followed in his wake.

"Sit down," Goud growled. His face was purple and a vein stuck out on his forehead.

Casey looked around, afraid of what Goud had to say. "But there isn't a chair."

"Do you think I care? Sit down."

After a second pause, with the glare of Goud's eyes like prison searchlights, he sank to the floor and sat cross-legged. He could barely see the tip of Goud's nose from his vantage point. The floor was caked in a fine layer of dust that was almost like silt.

"I've looked at your work salting the map, Casey, and I have to say that I'm extremely disappointed." His voice quivered, and Casey couldn't tell where the quivering came from.

"What did I do wrong? I followed your instructions to the T." The firefighters reached the bottom of the stairs, gave a curt wave to Goud, and left through the arch. A smell of camphor and burning fuse boxes followed in their wake.

"No," Goud said, "you followed them to a Q. Q as in 'questionable.' You didn't get close to the T."

"What are you talking about?"

Goud cracked his knuckles. "It's quite simple. You copied down places that actually exist and put them into your salting, instead of imaginary, fanciful ones. What index did you crib the names from?" Goud leaned over the desk. "Did you think that would save some time, Casey? Cutting some corners? Did you?"

Casey tried to look dignified as possible, but realized that was impossible sitting in front of his boss's desk, covered in rich dust. "That's impossible. All those names I made up, I swear." The jumble of them, like unruly horses, ran through his head. "What about Barktempest?"

"A lovely village on the northern coast of New Zealand, founded in 1863 by the inventor of the collapsible kennel."

"OK, um, what about Argh?"

"A city on the fringes of the Talamakan Desert. Known for its prayer rugs and the grave of a Czar's son who abdicated his position and became a missionary, and died in Argh in 1707. Funny, but you got the population figure right exactly. Funny how that happened."

Casey put his hands on his forehead. "No, that's impossible."

"It was very possible, and very easy, since you cheated. What you did violated the integrity of our entire profession."

"What's with the firefighters?" Casey hoped this would be a good distraction, but it only made Goud angrier.

"That's none of your concern. I'm putting you on probation. I've talked to other members of the board, and you're lucky you aren't fired. Until you're deemed fit to do more than utterly menial tasks, you'll be doing utterly menial tasks. Just be warned..." Goud trailed off. "Where are you?"

Humiliated, his head pounding, Casey said, "On the floor, sir. Where you told me to sit."

"Well, stand up where I can see you."

Grimacing, Casey wobbled to his feet. His left foot had fallen asleep, so it took all his concentration to stand upright and not be embarrassed again by falling. He only heard bits and pieces of Goud's soliloquy on values, cartography, and the worth of an honest dollar. "Is this clear?" Goud said at last.

Casey, nearly to the point of tears, weakly nodded.

"Here, then." Goud handed him a quiver of blunt pencils. "Sharpen these. The only sharpener in the building is in the basement--" Goud caught himself, and stammered, his composure lost for an instant. "I mean, it got moved, to the end of the hallway at the top of the stairs."

Casey took the pencils, and wondered what kind of business had only one pencil sharpener. But Casey knew the answer immediately: a fucked-up business. He also knew something wasn't right in that last exchange, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The best he could do was to slink away.

Moving up the stairs, he beat the dozen eraserheads against his palm. "It isn't fair," he muttered, grating his teeth. None of it was fair. Originpoint was the problem, not him. At the top of the stairs, the smells of ozone assailed him, and he decided what he would do. What he needed to do. He would drop the sharpened pencils on Goud's desk and quit.

The light from the high windows was diffuse and milky. He saw the pencil sharpener, silver and looming on a black pedestal, at the other end of the hall. Then he stopped, and took the map he made the night before out of his back pocket. Uncreasing it, and tracing his finger along his sketch of the second floor, he froze.

He had sketched the pencil sharpener on the map to appear at the end of the hall. His head swam. He looked at the doors of the rooms; their labels were hastily scratched over with a magic marker. "Storage." "Shipping." And "Room A." Each corresponded exactly to what was on his map. He couldn't read what was under the chickenscratch. A weird warmth crept inside Casey. He didn't consider it possible to predict the order and location of things. But there was evidence, and Casey needed to cling to evidence, no matter how implausible. Perhaps Goud felt threatened by him; perhaps Goud was crazy. Casey couldn't be sure.

He paused in front of Room A and listened, feeling like a spy in the house of malaise.

Nothing much. The scraping of pencils, a murmuring of intermixed voices like continual static feedback. A cough here and there.

A man piped up from behind the door, more loudly. "What do you think of this place? Arctangent City?" A rustling of paper.

"Definitely falsified. Who wrote that?" A woman said this, in a thick accent that sounded Greek.

"Calculus teacher from Boston, 1911. He killed himself in '35 but theorized the distances of imaginary cities based on algorithms and the distance from the sun to Uranus. What do you suppose Arctangent City looks like this time of year?"

"I see it now," the woman said. "Serpentine streets. Their king has a scimitar for a left arm." They both laughed, but it wasn't sarcastic, more the remembrance of a pleasant vacation.

"So what do you think of our new quarters."

"They're ok. I don't know why we moved, though. The big hourglass is a nice addition, though."

Casey was about to let out a surprised cry about the mention of the hourglass, his hourglass.

The "Shipping" door opened and Casey's back stiffened. Lame excuses ran like greyhounds through his head.

It was Vanessa, wearing khaki slacks and a blue shirt.

"Hey!" she said, cheery enough. "What are you doing up here?"

Casey tapped his feet. "Um, sharpening pencils." He paused, took a deep breath and in a halting voice he described what Goud told him. "I mean," he said in a whisper, "it's bullshit. I didn't falsify those cities, Vanessa."

She put her hand on his shoulder. His shoulder tingled. "I know. I'm on the board. Goud wanted to fire you, but I persuaded him to keep you on."

"You did? What the hell is going on?"

"Internal struggles. Paradigm shifts. The usual corporate bullshit."

Casey sighed. "I'm going to go down there and quit. I can't take any more of this."

Vanessa bit her lip. "It's your choice, Casey. I'm not going to tell you how to think or act. But I wouldn't quit. I want to explain more of this to you, but not right now."

"How about over dinner?" The words blurted out of his mouth, seemingly of their own accord. Casey didn't mind that they did.

"Are you asking me out?" Vanessa laughed, somehow making a giggle dignified, and even sexy.

"I guess I am."

"All right. Yes, Casey, I'll go out with you." They decided on an Ethiopian restaurant, and, walking on air, Casey left her to sharpen his pencils. The pencils that, after much temptation, he later didn't jam into Goud's throat but merely placed on his desk.

Everyone at their desks stared and scowled at Casey, but Casey beamed at each and every one of them.

Kill them with kindness.

Casey walked to the Dupont Metro stop, with the wide maw of the down-slanting tunnel and the slowly moving escalator. He took the Metro to the Mall. The Ethiopian restaurant skirted the edge of the Capitol district, on Connecticut; Casey wanted to walk the extra few blocks, watch the tourists and Vietnam vets mingle in an uneasy dance in the summer twilight. The Smithsonian Museums, the Washington Monument in the distance, the Capitol itself--the D.C. that existed in everyone's mind, even when that was only a snippet of the story, and a fanciful one at that.

Vanessa waited outside the restaurant in a sleeveless, white sun dress, a pearl pendant dangling below her neckline. Her body had the color and curves of an alabaster vase. Casey put his hands in the pockets of his gray dress slacks, and straightened his tie. His shirt was ecru. The three best items he owned.

They sat on low wicker stools and drank beers, waiting for their lamb. "You know," she said, it kind of surprised me when you asked me out."

"It kind of surprised me, too actually."

She smirked, but it wasn't an unkind smirk. "You were eavesdropping on Room A?"

He paused, trying to read any signs of paranoia on her face.

"Don't worry," she said. "It's natural to be curious. Besides, you were probably reeling from your hornlocking with Goud." She took his hand. Her skin was cool.

He laughed, and kept his hand interlocked in hers. "I wouldn't say we locked horns. It was more like an angry bull running through a drunken bullfighter."

"Goud has his good points," she said. "But I have to admit that they weren't exactly in full force that day. He's going through a lot, with the company."

"That might be true, but--"

Their lamb came. Casey loved Ethiopian food, and he rarely got a chance to eat it with such good company as Vanessa. He tried to push the myriad questions he had away, at least for a few minutes.

"The Ibexians cooked like this," she said, her mouth full, eyes closed, savoring. "Only their bowls were ten times this size. You had to climb into the dough, and eat your way out. It's been awhile."

Casey paused in midchew. "Isn't an ibex a type of goat?"

"Yeah, but that's where the ibex comes from. Ibexia."

"Where is Ibexia? The name sounds vaguely familiar, but..." His toe tingled, a sign that he had since he was a little boy that his brain and body were getting nervous in tandem.

Vanessa gave another laugh which sounded more like a defense mechanism than actual mirth. "South of Basque, east of France, I guess. Somewhere in the Pyrennes. I went there on vacation when I was a kid." She shrugged. "Are you going to have that pepper?"

Casey relented the pepper. He decided, if he didn't tell her now, then perhaps he'd never find the nerve to tell her.

"You look beautiful," he said.

She leaned back, about to return a similar compliment.

"There's something I have to ask you," he said quickly after, cramming his words in edgewise. He told her about the man who called her in the middle of the night, who corrected the spelling of his imaginary town. He scooted his stool forward and said in a low voice, "And I have to let you know, that Ibexia is one of the names of the towns I made up yesterday when I salted the map. Population 2500." He folded his hands together, scrying her face for any clues. But her face was of stone, of the non-Rosetta variety.

All she said was, quietly, "Oh dear. It's true."

"What's true?" he said.

Vanessa wiped her hands in four swift strokes with a purple napkin, and scrounched her eyebrows at Casey. "Curiouser and curiouser, huh?"

"I guess. Please tell me why Goud hates me, and accused me of screwing up. And why I shouldn't quit."

"It's like this, Casey. I've debated ever since you salted the map whether I should tell you. Some at the company want secrecy under the penalty of death, but...I like you. A lot."

"Is there a penalty of death?" Casey said, momentarily distracted.

"Well, some at Originpoint would like one, to tell you the truth. What is important is to have you think about maps differently. They're not static representations of geophysical space."

"Um, ok," Casey said, wanting a tequila to drink. Instead, he paid the bill.

She pressed his hand against the table, hard. "I'm serious, Casey. For the cartographers at Originpoint, maps are much more complicated. They don't represent the landscape. They define the landscape. That's the best place to start. I'll leave the political bitching for last. By the way, do you want to go?"

"Yeah, sure. Let's go."

They walked out into the busy street. Vendors gave the names of their roses in low whispers around them. Casey waited for Vanessa to continue, but she remained quiet and pensive, and they walked slowly toward the Capitol. "Where are you at?" Casey said. "I can walk you home."

"I took the Metro. I'll take it your way. Past Dupont. I can get home by myself after your stop."

"Do you live in Maryland then?"

"Not exactly." She kept her speech clipped.

Casey decided to let her sort it out--whatever it was--in her own head before he blundered and said something stupid.

On the red line, heading north, there was no one else in their car. Only three stops to Dupont; Casey wanted to hear what she said before he had to leave, but he didn't want to rush her either. He gave his I'm curious look, his slightly raised eyebrow.

After a few seconds, Vanessa sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder. "I don't know, Casey...this is all so difficult. I'm not supposed to talk about this. "

"Will this effect my employee evaluation?" he said, trying to make a joke of it. "I'm already in deep shit." But Vanessa puckered her lips, and apparently didn't hear him.

