The Cartographers

I couldn’t tell if he genuinely meant the things he said or if it was all talk. He really liked to paint the maps on subway cars, he said-“On them, inside them, it doesn’t matter: that’s where most people see it, and share it, and use it”- but of course this was also the most logistically difficult to execute. Inside the tunnels, the risk was lower, but so was the reward. “It’s a good place to practice, though. I can almost always do a whole map in under thirty minutes now”.

The red stretching far into the Bronx and into Brooklyn, the green making its efficient way, the yellow splitting towards the beaches. I knew the whole of the city was only three hundred square miles, but it was like he was painting the world and everyone in it. This was where I lived now, there was my life on the wall of a subway tunnel, put there by someone I didn’t even know.