On July 16, 1945, the edges of the world blurred. Atoms spilled their guts and burst the limits of their size, swelled with their new limitlessness, ate everything around them in a fraction of a second then everything around that and around that until they realized that, wait a moment, there were still limits after all. Collapsing in upon themselves, the atoms gripped and fell, tearing the seams of the world as they tumbled back into gravity. Things shifted. Ideas seeped through the rents.

In Boston, a printing press caught for an eternal second, feeling the thoughtquake. Time paused, thinking it was dead, then felt its heart remember how to beat. The press shook itself awake then continued on in the remade world. In Sydney and in Bombay and in Berlin the presses felt it too, held their breaths for a moment expecting an end to all things. Then, when all things didn’t end, they breathed out, looked ashamed of their apocalypse-gripped mechanisms, and ground on.

Maps fell from the presses, were folded and tied, marked SECRET when they were and sometimes when they weren’t, put in boxes, sent by rail and boat to the fronts.

Meanwhile the fronts had felt that sliding, felt the word ‘front’ lose its precision, smear over everything, and their lines sagged a little knowing it was time to give up the glory. When there’s no home left to write to, they thought, there would be nothing to write home about, and then who would tell the story of trench-dug mateship and mud-bound mateship and maggoty-canned-beef mateship and latrine-drowned mateship? The fronts pulled their belts tight, holding their edges in another thirty long days, but everyone knew their time had gone.

August rolled around, and then September. Things receded. The maps, still in their boxes, were left tangled in time’s riparian trees along with the final solution and destruction that couldn’t be mutually assured and keeping the home fires burning and an empire on which the sun never set – left high and dry as everything else subsided and moved on, cutting a new course through an old floodplain. Maps were left dripping, irrelevant and forgotten, then swollen, then dry, until a man with a pointy stick pulled them down and found a way to sell them for money.

The maps, it is no surprise to learn, had recorded the shift of the world along with their usual stories of borders, capitals, major cities, mountains, rivers, creeks. They went out into the world ingenuous, presenting all the facts (admittedly in neither legend nor key, but still), and it was hardly their fault that no one bothered to see.

Of the maps of that moment, most – within forty years or so – found their way to a Tulsa landfill to soak up the juices of leaking diapers and microwave Hot Pockets. Some were pulped and reconstituted into paper for inkjet printers in a Canberra scientific office. Two lined the moulds of mud brick makers in Bubaneshwar. In 1972 one became a shade for the light that hung above a couch in a Prague apartment; on his second visit to the apartment a young man was delighted when the lampmaker showed him the couch could be converted into a bed. Later, he spent the time between 3.14 and 3.46 am, the light still burning, tracing the route of the Vltava south to Ĉeske Budejovice, imagining himself in a home-made canoe.

One packet of maps stayed with the man with the pointy stick. He didn’t just collect pointy sticks; he also had a passion for cardboard boxes and for folding paper. Things weren’t yet at the point where he couldn’t let a single piece of folding paper pass through his hands – later he would find every brochure, newspaper and piece of giftwrap impossible to relinquish, but for now money still meant as much to him as the knife-sharp edges and softened planes on a folded brown paper bag, used and reused over tens and twenties of lunchtimes. So he sold most, but he kept one packet of maps, just for himself.

When the man first traveled to The Gap it was a holocaust of shadows. The man near smothered when, on a stroll out into the shimmery emptiness of his new kingdom, he was submerged in the cut-short imaginings of 72 million futures: children, houses, a picnic on the meadows near Warsaw, a train set that was only twelve more instalments of pocket money away, cheese, a blanket from the officer’s mess, the curve in the small of his back where she would rest her hand while they slept, a moment to sit quietly in the warm sun, an onsen in the snow and her smile through the steam, shoes, three months till the birth, replacing the broken clothesline, to stab that fucker through the eye and watch him bleed slowly to death then chop up his corpse for the dogs. The man stayed among the imaginums for so long he lost count and weight.

Every now and then the man would return to his old life, to his house of sticks and boxes, but as he wandered deeper into the future dreams of the world’s dead his real life seemed less and less interesting, and his visits home became less and less frequent. One blustery autumn day he emerged from The Gap to find his house had been taken over by Party functionaries. They took him in for questioning, searched him and confiscated his map, then they locked him up in the cells beneath Bartolomejska until they could think of something to charge him with. Unfortunately for the man – and for the future wife of a dead Russian soldier, with whom the man had been spending a lot of his time recently – things changed. The chief of police was replaced by another chief of police, who never got around to reading the file on the man and in the end – which was about three years later – the man died of pneumonia and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Zižkov cemetery.

The officer who had been assigned the task of investigating the man’s SECRET maps investigated for around nine weeks before finally stumbling into The Gap. He was not as surprised as you might think; an aficionado of Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek, he’d been more surprised about how ordinary his life had been up until then. He was pleased to report back to his superiors that he had found a place where all their wildest imaginings had gone to live. A memo was quickly drafted. It stated that florid imaginings were counter-revolutionary and that the young officer would be posted to Moscow for retraining.