In Search of Infinite Fidelity

What will it be like when the map is the territory?

With the resolution of the map perfect now, she found she couldn’t do anything else — didn’t want to do anything else — but look at this representation of the world, this real-time projection of the trees outside her window — how each leaf trembled in sync with its analogue on the map in her palm — the dappled ground — the oriole — although it didn’t look the same, that bird, its beak, no one would claim that, how could it look the same — it was what her wife called a homomorphism — a math term she had picked up in university and now sprinkled liberally on conversations — she could even watch her wife mouth that word, homomorphism, on the map / in the backyard of their sylvan neighborhood, talking to the mailman, gesturing with her cracked hands — how could the map be exactly the same and yet not quite the same, that was the question she puzzled over — how could she see every detail exquisitely without it being reality in composite — the dawn sun aping pink wisp for pink wisp the rare pink unfolding in the east and yet with the color deflated — she kept this inquiry to herself lest her wife pipe up and ruin the joy / mouth the joy away — the ineluctable joy she felt when she clasped that dawn in her palm — her wife was having an affair anyway — she hadn’t caught her yet but of course it was only a matter of time / a matter of resolution — look at her wife squishing the lawn in her tennis-shoed feet — look at her walking down the acorn-colonnaded lane calling out “going to the farmers market, back in an hour!” — squish squish, she couldn’t hear the sound but she knew the sound well — her wife strolling now past the bus stop, mouth pursed as if whistling — what a ludicrous mouth in this representation, her mouth / not hers, a real-time homomorphic mouth — her wife turned the corner and strolled through the market square, emerged a minute later empty-handed — those hands, those nails, dirty fingernails, she saw, zooming in — she hadn’t even washed her hands after rooting around in the garden — she was going to get fertilizer all over her lover — this woman whom she lay beside every night — all the freckles and spidering hairs on her forearms, committed to memory, a mental map — all the ways her wife taunted her, pricked her with obsessive, nosy, perfectionist — yet “we have become one being,” she had said in their vows at the seaside, “you are me, and I am you” — and yet they had so little in common, didn’t they — there was her wife, striding up the steps of a neighbor’s porch a block over, the paramour, surely, that must have been her — the two of them embracing and laughing, their mouths as real in her palm and as wrinkled in her palm as this tattered reality — but that was the sum of it, an embrace, nothing more, just a mouthed farewell — and then her wife looped back, the arms and freckles swishing, the squish of her feet — and she felt embarrassed and went to the yard to wait — and now she could watch herself / be herself — she could zoom in and study herself waiting for her wife — a sketch, a study in a museum — she could see her particular reality unfold in her particular palm — and as her wife neared, her perfume abuzz even if the map didn’t reveal it, she could witness, even before she felt it on her body — even before it happened — she could witness on the map a smile dawning on her face, an indentured smile — she reached for her mouth with her hand and caught it coming into existence, a second late — the map was now ahead of her — the map of her life — the idea of their life together was accelerating past her — leaving their true life in its wake —