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occupation of his father, who was also a philosophy teacher in a lycée in Strasbourg, the birth of his younger brother, Roger, his marriage with Elizabeth in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1970, and so on. But the strangest thing was that the map also predicted the events of Michel’s life after the date of its composition. It mentioned his elevation to full professor at Paris XII (Créteil) in 1991 and subsequently at the Sorbonne in 1995. It also listed the titles of the books that Michel would go on to publish:
Nietzsche et la métaphysique
and
Heidegger et l’essence de l’homme
, his most impressive published work. After
La fracture de l’histoire
, from 1994, there followed an increasingly mediocre series of essay collections that finished with
Par-delà le nihilisme
from 1999. It was the most productive period of Michel’s life. I remembered him excitedly saying to me in his apartment in around 1996,
“J’ai trois livres en chantier!”
He had three books in production. No children were named on the map.
    Michel knew that he was doomed. Did Elizabeth know too? Is that why she left him? She saw from the map that he would have no children. Michel could see the date, time, cause, and location of his death:
“0421 h
,
le 18 août 2003, La Verrière (Yvelines), crise cardiaque.”
I checked the precise details with my friend Beatrice in Reims, who had been a student and close friend of Michel. La Verrière was the little town to the southwest of Paris where Michel had spent his final years in a sanatorium. Knowing his fate, he had simply lost the will to live. He arrived dead just on time.

 
    I moved more rapidly through the stack of charts with a growing sense of unease. All of the remaining maps were devoted to philosophers who had been either superiors or contemporaries of Michel or whom he had met and become curious about, such as his predecessor Sarah Kofman, Reiner Schürmann (whose name was on my office door when I arrived in New York and remained. It felt like a tomb), Emmanuel Levinas, André Schuwer, Gilles Deleuze, Dominique Janicaud, Michel Henry, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I thought this was clearly some eccentric mark of affection. Michel had secretly designed memory maps for the philosophers he admired and had met. But that hypothesis fell to pieces with the next discoveries.
    Digging deeper, I found maps for philosophers who had died or were to die after Michel’s death. What was so terrifying was that all the predictionsproved to be true, although Michel couldn’t possibly have known that. There was a chart for his longtime acquaintance Jacques Derrida, who would die from the effects of pancreatic cancer in October 2004, four months after I first discovered his map, at the same age as his father, who had died of the same disease. Richard Rorty, whom Michel had met and befriended during his frequent visits to Paris in the early 1990s, would die from the same disease as Derrida on June 8, 2007. Michel’s maps seemed deadly accurate.
    Six maps remained unread. I knew all the names and they were all still very much alive and a few of them were close friends of mine. * Mine was fourth in the pile. My throat dried, but my mind was crystal clear. I made sure I was alone. As I put the magnifying glass to my eyes, I felt strangely exhilarated rather than afraid. I also suddenly recalled very clearly that when I’d met Michel in Perugia, as usual, in 1994, he’d asked me for my birth details, exact time and place. He wasvery insistent about the accuracy of the information I provided. I had to call my mum to find out (Saturday, 27 February 1960. 1500h. My dad was at the football: LFC/YNWA). I remember saying half-jokingly to Michel: “What, are you going to make my astrological chart?” He smiled.
    I peered through the magnifying glass at my destiny. The detail was fascinating. Working through the concentric circles, I moved among briefly noted events in my life that Michel couldn’t possibly have known about: