Every Year, the Old Map Lost Another Street

When Wen renewed his staff card for the seventy-sixth time, the clerk asked him to remove his glasses.

He did. She compared him with the old photograph. “You've aged well.”

He offered no explanation. The people who knew he did not age had moved away, retired, or stopped visiting the map archive. New colleagues assumed “Master Wen” was merely a courtesy.

A deep drawer held discarded maps of a few western streets. A printing revision had removed a bend; roadworks had filled a canal. Each time the city changed, he kept the replaced sheet, as though saving a missing person's coat.

This year the stone bridge was to change.

It was called Locust Bridge, although the tree was long gone. The new neighborhood wanted Star River Bridge. The school planned to print the name on its homeward walking routes. Wen returned the application: Historical name. Recommend retention.

“Everyone already calls it that,” his younger colleague said.

“An error doesn't improve with age.”

That afternoon a girl bought a map. She slid a slightly sticky coin across the counter and pointed to Locust Bridge.

“Where's Star River Bridge?”

He circled it in pencil. “Same bridge.”

“No. There's a ramp here. You can push a cart down it. Your map sends people to the steps.”

He reached for his glasses. The thin line still indicated steps. Last time he had visited, a cobbler kept a stall there, his nails in a metal biscuit tin. Wen remembered its color but could not recall how many years had passed.

The girl bought the map. “Am I allowed to change it?”

“It's yours now.”

She drew a crooked line on the counter, added an arrow, and wrote “My house.”

On Saturday, Wen took the old map to the bridge. The ramp was real. The steps remained, but a railing blocked their far end. Anyone pushing a cart and following his map would have to turn around and make a long detour.

He waited there as though expecting a friend whose work shift had changed.

A patch of open ground occupied the tree's old place. Children were drawing stars in chalk. A passerby explained that the neighborhood had screened a film there one summer. The children had called it Star River Bridge ever since.

Wen remembered that “Locust Bridge” had started as something people said too. There had been no application form. Its branches hung low; people tilted their heads as they crossed.

On Monday he drew the ramp and removed the misleading route. At the bridge's label his pen hovered.

His colleague placed two cups of tea nearby and said nothing.

At last he wrote “Star River Bridge” on the main map and “Formerly Locust Bridge” in a note. On a separate sheet he drew the tree, the steps, and the cobbler's stall. The biscuit tin's color did not belong on a navigation map. He recorded it in the margin.

At the month's end the archive opened a small exhibition of old streets. The girl returned with classmates.

“I found the mistake with that ramp first,” she said.

Wen nodded and offered her the pencil. “What else is wrong nearby?”

She bent over the table to look. For the first time, he felt that the unfamiliar names on the new map were not all evidence of loss. Some were routes other people were taking home.