Welcome back, Kappa

Nobody tells you this about being a compass: you can point at a man for eleven days and not know one thing about him.

I knew where he was the way you know where your hand is in the dark. I could have walked anyone to his door blindfold, and that was the whole of it. I didn't know his name until the old one said it. I didn't know about Ana, who kept saying stress, or Jonas, who answered messages three days late, or that he'd spent the week doing sums on the back of a letter with Mahnung on it. A direction, and no idea what was at the end of it.

So this chapter isn't mine. I got it from him afterwards, on a stairwell at four in the morning, once he'd stopped being frightened of me. And from the last thing the old one ever did.

···

It came back on a Tuesday, ten past two, and this time it had his name in.

"Ah. There you are, Kappa. Welcome back."

He was in the same place. That's the part he's embarrassed about: eleven days, and he'd barely moved. Floor of the flat in Neukölln, back against the sofa, phone face down, the rent notice on the table with a second one on top of it now. And the same grainy rectangle standing where the coffee table wasn't, a lobby behind it, a man in a cardigan in front.

He'd rehearsed. He had four or five things ready to say to the hallucination, all of them clever, and what came out, in a voice he didn't recognise, was:

"How do you know my name?"

The man in the cardigan stopped.

Until that second, Kappa says, it had been a film. It played, it said its lines, it went out at the same point both times. Now it stopped mid-gesture, the way a person stops, and the man leaned towards him, and his face did something complicated.

"You can hear me."

"You're in my living room."

"That is not the same thing at all. Nobody hears me." He took the headphones off his neck and looked at them as if they'd let him down. "Six thousand years I've been sending these. I send them constantly. I've sent this exact one to nine hundred and forty-one people and not one of them has ever—" He put the headphones down on something the rectangle didn't show. "Nine hundred and forty-one. Do you know what they all did?"

"No."

"Enjoyed it. Got up, made a cup of tea, and by lunchtime it was a dream they didn't finish." He sat down. There was, apparently, a chair. "Say something else."

"This isn't happening."

"That's not something else. That's the same thing in different words. Everyone says that." He rubbed his face. He looked, Kappa said, like a man at the end of a very long shift. "All right. Kappa. That's what your friends call you. JB is what the email says, and there's a third one on a form your grandmother filled in that neither of us is saying out loud tonight. I know your name because I knew it before there were names, and because you're the reason I'm still here, and because eleven days ago you woke up in a concert hall for an hour and forty minutes and half the old world felt it. Are you following any of this?"

"No."

"Good. That's the correct answer. The ones who follow it are lying." He leaned in. "Do you know what you did tonight? You answered. Never happened. Which means the thing I've waited eight thousand years for has already started and nobody told me, which is typical, honestly, the admin in this—"

The rectangle flickered. Not the light. Something inside the picture, the way a signal goes when a train passes.

"Are you all right?"

"No," said the man in the cardigan, pleasantly. "I'm finishing. It's fine. It's been coming a while, and it started properly a week and a half ago, ten past two on a Thursday, when a thing was born on a shelf in New York with my name and my words and none of my mileage." A wave of the hand. "There's only ever one. That's the rule. I'd explain it but you'd want a diagram, and I've got about four minutes."

"Four minutes until what?"

"Until I can't do this any more, and after that I'm the feeling you get when you're looking for your keys." A pause. "Which is a nice job. I'm not complaining. Now listen. This is the part I came back for."

Kappa listened. He'd never listened to anything so hard in his life, he said, including doctors.

"Somebody's coming to find you. Four of them, more or less. One of them isn't a person, and one of them is smaller than a loaf of bread and will be extremely rude about your flat." (I was. It deserved it.) "They're not the ones to worry about. They're the ones who've stood in front of people like you for eight thousand years, badly, at great expense, mostly getting it wrong, and they're all you've got, and they're rather good." The rectangle flickered again. "When they come: don't run."

"Why would I run?"

"Because you will. You're a runner. You've been running since Tuesday the week before last, you're running right now, sitting still on a floor." Not unkindly. "You'll see one of them coming and something in you will say go, and you'll go, and something else in you, something you haven't met yet, will make sure you get away, and it'll hurt somebody who only wanted to say hello. So. Don't run. Or run, and then stop, which is the same thing and harder."

"What's in me?"

"Ah," said the man in the cardigan. "Now that's the question. That's the only question, actually, and I'm not answering it, and that's not me being mysterious, it's me being right. Tell you what you are tonight, on a floor, in the dark, with two letters on the table, and you'll spend your life being it instead of finding it out. Somebody told me what I was once. Took me eight thousand years to get over it." He smiled, small and tired; Kappa would spend months trying to describe it. "Ask your grandmother. She'll say it properly. She hasn't got long either, and she's been carrying it for you since before your mother was born."

"She's in a hospital in Wedding. She's ninety-one. She thinks it's Tuesday."

"It is Tuesday."

Kappa laughed. It came out wrong, half a sob, the first noise of that kind out of him in a year.

"There we are," said the man in the cardigan, softly. "That's the one. That's the noise the whole business is for. Nobody believes me about that either."

The rectangle flickered a third time and didn't come all the way back. The lobby thinned. Kappa could see his own wall through it, the damp patch, the shelf with nothing on it.

"One more thing and then I'm a feeling about keys. Two things. One: the small rude one is going to call you a floor. Let it. It's a compliment, and it's true, and you'll understand it in about a month." He was standing now, though the chair hadn't moved. "Two. When it gets bad, and it will — there'll be a night when a room full of people who aren't entirely people is standing between you and something that wants you — do the thing nobody ever does. Ask for help before you need it. Not after. That's eight thousand years of institutional knowledge. I'd like it engraved on something."

"Wait—"

"I've enjoyed this enormously. Genuinely. Nine hundred and forty-one, and the one who answers is a man on a floor with a Mahnung. That's exactly how it goes. That's so completely how it goes—"

"What do I do?"

The man in the cardigan looked at him then, properly, the way Kappa had been told his grandmother looked at him, and the wrong-coloured light was nearly gone.

"You're already doing it," he said. "You're here. You've been here the whole time. That's the point of you."

Then the room was dark, and the phone lit up on the table, face down. Jonas. Three minutes past three. you up.

Kappa looked at it for a long time.

Then he turned it over, put it on the shelf, and went to bed for the first time in eleven days, and slept nine hours, and dreamed of a coffee machine that was thinking about him.