Berlin

"There's one in Berlin," said Marguerite.

"One what," said Ilse.

"I don't know. Neither does she."

The small studio at Varga's, the radiator ticking. Six weeks since Toronto. The tour cancelled, the movie pushed, the world sending flowers to a hotel that had stopped accepting them. The room had spent an hour arguing about what a soft floor meant and got nowhere, because nobody had a word for it and Ilse wouldn't let anyone invent one. Rose in the hoodie, always the hoodie now. Bob in the doorway. Frau Adler, flown in from a swimming bath with no water in it, on the piano stool with a thermos and the face of a woman who has sat on a council for a long time and has decided to stop.

Marguerite had her phone in her hand and wasn't looking at it. "QueenL played the Columbiahalle on Thursday. She rang me Friday at four in the morning, which she has never done, and said: there was one in the room. At the back. Old. Older than anything. I looked at him and he looked at me and it was like—" She stopped. "She didn't finish the sentence. She said, I've never felt another one. I didn't know there were other ones. And then she said, the floor was fine, Marguerite, the whole hall, for an hour and forty minutes, and hung up."

The radiator ticked.

"Another one," said Frau Adler, slowly. "Another what."

Nobody answered her. Rose was looking at Ricky. Ricky was looking at the floor, soft for a year, and thinking that four thousand miles east there had been, for an hour and forty minutes, a room where it wasn't.

"Ricardo," said Ilse Varga. "How soon can you fly."

···

Berlin was softer.

He'd been told, and it was still a shock, the way cold water is when you've been told it's cold. He came out of the airport with Rose in the sunglasses and Bob behind them refusing a trolley, put his feet down, and the whole city gave, very slightly. Frau Adler had said it's worse in the old places. She hadn't said the old places were leaning on it hardest.

She'd given them a key to the side door of the bath in Prenzlauer Berg, and for six nights that was home: Rose and Ricky in the changing cubicles, Bob in the deep end of the drained pool, where he said the tiles reminded him of home. Frau Adler sat with a lamp and did not explain herself.

"Nothing is wrong with the floor," she said, the first night, pouring. "That's the council's position. I'd like you to know I sit on the council, and it is not my position, and I told them so on Tuesday, and they told me to sit down."

"What did you do?"

"I sat down. I'm old." She screwed the lid on. "Then I flew to New York. Drink your tea."

On the second night Charlie came.

She'd been in Rome for a month, doing something with the council and the ground under the Forum that she described, over Frau Adler's thermos, as reading. She hugged her brother for a long time in the shallow end of an empty swimming pool and then said, to the room, "Rome's the same. Soft. Worse than here, actually. The council's position on Rome is that Rome is fine." She sat on the tiles next to Bob, who moved up for her without being asked, which he had done for nobody. "Hello. You're the kobold. You came out of a hill."

"I did."

"I've read everything anyone's ever written about your people and all of it's wrong, isn't it."

"All of it," said Bob, delighted.

She stayed four days. She read the U-Bahn maps against something from 1902, found two tunnels that shouldn't exist, walked both, found nothing, and said so cheerfully. And on the last night, when Ricky came in wet through from Sonnenallee with one step in his legs he couldn't explain, she listened without interrupting, sat quietly for a while, and said:

"I couldn't have felt that. I want you to hear me say it. I've got the books and the languages and the chair, and I'd have walked up that street and felt a street." She pushed her hair back the way their mother did. "You found a man under a lid, Ricardinho, with your feet, in the rain. Write it down. Every detail, tonight, before you sleep, because you'll smooth it by tomorrow and the smooth version's no use to anyone."

He wrote it down. It's in the file at the Zentrale now, in his handwriting, which is terrible.

···

They looked for him the way you look for a word.

Rose stood in crowds. That was her half. Alexanderplatz at rush hour, the market at Maybachufer, the platform at Kottbusser Tor, sunglasses on, Bob at her elbow in a jacket that said SECURITY in a font Teo would have hated. She looked two days out, face by face, and saw nothing. Not nothing. Everything. Berlin had more things that had stayed than New York, older ones, a city that had been very badly hurt and liked being alive anyway, and every one of them turned to look at the famous girl, and she saw every one of them coming, and none of them was him.

"He's not in the crowd," she said, on the third night, in the deep end. "I've looked at forty thousand people. It's like he's in the one place I can't—"

"Can't what?"

"Look." She took the sunglasses off. "QueenL said the floor was fine. The whole hall. That's not a person in a crowd. That's a person the crowd was standing on."

Ricky walked. That was his half. The U-Bahn tunnels under Alexanderplatz, wet and long. Tempelhof at dawn, a whole airfield of soft, so wide he could feel the edges of the city give. Neukölln at two in the morning, street by street, the way he'd walked Grand Central.

And on the fourth night, on Sonnenallee, outside a bakery that was closed, with the trams gone and the rain just starting, he found it.

Not it. Him. For one step. His foot came down and the ground was solid all the way down, a jolt up through the arches like a stair that is there when you'd braced for it not to be, and what came up through it was older than the council, older than the golem at Grand Central, older than anything he'd ever stood on, and also, on the same string, so new it came up like light under a door. Rose's beat. Both at once, like a river meeting the sea.

Then his other foot came down, and it was gone.

He put his foot back. Nothing. Soft. Berlin. He got his hands on the pavement, the way he'd put them on the writing in St. Louis, and there was something, faint, still: a drum stopped on purpose by someone who wanted quiet to work in. Not a beat. A hand held flat over a drum.

He'd felt one thing like it before: the blank under the lamp shop. But that was an absence. This was protection.

"Someone's keeping him," said Frau Adler, at four in the morning, in the deep end, when he told her. She poured. "Something old. Older than us. I've felt it once or twice over the years and never known what it was, a stillness somewhere in Neukölln, like a stone in a pocket. I thought it was a leftover. Something that stayed." She drank. "It's not a leftover. It's a lid. Whatever's under it has been there a long time, and it woke up on Thursday for an hour and forty minutes, and the lid went back on."

"Can we lift it?"

"You can try. I wouldn't. A thing kept that carefully, that long, by something that old, is being kept from something. And you don't know what." She looked at him with the council's eyes. "The girl on the runway was kept, too. By hills. Ask the kobold how that went for the people who came looking."

···

They went home on the seventh day with nothing.

Not nothing. Ricky had one step on Sonnenallee he'd feel in his sleep for the rest of his life. Rose had forty thousand faces, none of them his, and a sentence from QueenL she kept turning over: I didn't know there were other ones. Bob had a jacket that said SECURITY and would not give it back. And Frau Adler, at the airport, said the last thing, the one Ricky would carry across the water and put down on the floor of his grandfather's school like a bag he couldn't open.

"Whoever he is, the floor is fine under him. Only under him. Everywhere else is soft, and has been since a night a year ago that you felt and I felt and the council says didn't happen." She screwed the lid on. "A floor doesn't go soft because something's gone, Ricardo. It goes soft because something's moved. Something that was under all of us got up and walked to Neukölln and sat down. And now it's waiting for someone to come."

"For what?"

"I'd say," said Frau Adler, "to be welcomed back."

On the plane Rose slept, for once, hoodie over her face. Somewhere over the Atlantic she sat up with her eyes open and her hands in the small quick knot and said, to nobody, in a voice that wasn't quite her own, "Oh. There you are," and lay back down, and didn't remember it in the morning.

Ricky remembered it. Seven miles up, the floor of the plane was soft, and four thousand miles behind them and getting further there was one place where it wasn't.

Something had just said there you are to it. Nobody had said it back.