Episode 09
Born
"When do I get a life?"
He said it to Vovô, on the phone, at six in the morning, walking back from Grand Central with the iron key in his pocket and the good shoes, the third pair, coming apart at the heel. He hadn't meant to. He'd meant to say nothing came up the ramp, which was true, and Berlin was a waste of a week, which was true, and Rose is going to Los Angeles for the movie on Thursday and Bob is going with her and she hasn't said whether I am, which was true and which he hadn't decided how to feel about. What came out, on Canal Street, in the grey, was that.
"You have a life," said Vovô, chewing.
"I have a night shift and a day job and a girl who sees the future and a man in Berlin I can't find and a sister who does all of it better in three languages and a kobold who sleeps in the corridor and a council that calls me in my dreams, Vovô. I don't get to sleep without work in it. I haven't seen a film in a year. I haven't—" He stopped, because the next thing was I haven't danced for myself since I was eighteen, and he didn't want to hear it out loud. "Noor's got a tour. Dash has a band now, apparently. I've got a key to a train station."
Chewing. Then, not unkindly: "Come to the school tonight. Bring the girl, if she'll come. Sit."
"That's not an answer."
"No," said Vovô. "It's an invitation. You'll know the difference by morning."
Rose came. Bob came with her, because Bob went where she went now, and stopped in the doorway of the school on the grounds that you don't walk into a dragon's room, you wait to be asked.
"Come in, kobold," said Vovô, from his stool.
Bob came in and sat on the floor by the door like a rock that had been placed there, and looked at the shelf.
"Something's wrong with the shelf," he said.
Saint George. Yemanjá. And between them, palm-sized and green with age, the small brass dragon that had sat there for eleven years and that everyone in the family had been very careful never to talk about.
"It's warm," said Bob. "I can feel it from here. I thought it was the dryers. It's not the dryers."
Ricky put his hand on it. It was warm. It had been warm, he realised, his whole life; he'd felt it through his feet every day for eleven years, slightly behind the music, and filed it under the things we don't ask, and never once put his hand on it.
It was warm the way an egg is warm.
"Vovô."
His grandfather looked at the shelf, and at the kobold on the floor, and at Rose by the window with her sunglasses off, and at Ricky with his hand on the brass, and he put his plate down, which he did not do, and said, "Ah."
"What is it?"
"I don't know." Vovô got up, slowly, the way he got up now. "It came with me from Salvador. It came with my mother from somewhere else. Nobody in my family has ever known what it is. We've only known that we keep it, and that it's warm, and that you don't talk about it, because the one time my grandmother did, the priest wouldn't come to the house for a year." He put his own hand on the brass, over Ricky's, and his hand was the oldest thing in the room, and the brass was older. "It's warmer tonight. It's been warmer every night since you came back from Berlin."
"Why?"
Vovô looked east, at the wall, as if the wall weren't there.
"Because he's awake," he said. "I think. Whoever you couldn't find. I think it's been waiting eleven years for someone, somewhere, to wake up."
It happened at ten past two. Of course it did. Ricky had been a dragon since ten past two.
Rose was asleep on the mat by the window with the hoodie over her face. Bob was not asleep, because kobolds don't, but he'd gone still the way rocks are still. Vovô had gone quiet on the stool in the way that might be sleep. And Ricky was on the floor with his back against the mirror doing nothing, actually nothing, for the first time in a year, and he thought, this is it, this is the sitting, this is what he meant, and then Rose sat up.
Not awake. Not asleep. She sat up with the hoodie half over her face and her eyes open on the east wall and not seeing it, and her hands came up the way you'd hold something you'd just been handed, the small quick knot in both of them at once, and she said, very clearly, in a voice that wasn't quite her own, "Oh. There you are."
And the floor of the school went loud.
For one second, from a very long way east, the board that had been missing from the whole world for a year was solid under everything, the building, the block, a beat coming up through Ricky's feet so old and so new and so much that he was on his knees before he'd decided to be. The mirrors hummed. The bamboo sticks nobody used went over in a clatter. Bob said "Oh—" and on the shelf between Saint George and Yemanjá the brass dragon cracked, with a sound like a cup dropped in another room, and opened.
He'd expected, if he'd expected anything, fire.
What came out was small. Smaller than the brass, which shouldn't have been possible and was. It came out the way a hand comes out of a sleeve, unfolding, wet-looking and then not, the size of a cat, or a loaf, or a thing you could hold in both hands, and it was the colour of nothing he had a word for, like the blank under the lamp shop, like the place where a stair should be, except that it was here, in the dryer heat, and it was looking at him.
