The door

This part is mine. It's the only chapter of this book I was present for from start to finish, and I spent most of it in a box.

Here is what a shoebox is like when you're a compass. You can't see out, and it doesn't matter, because I knew where Kappa was every second: behind me, then further behind me, four hundred kilometres, nine hundred, two thousand, the way you know where your own hand is with your eyes shut. People ask what the worst part was and expect me to say the dark. It wasn't the dark. It was that.

The car became a van somewhere in Poland. The van became a container, the container went onto a train, and I know it was a train because of what trains do to a floor. Nine days.

They fed me. I want to be fair. Twice a day, water in a dish through a corner of the lid, and once a piece of bread, which I didn't eat, because nobody had told me yet that I don't eat. I sat next to it for two days feeling rude.

On the fourth day the woman with the lanyard took the lid off and looked at me.

Arm strapped up. Ordinary face. That's the thing I keep trying to get across about them and keep failing at: there is nothing to see. No beat, no blank, no hole. Ricky can feel a golem through forty feet of marble. I looked at a piece of a place with no shape from eighteen inches away and got a woman in a coat with a broken arm who hadn't slept.

"Do you know what you are?" she said.

"I'm a compass."

"You're a key," she said, and put the lid back on.

···

Nine days in the dark, and I used them to think. I got most of it right and I would like the credit.

One. They didn't need me to find Kappa. Since the hospital he had been the loudest thing in the world; you could have found him from orbit with your feet.

Two. They didn't want me for another oasis either. There aren't any; that's rather the point of oases. QueenL is the only other one found in eight thousand years and they've never once gone near her, and I think it's because she isn't the one. They aren't interested in universes in general. They're interested in the one that got away with a piece of itself still in their pocket.

Three. So what does a thing with no shape want with a small warm object that can feel exactly where something is, from any distance, through anything?

I got the answer on day six, when the container stopped and I heard, through the wall, a sound I'd felt once down the network and never with my ears: four hundred small linked animals, all breathing, in a room made of stone.

They wanted a door opened. And a door shut for eleven thousand years, which a dying woman in Wedding said out loud she'd never gone back to close, is a door nobody alive knows the exact position of.

Except a compass.

···

The Kanzlei is still there.

I expected ruins, probably; I'm young. What's there is a hillside in a place I'm not going to name, and under it a hall, and the hall has been maintained. That frightened me more than the coats did. Somebody has kept the lamps in oil for eleven thousand years. Somebody has been oiling the rail.

The seat is still on it. The two pedals are still connected to nothing.

The hundred small doors are still in the wall, and behind them, in the dark, are the descendants of four hundred mice who caught something in a room full of dead attempts. Still linked. Nobody driving them since the year a boy died on the eastern road and a wave went through the whole floor and killed nearly all of them at once.

And they remember it. That's the part I wasn't ready for. I put my head against the cardboard, fifteen days old, and found a colony of small quiet animals eleven thousand years deep in a hillside who have passed one memory down the line without a gap since the beginning, the way my family passes down a kitchen in Salvador. The memory is teeth in the dark and everyone stopping.

Above them, in the hall with the high roof, is the ring of ancient things. Bronzes. Bells. Stones with writing on them, in a circle round the centre.

The circle isn't there to keep bad spirits out of the room.

It's there to keep the door in the middle of it shut.

···

On the ninth day they set me on a table in the middle of the ring. There were eleven of them by then. The woman with the lanyard crouched so we were level.

"It's under this floor," she said. "A child opened it once, for nine seconds, and it's been walled up ever since by people who didn't understand what they were doing. Every one of us in this room came through that gap and got stuck in this shape when it shut. Do you understand what I'm asking?"

"Yes."

"Point at it."

"No."

She sat back on her heels. She looked tired rather than angry, which I have decided is the most frightening thing a person can look.

"You're a compass," she said. "It isn't a decision. You point at what's there. You've been pointing east for fifteen days and couldn't stop if you tried, and you're sitting four metres above the largest thing you will ever be near, and I can see you not-looking at it from here."

And she was right. That's the true horror of the ninth day. I haven't told Ricardo this part. I'm telling you.

I could feel it. I'd been able to feel it since the container stopped, the way you feel a cliff edge behind you in the dark, and for every second of nine days I had been holding my attention off it the way you hold your tongue off a broken tooth. I was fifteen days old. I was tired.

"What happens if I do?"

"We go home. That's all. That's the whole thing. Everyone assumes we want to eat the world. We want to leave. We've been in coats for eight thousand years."

"And the world?"

She stood up.

"The world is a room with no house around it, standing on a stone that died on Saturday. When we go out through the floor, it goes out with us. Not from spite. From plumbing." She picked up the lid. "You have until they get here. Somebody's coming for you, I imagine. That's the one thing that always happens."

···

So here is what I did, in the dark, on the ninth night, in the middle of a ring of bronzes on a hillside in the old country.

I couldn't shout. There's nothing to shout with. I'm not on the family line, I'm not a dragon, I'm a front door. I can't reach Ricardo, I can't reach Vovô, I have never been able to reach anybody.

Except one.

I have been pointing at him since I was four hours old. Through cardboard, nine days, two thousand kilometres, a hospital and a funeral I could feel and couldn't attend: one line between me and one man, taut the whole time. And for fifteen days I'd thought of it as something I did to him.

It had never once occurred to me to pull.

So I put everything I had into it, all fifteen days of me, and down that line, at the speed of feeling, I sent the only three things I know how to say. That I'm here. That I'm frightened. And:

Welcome back.

Four thousand kilometres away, in a hotel room in Berlin at four in the morning, nine days after burying his sister, a man who hadn't slept properly in three weeks sat straight up in the dark and said, out loud, to nobody:

"Oh. There you are."