"It's like this," she said. "Throughout time people have made erroneous maps. People don't know the lay of the land, and yet they decide to draw it anyway. Kings, academies of mapmakers, the Phonecians, the Hittites...just because you can travel to a place doesn't mean you can know it. And some people falsified maps, just as larks. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Not yet. But go on," Casey said. He began stroking her fine hair, and she didn't pull away.

"What if there were people, though, who had to live in those places? The places drawn erroneously? Or even imaginary utopias or distopias?"

"Do you mean, the bad maps were accurate? In their way?"

"Yes, in their way. The sea serpents and krakens dotting the Atlantic Ocean--before it was called the Atlantic Ocean--were real for us. We had to confront them. The Auroras and the northwinds, huffing and puffing, blew our houses down. We had to learn the customs of these countries, but we didn't understand them."

"Who's 'we'?"

"Let me finish. We didn't know why this affected us. But, recently, we've found that with Geosats and computers doing most of the work, there's been no room for error. We thought we'd be happy, but it's been killing us. We lived so long in terra incognita that its imaginary contours began to affect us, and we couldn't quite place ourselves in terra firma. God knows we've been looking for terra firma, and one day maybe we'll find it."

Casey stood up. He was beginning to get frustrated. "Vanessa! Would you please tell me who you're talking about?" His stop would come in another three or four minutes. He clenched the pole. The subway rollicked through its tunnel all around him, like a worm racing through a burrow.

"Originpoint," Vanessa said finally, "isn't just a company. It's...a tribe. We found ourselves accidentally in one of Ptolemy's maps 2600 years ago, after getting lost in Asia Minor on a hunt. There was a stone archway. We entered it. We found the world to be divided in four quadrants. Which was fine, except the rivers flooded the perfectly flat plains, having no seas to empty into, and the sun stayed in the same place all the time."

She began to breathe heavily. "We didn't die. Goud, the other workers, none of us have ever died. We found another stone arch--"

"I get the picture," Casey said, not completely understanding. "Look, let me come with you to your place."

"You can't." She stood up, and looked behind her to the metro map set on the compartment wall. She traced a finger along the representation of the orange route, north into Maryland, and continued pressing her finger against the map's plastic case. A beige trail followed, as if her finger was a crayon or magic marker. Casey stood there with his mouth open. Her finger continued its brownish trail past the map; she stood up on the hard cushion of the subway and traced the continuation of the Metro line to the car's ceiling, where she stopped with her arm outstretched. Her bellybutton showed.

"That's where I live," she said. "On the ecru line." She smiled. "To match your shirt."

A smattering of comprehension came to Casey. "So when I salted the index, it wasn't that I happened to be lucky in finding placenames that happened to be real, or even could prognosticate them..."

"That's right," she said, with her arm still extended. "You created more fodder for us. But we need that. Imaginary maps are our lifelines. That's why we do vintage cartography. We always need new places to add to the mix, to call our own. The maps are our subconscious. Silly, huh?"

"Silly isn't the word for it. So what happened when I made the map of the office building--" He thought of the stone archways of the doors and windows, and what that must have signified.

"Casey, you rearranged the entire building to fit what you drew in the map. There shouldn't have been a way for you to do that. Most of the people in the tribe are afraid to talk to you, to tell you the truth." Casey didn't know what to say, or expect next. It wouldn't have surprised him if the entire subway car melted or broke out of its tunnel and flew across the Potomac.

"So all those imaginary and misnamed places, Originpoint has been to all of them? Even Barktempest and Argh?"

She touched his cheek with her palm. "Yes. And the guy who called you in the middle of the night was probably the mayor of Retinul, who wanted a smaller village rather than a large one. So, yes. Originpoint has been to all those places. Goud is afraid of you, but I'll try to work on him." She paused and looked down.

"Is this where the bitchy politics part comes in?"

Vanessa tapped his stomach playfully. "Hey, you're bright. The tribe has really been in a bind. Divided. Goud and a lot of the older people in the tribe don't want to solicit the help of 'outsiders.' They think it's too dangerous, that someone could easily turn on them and ruin them. But there are those of us who want to open things up. We had no idea when you got hired, and salted the map, that you would be able to change things like you did. But now, we need you, Casey."

