Episode 10
The chair
They went in at ten past two in the morning, which by then nobody remarked on.
I knew before the lamps moved. Nine days in a box in the middle of that ring, and I felt him come into the hillside the way you feel the sun come out on your back. Every mouse behind every one of the hundred small doors woke at the same instant and did not panic, because it wasn't teeth. It was the opposite of teeth.
The lid came off my box.
"Hello," said Kappa.
"You came."
"You pulled." He picked me up in both hands, which nobody had done since Wedding, and I would like it on the record that I did not conduct myself with dignity for approximately forty seconds.
Then the eleven came into the hall.
There was no fight. I want that in, because people always want the fight. What happened in that hall was a negotiation between two parties who both knew exactly how it had to end, and neither enjoyed it.
"You brought him here," said the woman with the lanyard, and for the first time in eight thousand years, by her own account, something in her voice moved. "Do you understand what he is? You've walked the floor of the world into the room with the hole in it."
"Yes," said Gucci. "Sit down, all of you. We're doing it tonight and I'd like it done properly."
"Doing what?"
"Sending you home."
The silence in that hall, Rose says, was the loudest thing she has ever stood in, and she has stood on a runway in front of twenty thousand people.
"You can't," said the woman with the lanyard.
"I can. I've been able to for four hundred years. I haven't, because I couldn't do it without taking the world with you, and now my brother is standing in this room and I can." Gucci hung her coat over the back of a chair. "Would you like to argue about it, or would you like to go home?"
The woman with the lanyard sat down on the floor of the Kanzlei, in a good coat, arm strapped up, put her ordinary face in her one good hand, and made no sound at all.
Here is how it was done. I was there for all of it and I've checked the parts I couldn't see.
The ring came apart first. The oldest objects in the world, lifted one at a time by kobolds who handled them like a sleeping child, and stacked round the edges of the hall. Ninety minutes. Ilse Varga carried four herself and would not be helped. Marguerite wrote down what each one was as it moved, because Marguerite is Marguerite.
Under the ring: plain stone, with a seam in it that was not a seam.
The colony came up when the last bronze moved. Nobody called them. Four hundred and eleven of them, out of the hundred small doors, and they sat down in a ring exactly where the old things had been. That's when Gucci sat down on the floor herself and said, "Oh, my darlings. You remembered."
They'd been holding the lid with the bronzes for eleven thousand years, and nobody had ever asked them.
"They'll panic," said Bob. "When it opens. The wave goes down the line, they all die again, and this time there's nobody left to come after them."
"Yes," said Gucci.
"So somebody has to hold four hundred frightened animals steady from inside," said Ricky.
And everybody looked at the rail, and the seat on it, and the two pedals connected to nothing, and then at the only dragon in the room young enough to do it.
"No," said Vovô.
He had not spoken since the ladder.
"Vovô—"
"My uncle sat in that chair for six hundred years." It was the voice Ricky had heard maybe four times in his life. "He walked eleven thousand families out of a city, very gently, and he minded every single time, and it took him apart one household at a time. The last thing he said to my father was never take the chair. It is the only instruction my family has. It is what we have instead of a religion." He looked at his grandson. "And I am going to sit in it, because I am four hundred years old and you are twenty, and that is what the instruction is for."
"You can't hold four hundred," said Gucci gently. "I'm sorry. I watched your uncle do it. He was the best there has ever been, it took everything he had, and he was in his prime. You are a very old man in rubber boots."
"Then who?"
"Both," said Charlie.
Everybody turned round.
"It's a lens." She had the photocopies out. She'd had them out for four days. "That's all the chair is: a lens, a seat, and two pedals so you know which one you're pressing. They put one dragon at the end of the hall and one man on the seat because they only ever had one dragon willing to sit still. Nothing here says it has to be one." She looked at her brother and her grandfather. "Him at the end of the hall holding the line steady. You on the seat, because you can feel a floor better than anyone I've ever met and you'll know the second they start to go. Four hundred is too many for one. It is not too many for a family."
Vovô looked at her for a long moment.
"Your grandmother," he said, "would have said exactly that. Faster."
Rose stood at the seam with Kappa, because somebody had to, and because she was the only one who could see two days into a future about to have a hole in it.
Bob and the kobolds stood between everybody and everybody, which is what kobolds are for.
Marguerite wrote it all down.
Ilse Varga stood at the edge with her cold coffee and did not sit, and at the very end, when it mattered, did the one thing nobody expected. I'll get to it.
And I sat on the stone by Kappa's foot, because he put me there, and because a compass is useful when you're about to open something that isn't in any particular direction.
"Point," said Gucci.
And I pointed. Nine days of holding my attention off it, and I let go, and turned, and the thing I'd been not-looking at came up under me like a floor going out.
"There," I said. "There. Fourteen centimetres left of the seam. It's not where the seam is, the seam's wrong, it's there—"
Kappa put his hand flat on the stone fourteen centimetres left of the seam and said, "Okay."
And opened the door.
I'm not going to describe it. Not because it was horrifying; because it wasn't anything. No light, no wind, no hole. There was a place in the floor where the idea of the floor stopped being available, and my whole small body understood that if I looked at it properly for more than a second I would not be able to stop.