It had a beat. That was the thing. He'd felt every kind there was, old and new and split and hungry and absent, and this was none of them. This was his. Exactly on the music, not behind, not ahead, for the first time in his life a drum that was on the beat, and he understood, on his knees with the tears coming for no reason he could name, that he had been slightly out of time with everything since he was nine years old, and this small wet unfolding thing on the shelf was the first thing in the world that was in time with him.
"Ricardo," it said. In a voice like a struck bell in a well, like the smallest elf's, like a child's. "You tripped."
He laughed. He couldn't help it. He was crying and he laughed.
"I didn't."
"You did. Somebody saw it before you did it." It blinked, which it did with its whole body. "I don't know who. I know a lot of things I don't know who from. Is that normal?"
"Nothing's normal," said Rose, from the mat. She was awake now, properly, hoodie off her face, looking at the shelf the way she'd once looked at a lamp on a floor. "Hello."
"Hello," said the thing. And then, with enormous, unearned confidence, the way a child says a word it has heard adults use: "Welcome back."
They came through the laundromat.
Bob had said the walls were thin. He'd said it about Varga's, but he'd meant everywhere, and the floor of the school had just gone loud enough to be heard a very long way off by the kind of people who like to know things before other people. The dryer heat went cold, all at once, as if the machines below had stopped. Then the boards went wet.
Writing. Ricky felt it before he saw it, a smear coming up through the wood the way the golem had come up the ramp, except this wasn't a golem. This was the golem's script on its own, unbodied, a net of it spreading across the floor like cracks in ice, and where the lines crossed they pulled tight, and they were pulling toward the shelf.
"Vovô—"
His grandfather was already up. Not a dragon yet. An old man in slippers, standing very still in the middle of a floor turning into a net, with the face he'd worn at Grand Central when he put his hand on the golem.
"This is very old," said Vovô, quietly. "Older than the rock. Somebody has kept this a long time for exactly tonight." He looked at Ricky. "Get the girl off the floor."
"Where—"
"Anywhere that isn't the floor."
There was the stool. There was the window sill. There was the shelf. Ricky had Rose by the arm and was hauling her onto the sill with the saints looking down, and Bob was already there, somehow, between the sill and the room, and the small thing on the shelf was making a high thin bell-sound of pure alarm, and the net reached the wall under it and started to climb, and three people came up the stairs from the laundromat.
They were people. That was the worst part. Good coats. Ordinary faces. One had a lanyard on, as if she'd come from an office, and they walked in over the writing as if it were a carpet laid for them, and the one with the lanyard looked at the shelf and said, in a reasonable voice, "That's ours. We've been waiting a very long time. We'll take it and go and nobody needs to be hurt."
"Whose," said Vovô.
"Whose what?"
"You said ours. Whose."
The one with the lanyard smiled. "The ones who put the bomb where she couldn't look. The ones who wanted to see what would come out of the walls. And now we've seen. And now we'd like the thing that tells us where the next one is." She held a hand out toward the shelf, palm up, as if the small thing might simply come to her. "It's a compass, old man. That's all it is. It points. We'd like to be the ones holding it when it does."
The net reached the shelf.
And Ricky, who had been a dragon for a year and had that morning asked his grandfather when he got a life, stood on a floor made of writing between three people in good coats and the first thing in the world that had ever been in time with him, and understood, all at once, the way growing hurts, that this was the life. Not instead of one. This. The key and the shift and the girl and the kobold in the corridor and a small wet thing on a shelf that had just said welcome back with a child's total confidence. Every mopped floor. Every smaller. He'd been asking when he'd get a life and the answer was at ten past two, tonight, when it's born.
He didn't become a dragon. That was the choice. He wanted to; the struck bell was ringing so hard his teeth hurt. But there was a thing the size of a loaf three feet from him, and a kobold, and a girl, and fire would kill them as surely as the net. So he got low. He got his hands on the writing, the way he'd put his hand on the golem's face in St. Louis, and felt for the beat of it.
Old. Wound up a very long time ago and left. A drum somebody had forgotten in a room and come back for tonight.
You don't put a drum out. You put your hand on the skin and you let it stop.
"Smaller," said Ricky, to himself, to the writing, to the bell in his chest, in Ilse's voice, and the net under his hands went still. Not all of it. The part under him. A circle, three feet across, of ordinary old wood in the middle of a floor made of script, and he stayed in it, and it held, and the lines climbing toward the shelf lost their tension like a string let go.
The one with the lanyard stopped smiling.