"I want to help."

"I know you do, I know." She kissed his forehead. "So after I spilled the beans like this, do you still want to quit?"

Casey took a deep breath. "I'm pretty sure I don't. But tell me this--will you get angry if I went up to Goud and told him everything that I know? And demand an apology?"

Vanessa whistled. "I don't know, Casey. Goud's a tough nut to crack. But you're right--he's not being honest with you about why he put you on probation. It's better to bring this thing to a head."

"Tomorrow, then. I'll be back tomorrow."

The train came to a sudden halt. Dupont Circle Station. The concrete and chrome outside the subway windows mixed like ice and black ice. Vanessa lost her balance and collapsed, somehow artfully, into Casey's arms. Her body folded into his, like a letter into an envelope, and before he blinked he was kissing her. Kissing her neck and eyelashes and finally her mouth, as her hands clung to his shoulders. She returned the kisses with grace. Casey realized that this was what she wanted all along, but they were both surprised that he actually had the nerve to put himself in this position.

The door to his compartment slid open.

"Thank you," she said, "for a wonderful evening." She leaned her head against his and looked up, briefly, at the map of the Ecru Line on the ceiling.

Straddling between the hard concrete of the station and the thin carpeting of the subway car, holding the door open between the two...worlds? No, he decided. It might have been accurate but also too pretentious. He turned around. "I don't understand, though, why you have to worry about imaginary places. You're here. In the real world."

Vanessa grasped onto the pole and gave a sly smile. "It's interesting you're sure of that."

He stepped away, the door swung closed, and Vanessa sat in her seat, facing away from the station. The subway swung into the tunnel and Casey waited until even the noise of its departure died away.

Footsteps echoed in the station. Businessmen scurried down the stairs to get home after second shift, trios of men and women scrambled up the escalators to loll around Dupont Circle, to people-watch and saunter in the last remnants of the summer.

Casey loosened his tie and made for the stairs. Winding up a level, he walked a hundred more feet and stepped onto the escalator, to lead him from the subterranean to the terranean. He leaned against the guardrail and peered up as he moved up on the escalator. The Dupont station was the farthest underground in D.C. He always imagined himself arising from a pit mine or, better, soaring from ground level to the celestial sphere, a motorized Jacob's ladder.

Vanessa's scent stuck to his clothes and skin. He mulled over their conversation and their kiss. He had no idea if Goud, when confronted, would bite off his head. But Casey had facts and maps on his side. He would find out. He wanted to find out how much Vanessa wanted him in the tribe, and her life.

The full, bulging moon showed its face from behind a frieze of clouds, but then ducked away again, the Sea of Tranquility obscured by the condensation of water in Earth's upper atmosphere...Casey rattled his head and blinked hard. Five minutes could have passed, or fifteen. He was still on the escalator, still going up, and the surface appeared a long way off. The moon cast its gloss into the diagonal escalator tunnel. Looking down where he came from, the Farepass vending machines and brightly lit maps of crosswired subway routes appeared like the landscape in the few seconds after a plane would take off, when the fast cars and big houses still had normal perspective, still held some measure of the significance the owners of those cars and houses had in their own eyes.

"I am my own geosat," he whispered. Perspective leaked out of Casey. The moon was like a scientist, craning its face to stare down the barrel of a microscope, at the well-dressed creature rising out of the depths.

A fan kicked in above Casey with a gargantuan hum. The escalator tunnel could have lengthened and contracted. After that night, Casey wouldn't have doubted it. His place on the escalator finally broke the threshold between the enclosed space and open air. He could see the end: the vendor's carts piled away, the children screaming at each other in Spanish and skipping toward the Circle. Casey closed his eyes. The contours of the bewildering city didn't need a map. The city mapped him, etched his steps into the interplay of everyone else's steps. Each person was a map, he decided, as his feet hit sidewalk, the ground zero of moving bodies. Everyone was equal parts flesh and imagination, bound together like sodium and chloride, like the salt of the earth.

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