Map of where the lights were

In her notebook she kept a map of where the lights were. Not the streetlights, not the bridge sodium, not the porch lamps left on by accident in November — those were on every map, public and free and beneath notice. She mapped the others.

The square of orange on the fourteenth floor of the building near the bank that came on at three a.m. and went off at four. The single window in the brick wall by the canal, blue, always blue, no curtain, no figure behind it, never another color. The doorway at the back of the noodle place that pulsed faintly green when the cook was in a mood, which was rarely.

She did not know why she mapped them. The notebook was small. The lights kept their schedules without her observation. When she missed one for a week — when a flu kept her indoors or a deadline kept her elsewhere — the lights forgave her, came on at their usual hours, waited.

A man asked once what she was writing. "Lights," she said, which was true. He nodded as if she had said the weather, which was kind.

Her hypothesis, when she allowed herself a hypothesis, was that someone else also kept a map. That the city had a second city stitched through it made entirely of decisions to leave a window orange at three a.m., and that her map was one of many, and that if all the maps were laid over each other the second city would resolve like a developing photograph, and then —

She closed the notebook. The next light was due in forty minutes.