The mice went up like a struck match.
Four hundred and eleven small linked animals in a ring, eleven thousand years deep in one remembered night of teeth in the dark, and the floor opened, and the wave started exactly as it had before: one of them, at the edge, simply stopping, and the stopping going down the line.
It got four.
Then it hit a dragon at the end of the hall who had been standing in a river of it with his eyes shut for ninety minutes, and it went into him instead of through them, and Vovô made a sound I have never heard anything make. It went past him, weaker, and hit a nineteen-year-old on a brass seat, feet on two pedals connected to nothing, hands flat on the rail, eleven years of learning to feel a floor and about four seconds of learning to be a lens. He didn't stop it either.
He did the other thing. The thing his uncle never worked out in six hundred years, because his uncle was alone, and you can't do this alone.
He gave it somewhere to go.
Ricky opened the whole of himself down the family line: to his grandfather at the end of the hall, and through him, out, up, four thousand kilometres, to a kitchen in Salvador and a school on Canal Street and every dragon on the Ältestenrat in their pools and hills, and to his sister six feet away with a torch in her hand. Every one of them felt four hundred small animals be frightened at once. Every one of them took it and did not let go.
It's the largest thing my family has ever done. There's no record of it except this, and eleven of the twelve council members couldn't speak for a day and a half afterwards.
The mice held.
And the eleven walked past them, past a woman in a padded coat who had brought them blankets, to the place where the floor stopped.
The woman with the lanyard stopped at the edge.
She looked back at the hall. The mice; the stacked bronzes; a dragon on a brass seat with blood coming out of his nose; Kappa, hand flat on the stone, holding the floor of the world still with an expression of enormous concentration and no fear at all.
"Twenty-two people in a foyer," she said. "In Toronto. I'd like to say something about that, and there isn't anything."
"No," said Rose. "There isn't."
"We didn't know what else to do. We have never known what else to do. That's what being a piece of a thing with no shape is: you want, and you have no method." She looked at Rose properly. "You were never the point. I'm sorry. That's worse, isn't it."
"Yes."
The woman with the lanyard nodded, and stepped off the edge of the floor, and was not there.
Ten more followed. The last was small and had been carrying the blankets, and it stopped in front of Gucci and folded them and gave them to her, and went.
"Now," said Gucci, "the closing. And then I'm going to say something and nobody is going to argue with me."
"A door closes from one side." Kappa said it flatly, the way you say a thing you've known for two hours and hoped to be wrong about. "You can't shut it from here. Somebody has to be on the other side of it."
"Somebody has to be on the other side of it," Gucci agreed.
"Then I'll—"
"You are the floor of the world, my love. Put one foot through that hole and every living thing goes with you like water down a plughole. Also you are my little brother and I have waited eleven thousand years for a Tuesday with you in it." She was already taking her boots off, which nobody understood at the time and which Bob says he thinks about every day. "It has to be somebody old enough to hold the lid on from the far side and light enough that the world doesn't follow them through. That's a very short list and I've been on it alone since Saturday."
"Gucci—"
"I kept the lamps in oil for eleven thousand years, brother, and every single day of it I knew what the lamps were for." She was crying and entirely calm. "Chanel gave up her body so you could come back. I have never once been the one who did the thing. I would like, at the end, to have been the one who did the thing."
"That's not a reason," said Kappa.
"No. It's a feeling. They're better." She kissed him on both cheeks, and then, to everyone's astonishment, kissed Bob on the top of his head. "Small one. Point at me sometimes."
"I will."
"Good."
And Ilse Varga, who had said nothing for two hours, put her cold coffee down on the stone and said: "No."
Everyone turned.
"I have run Kralle for two hundred years. Do you know what Kralle is for? It is not for finding. Anyone can find. It is for standing in front of. That is the entire job, it is the only thing I have ever been proud of, and there is a woman in this room about to walk out of the world alone because she is the only one on a list." She looked at Gucci with the eyes that were not entirely a person's. "You will not be doing it alone. That is not negotiable and I am not asking."
"You've no idea what's through there."
"No," said Ilse Varga. "Neither have you. And I have wanted to know what things are my entire life."
Gucci looked at her for a long moment.
"Bring your coffee," she said.
They went through together, a small round woman in socks and an old woman in a coat with a cold coffee, and the floor closed behind them the way a held breath is let go, and the hall under the hillside was just a hall with a lot of mice in it.
And everywhere in the world, at once, at eleven minutes past four in the morning, the floor came back.
Not soft. Not holding. Back. Solid all the way down, the way it had been before a night at Grand Central two years earlier, when a boy in good shoes felt a board go out from under everything.
Frau Adler, in a drained swimming bath in Prenzlauer Berg, stood up out of her chair for the first time in six years.
In Salvador a fisherman rang a school on Canal Street and got no answer.
Under the hillside, four hundred and seven mice went quietly back through a hundred small doors. A nineteen-year-old fell off a brass seat into his sister's arms. An old man at the end of the hall sat down and put his head in his hands. And Kappa took his hand off the stone and looked at it as if it belonged to somebody else.
"Is that it?" he said. "Is it— did we—"
"That's it," said Rose. "That's what it looks like. It looks like nothing. It always looks like nothing."