When he returned to New York, Matthew hung the map up in his apartment, just like a souvenir. He studied it closely for a while, taking down dates and locations, trying to find some kind of pattern. Sometimes new markings seemed to appear that he hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe they hadn’t been there before. He wondered who had made the map, how, and why. What purpose did it serve? Was it a toy? Or was it somehow useful?
One day, as he was getting ready to go to a Mets game with a friend, he noticed a new marking appear on the map, very different from the others. It glowed like the blue base of a flame. It was in New York, right in Manhattan, not far from where he was. He promptly forgot about the Mets game and his friend. He grabbed a compass from his desk, took the map down from the wall, and ran out the door.
The coordinates took him to Saks Fifth Avenue, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary, just pedestrians minding their business, cars and taxis, a woman walking her dog, a man in a suit leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette.
Matthew unfolded the map. The symbol on the map was still there, still glowing. When he looked up again, a woman emerged from the store. Matthew Hudson’s heart stopped dead in his chest. He couldn’t quite say what it was about this woman that slapped him so silly, but he knew she was anything but ordinary. It wasn’t only that she was beautiful. Matthew had seen plenty of beautiful women in his life, and they never had this effect on him. It was something else, an otherworldliness, a certain energy. She was different. He wanted to meet this woman. He thought maybe he could offer to help her, since she had several bags and packages. That wasn’t creepy, was it? He wasn’t experienced in approaching strange women. He wasn’t much experienced with women at all. He’d always been very shy with girls. They always made him feel awkward and tongue-tied. He simply had no confidence when it came to those things. But this woman, for whatever reason, made him feel bold. He had to talk to her. He just had to.
But before he took a step, a taxi pulled up. In all respects, it looked like an ordinary taxi, except for two things. It was full of people, surely more passengers than there were seat belts, and in the place where there would usually be an advertisement on top of the car, there was instead a symbol. It was exactly the same symbol that showed up all over the map in varying shades, a compass with a V at the center. In this case, the V was bright red.
The woman shoved her packages in the trunk. She looked over her shoulders both ways, clearly checking to see if anyone was watching. Her eyes locked on Matthew. They stared at each other for a moment, and then her face spread into a smile, almost like she recognized him somehow. Matthew Hudson’s heart nearly leaped out of his chest. She gave him a wink and got inside the very crowded taxi.
Then something happened that Matthew Hudson wasn’t sure he really saw or not. The taxi drove off and disappeared. Truly disappeared. One moment there, the next gone. He looked at his map. The symbol was still bright, but it was no longer glowing.
From that moment on Matthew was obsessed. He could barely take his eyes off the map. When he was at home, it was on the wall in front of his desk. He looked at it about every five minutes. If he was forced to go out, to class or to work, or home to visit his mother, he always brought the map with him. His mom teased him about it once, asked if he’d found any nice girls to date on that map of his.
Matthew would never mention the mysterious woman to his mother. She’d think he was crazy, and on some level Matthew thought she would be right, but he couldn’t get the woman out of his head. Who was she? Where did she come from? Where had she gone? And how? How had the taxi just disappeared like that? He had to know. He had this feeling that he was meant to find this map, that he was meant to cross paths with that woman, for whatever reason. Sometimes he saw glowing new markings appear, as he had in New York, but they were always too far away, and would often disappear before he could even make travel arrangements. Even if he could, he didn’t think he’d have much luck, not if the dates that hovered over the glowing symbol were correct. They were all over the place in time, as far back as 44 BC and even into the twenty-first century AD. Eventually Matthew figured out what was going on. As improbably as it seemed, the woman was a time traveler, and this map was somehow tracking her movements.
It was almost a year before he was able to see the woman again. He almost missed it. August 24, 1996.