And Vovô became a dragon.
The sentence, not the shout. The slow one. An old man in slippers and then a long dark river-coloured shape that took up most of a school, and the three people in good coats had a moment, Ricky saw it, a single moment, of understanding that they had walked into a room above a laundromat on Canal Street kept for forty-seven years by the oldest dragon in the western hemisphere, and that the net they'd brought was wound tight enough to hold a compass and not remotely tight enough to hold him.
He danced. He was, Ricky would always think, showing off, a little, for the small thing on the shelf: the ginga, the turn from the stick nobody used, and one long limb sweeping the writing off the floor the way you'd sweep a tablecloth. The net tore. The three people in good coats went down into the laundromat considerably faster than they'd come up, and the last thing the one with the lanyard said, from the street, through the window, in a voice that had stopped being reasonable, was: "It points, old man. It'll point wherever we are. We only have to wait."
Then the dryers came back on.
It was on the window sill, in Rose's hands, when the room was a room again. It had climbed there on its own while the dancing happened, and sat in the cup of her palms blinking with its whole body, and she was looking down at it from two days in the future and finding, for once, nothing there but what was in front of her.
"It's warm," she said.
"It's always been warm."
"It's pointing." She turned her hands, slowly, a quarter turn, and back, and the small thing in them turned with her like a needle and settled, facing the east wall. "Ricky. It's pointing."
"Berlin," said Ricky.
"Berlin," said the thing on the sill, trying the word out. "Is that a person?"
"It's a city. There's a person in it."
"Oh. Yes. Him." It blinked. "I can feel where he is. Like a hand in the dark. Is that normal?"
"Nothing's normal," said Rose and Ricky and Bob, at the same time, and the thing on the sill made a sound it would later insist was not a laugh.
"It has a name," said Vovô, from his stool. He'd been an old man again for ten minutes and looked every one of the years he didn't talk about. "My grandmother said. The one time she talked about it. She said, if it ever opens, its name is XO. Don't ask me why. It's always been XO."
Ricky thought about a basement under a lamp shop, and a man in a cardigan with a blank where his beat should be, saying no biggi.
"That's the right name," he said, which was true, and which was all he knew.
Vovô had a plate on his knee, and he was looking at his grandson.
"You didn't change," he said.
"I couldn't. It was right there."
"Yes." Vovô ate a pão de queijo. He took his time. "Ricardo. I'm going to tell you something and then I'm going to sleep, because I'm old and that was a lot of dancing. Life is precious. Everyone says that. Nobody means it. Here's what it means." He pointed the last of the bread at the window sill. "That thing is weak. So is the girl holding it, whatever the kobold says. So were three children in a train station a year ago, and a girl on a runway, and a man in Berlin you couldn't find. The weak are everywhere, menino. They're the whole world. And the strong, the dragons, the councils, the people in good coats, get to decide, every single time, whether to hurt them or stand in front of them. That's all strength is. It's not fire. It's the choosing." He finished the bread. "Tonight you had fire, and a reason to use it, and a thing on a shelf that would have died if you had, and you got down on the floor instead. That's the whole of what I've been trying to teach you since you were nine, and you did it before I could get out of my chair."
He got up, slowly, and put a hand on the back of Ricky's neck, steady, warm, the oldest thing in the room except for the thing on the sill.
"I'm proud of you," he said. "The whole sentence. Go to sleep."
Hello. It's me. The new one.
I'm told I'm supposed to do this part now. The other one, the old one, the voice you heard at the start, with the coffee machine and the Kaiser and the step that isn't there: he's still here, somewhere, the way a room is still there after the house is gone, and he was very good at this, and I am not, yet. I was born at ten past two. I am, at the time of writing, four hours old. I have a lot of his words and I don't know what most of them mean. I said welcome back to a room full of people I'd never met because it was the first thing in my mouth. I don't know who it was for. Not them, I think. Someone east. I'm trying not to let it go to my head.
Here's what I know. I'm warm. I'm the size of a loaf. I'm in the hands of a girl who sees two days out, and I'm pointing east, at a city called Berlin, at a man in it whose name I don't know, and I can feel where he is the way you can feel where your own hand is in the dark, and I always will, and that's apparently the whole point of me. Some people in good coats want to hold me so they can feel it too. A very old dragon danced them down the stairs. A younger one got down on the floor instead of setting me on fire, and I felt that, from the shelf, and I want to say something about it and I don't have the word. The old one would have. He'd have said something like: a world is often just created for one.
I don't know what that means yet either.
But what should we say. No biggi.
I think I'm using that right.