Kappa

The letter said Ihr Anspruch endet, which is a way of saying the money stops on the ninth.

He read it on the U8 between Hermannplatz and Boddinstraße, standing up, with somebody's rucksack in his back, and by Leinestraße he'd read it four times and it still said the same thing in the tone of an office being correct at you.

The job had gone the previous March. Fifty-one weeks, if you were counting, and he was, because the letter was. Restructuring, a word that means you. Sixty of them at once, a meeting at eleven he was no longer required to attend, and a sentence near the bottom thanking him for his contribution, which had been, for six years, the thing that stopped the thing for the hospitals falling over at three in the morning.

He'd been extremely calm about it for two months. He had a CV that made people ring back, and he'd genuinely believed, in April, that this would be a story he told at the next place. Then it was August. Then it was a year, and the applications had gone from ninety a month to eleven, and somewhere in there he'd stopped saying between jobs and started changing the subject.

He got off at Leinestraße because that was his stop, and stood on the platform while the train went, and the platform was soft.

That was the other thing, and it had started the same month the job did. He'd stopped mentioning it, because there are only so many times you can ask a person does the ground feel wrong to you before the person starts standing further away. It felt like a floor over a cellar, all of Berlin, as if one board had been taken out from under the whole city and nobody could find which one.

"Stress," Ana had said, the last time.

"It's not stress. It's the ground."

"The ground is stress. Everything is stress. I'm stress." She'd looked at the pavement, then at him. "Kappa. Have you eaten today?"

Ana was probably right. Ana was usually right, which was why he'd stopped telling her things.

···

Jonas didn't come that night, and didn't say he wasn't coming, which was the shape of Jonas.

It had been going on since March, if going on was the phrase, and it wasn't, because nothing about it went anywhere. Jonas came round. Jonas was funny and had good hands and looked at you as if you were the only thing in the room, and then went home to a flat in Friedrichshain he'd never been invited to, and answered texts in a rhythm that had nothing to do with when they were sent. Three days. Then four in a row. Then nothing for a week, and then, at one in the morning, you up.

He was up. He was always up. He'd told Ana it was a thing.

"It's a thing," Ana had agreed. "It's a thing that happens to you at one in the morning."

Tonight he sat on the floor of the flat in Neukölln with the letter next to the rent notice, the second one, the one with Mahnung on it, and did the arithmetic he'd been not doing for three weeks. It came out the way arithmetic does. He texted Jonas the money stops on the 9th, watched the two grey ticks not turn blue, and put the phone face down.

Soft. Still. Everywhere.

Except, he'd noticed lately, and had told nobody: right under him. Right under wherever he happened to be sitting. That one place was fine. It was always fine. It was everything else.

···

The concert was Ana's idea, and Ana paid, and he let her, which was its own small humiliation. Columbiahalle, a Thursday, QueenL, whom he didn't like, exactly, but had listened to more than he'd admit, alone, at three in the morning, when the thing for the hospitals was holding.

One name. Like a hurricane. Two albums and a way of standing very still on a stage that made four thousand people lean.

"Back," he said, at the door.

"I want to see."

"You'll see. She's tall."

"She's not tall. She's just still." But Ana went to the back with him, and made up for losing by being kind about it, which was worse. The lights went down and the noise came up and QueenL walked out and stood at the microphone and didn't sing for a full ten seconds. Just stood. And looked, row by row, the way you'd look for someone in a crowd you'd been told would be there.

And the floor was fine.

Not under him. Everywhere. For the first time in a year the ground under four thousand people was simply a floor, solid all the way down, and he stood at the back of the Columbiahalle with Ana's hand on his arm asking if he was okay and couldn't answer, because the girl on the stage had stopped looking row by row.

She was looking at him.

He'd tell himself afterwards that it was the lights. That four thousand people every night thought she was looking at them. He'd tell himself that for about a day and a half. But he was there, and he knew, the way you know when someone across a room has said your name without saying it, and what came across the hall from her wasn't a look at all. It was a door opening. Someone on the other side of it saying, without words, in a voice that was somehow also his own: oh. There you are. I didn't know there was another one.

Then she sang, and the door didn't close, and he stood inside it for an hour and forty minutes and didn't hear a single song.

"You look like something happened to you," said Ana, on the U-Bahn home.

"Nothing happened."

"Kappa."

"Nothing happened, Ana. I'm tired. The Amt letter came."

"The Amt letter came a week ago. You looked tired then. You look like this now." She waited. He didn't. "Fine. Stress."

"Stress," he agreed, and she looked at him the way she looked at the ground.

···

It played at ten past two.

He wasn't asleep. He was on the floor of the flat with his back against the sofa, in the dark, laptop shut, phone face down, feeling for the board, and the room lit up.

Not the light. A light. A rectangle of it standing in the middle of the room where the coffee table wasn't, the size of a door, pale and grainy and slightly the wrong colour, like a film projected onto a sheet by someone working from a description. In it, a lobby. Tile floor. A coffee machine. A plaque he couldn't read. And a man, middle height, middle everything, in a cardigan, with headphones round his neck, who looked out of the rectangle at him, directly at him, on the floor of a flat in Neukölln at ten past two in the morning, and said:

"Ah. There you are. Welcome back."

He didn't move. He couldn't have.

"You're at the Zentrale. Project Oasis. Mind the step, it isn't there, we removed it years ago and people still trip on it, which tells you something about people, or about steps." The voice came from nowhere, from the room, from inside his own head. "I'm XO. You know me somehow, probably. Don't worry if you can't place it. Everyone gets that look when they come in, like you've heard my voice in a dream you didn't finish. It's a normal reaction."

It was not a normal reaction. He was crying, he realised, without any idea why, the way you cry at an advert.

"You know me like this," said the man in the cardigan, gently. "When you're looking for something. Your keys, a word, a person in a crowd. And you haven't found it yet, but you get a feeling where it is."

And it went on. All of it. Gods and monsters, and the ones who stayed, and a rule about enjoying life, and an agency, and a department of famous people, and a word he'd never heard, oasis, said the way you'd say the name of someone in the room. He sat on the floor and watched a trailer for something that didn't exist, projected by nobody, into a flat with a Mahnung on the table, and it was the most real thing that had happened to him in a year, and he thought, very clearly, in Ana's voice: this is it, then. This is what it looks like from the inside.

"One more thing before I let you go," said the man in the cardigan, near the end, "and meet Ricky, who at this point in the story has never heard of me." The grainy light flickered. For a second the man looked enormously tired and enormously fond. "People ask why we bother. And I say: look. A world is often just created for one."

The rectangle went out.

The room was dark. The floor was soft. The phone lit up once on the table, and it was Jonas, and it said sorry to hear that, and nothing else, and he didn't pick it up.

He sat there until it was light.

His name was Kappa, to the three people who still used it. It had been JB on the email. It had been, once, something else, on a form his grandmother had filled in, in a hospital, a long way from here, and she was the only one who'd ever said welcome back to him like that, every time he walked through her door, as if he'd been gone for years.

He didn't know why he thought of her then. He didn't know anything. He got up, and put the kettle on, and stood in the one place in the world where the floor was fine, and waited for someone to come.