Episode 11
No biggi
Things that happened after, in no order, because that's how they happened.
They buried Leni properly in the spring, in Queens, next to nobody, because she'd asked for New York and wouldn't say why, and I have a theory I'm keeping. It rained. Everyone came. Frau Adler, on her own feet. The elves' mother with her three daughters in altered overalls. Nine members of the Ältestenrat who never leave their pools. Two girls in black and yellow, the yellow one crying with delight. Noor, back from a tour for one day. Dash, with four coffees held against his chest like something that mattered. Ana, who had asked whether it was all right for her to come and been told by Kappa that if she asked again he would push her in the hole. Marguerite. Teo. QueenL, at the back, who left before the end and sent a wreath with no card. And in the trees and the wall and the earth of that cemetery, several hundred kobolds, facing out, not coming up because they didn't need to.
Bob wore a black suit somebody had cut down for him and said nothing for the entire service, which for Bob is a speech.
Abu sang. Kappa asked him on the plane, badly, after rehearsing for four hours, and Abu said "obviously" and went back to his phone.
He did it at the grave, unaccompanied, in Arabic, in the rain, to a hundred and forty people of whom perhaps nine understood the words. Nine council members who never leave their pools stood absolutely still. Frau Adler put her hand on the arm of the woman next to her, a stranger. Rose, who has made twenty thousand people into a field in wind, cried in a way that got into one photograph and has never been explained by anybody.
And the floor of that cemetery went quiet and listened, and picked up again where it had been, and Ricky, on his knees in the wet grass with both hands flat on the ground, decided not to say anything about it, for the second time in a year.
Vovô didn't fly home for six weeks. He sat on a stool above a laundromat on Canal Street and taught nine-year-olds to fall over, and every Sunday he ate with his grandson and his granddaughter, and in the sixth week he said the wave had gone out of him. Charlie says that isn't true and never will be, that he sleeps badly now and always will, and that he'd do it again on a Tuesday.
Ricky was in a chair for eleven days. Not a metaphor; an actual chair, unable to feel anything through his feet, which for him is what deafness would be for anyone else. It came back the way feeling comes back into a limb, badly and then suddenly, and the first thing he felt was a floor in Queens that was solid all the way down. He cried about it in a car park. He has authorised me to include that.
Noor is running Kralle now, with Marguerite, from the lobby, which is still on fire and always will be. She's twenty-four. Ilse would say she's had it since the casting.
Wished transferred in the autumn and ran two years. On opening night Kira sang the last number and three thousand people forgot to breathe on cue, and Rose watched from the wings with her sunglasses on her head, because she wasn't in it and never wanted to be. She hasn't toured since. She says she will. Bob says she won't, and that this is fine, and that a paradise gets to stop.
Ana kept the key.
Jonas sent a message in June: saw the thing about the singer, is that your friend? Kappa looked at it for a while and wrote back yes, and that was the whole of it. I put it in because he has never once pretended it didn't hurt.
Kappa got a job. Nothing much: a small company that makes a thing for hospitals. He goes in on Mondays. As far as anyone there knows, he's a quiet man of twenty-nine who is good with legacy systems and never takes the last biscuit. He is also the floor of the world, and the Ältestenrat has been formally petitioning him about it since March, and he has answered every letter by hand, saying no.
"Say what you like about the boy," said Frau Adler, at the funeral, to nobody in particular. "He answers his post."
The mice are still there. Somebody has to keep the lamps in oil, and it turns out that somebody is four kobolds and one very old elf with opinions about drainage. They have a rota. Marguerite audits it.
Nothing has ever come back through that floor. I want that stated plainly, because I know what it sounds like when I say the rest.
I point at her sometimes. I promised.
It isn't a direction. There is no direction. What there is, when I do it, is a pull, small and steady, the way you know which pocket your keys are in, and it is there, every single time I've looked in eight months. It means one of two things and I don't know which. Either she is somewhere, and somewhere is a thing you can be on the far side of a shut door. Or I'm a fifteen-day-old compass who has learned how to want something.
Ricardo says: does it matter.
I say: yes, obviously, enormously.
He says: does it change what you do tomorrow.
That's the argument I lose, every time, and I've started to suspect that's what he's for.
One more, and then I'll stop.
In September a man came to the Zentrale.
He came in the ordinary way: stood in a whispering gallery under a station in a city I'm not going to name, said the thing, tripped on the step that isn't there, got up, and asked at the desk for somebody in charge.
Marguerite took him into the room with the wrong window. About sixty. A coat that was not a good coat, a cardboard folder held together with a rubber band. He sat down without being asked, the way people do when their legs have made a decision.
"I need to report a missing person," he said.
"This isn't that kind of office."
"It's exactly that kind of office." He put the folder on the table. "Fifty years. Every government on earth had somebody they leaned on and pretended they didn't, and one day there wasn't one, and all of you walked into the hole that left and sat down in it and called it integration." He pushed the folder across. "I've been putting this together since 1974. Nine hundred pages, all about one person, not one of them with a name in it, and I would like to know why every one of you people flinches when I say the big one."
Marguerite did not open the folder.
"Because we don't know," she said.
"You must."
"We ran an agency for eight thousand years to find one thing, and the one thing walked into this lobby, and I'd like you to understand what I'm telling you." She stood up. "It wasn't ours. It was never ours. Whoever the big one was, they weren't in our files, or the council's, or the tribe's. They were simply here, and then they weren't, and every old thing in this world went quiet about it at once." She picked up the folder and did not give it back. "And now somebody walks in off the street with nine hundred pages, in the same year the floor came back."
I was on the desk. I felt it go through the building.
Nine hundred pages, no name, and a pull in a direction that is not a direction.
So. That's the second one.
I'm eight months old. I'm the size of a loaf and I haven't grown, and I've been told I never will, which suits me. There's a shelf in a school above a laundromat on Canal Street, between a Saint George and a Yemanjá, where I sleep when we're in New York; a shoebox with holes in it that I've refused to throw away; and a man in Berlin who writes to a council of dragons by hand to say no.
Here's what I've got. There was a world, full of gods and monsters, and the gods left, and the others stayed, and it turns out they stayed for a reason. There was a door, opened by a child who wanted to see. There was a woman who turned herself into a stone and held eleven thousand years still so her little brother could grow up enough to come back and be her little brother. There was a sister in rubber boots who kept the lamps in oil and then walked out of the world in her socks with an old woman in a coat, and I point at them, and something answers, and nobody will tell me whether that counts.
And there's a dragon who got down on the floor instead of setting me on fire, on the first night of my life, with every reason not to.
I have the word now, by the way. It took me eight months and nine languages, which is the sort of thing my aunt does, and in the end it was in the first thing anyone ever said to me.
The word is: here.
That's it. That's the whole of it. Not brave, not strong, not chosen. Standing in the room while the thing happens, on your knees if that's what's available, saying so out loud. Eight thousand years of agency, eleven thousand years of a stone holding still, four hundred mice in a hillside, a kobold in a doorway, and it comes to the same thing every time, which is somebody deciding to be in the room.
People ask why we bother. All this, a whole department, a council in a swimming pool, kobolds in the trees, for one man in a small company who is good with legacy systems.
And I say: look. A world is often just created for one.
I know what it means now. I've known since a hall under a hillside, when the floor came back everywhere at once and I understood that one was never the small number in that sentence.
But what should we say.
No biggi.
Welcome back.