Occupied meant a site that was actively inhabited in ways that went beyond its current building. Vacant meant a site that had lost its occupant and was available. Waiting meant a site that had never been filled. Gone meant a site that had been resolved — he used that word, resolved — in some way he did not detail.
He wrote, in the final paragraph: I do not know what these sites are. I know that they exist, because I have spent eight years standing in front of them and they respond to being stood in front of. I have marked them on the surveys because I believe they should be on the record somewhere. I do not know what anyone would do with such a record. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something, if the right person found it.
I read that paragraph several times.
I had found the map at a car boot sale for three pounds. I had been killing a Sunday afternoon.
If the right person found it.
I am a history teacher. I care about documents. I went to the archive on Monday and I found Hester and I cross-referenced the map against the current street plan and I walked the perimeter of the green space and I found the darker square of grass and I went back on Wednesday and I followed the thread until I found Aldric Vos’s retirement notes from 1991.
I had not planned any of it. I had simply followed each thing to the next thing, which is what you did when something had your attention.
I think about occupied on most nights now. My house, specifically. My plot. My footprint on a map drawn thirty-five years before my house was built, marked with a note that described a state rather than a building.
I do not know what it means for a site to be occupied in the way Aldric Vos meant. I do not know whether the quality he was describing precedes the people who live there or is created by them. I do not know whether I am here because of what the site is, or whether the site is what it is because of who has been here.
I have been here for four years. Before me, someone else lived here for three. Before them, the land was bare.
I sit in my kitchen sometimes in the evenings and I try to feel whether the quality Vos described is something I can sense, or whether I am simply a person in a house on a Tuesday who has read too much into an old map.
Most evenings, I think it is the latter.
But some evenings the room feels fuller than I know how to account for.
And on those evenings I think about Aldric Vos standing in front of these sites for eight years, recording them because he believed they should be on the record somewhere.
He was right about that.
He was right that the right person would find it.
I am still deciding what I am supposed to do next.
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