Episodul 106 · A Yard Full of Questions

Someone was honking.

Maxim opened his eyes. The barrier was up. The bell had gone silent. A line of cars had formed behind him, and the driver of a white van was holding down his horn without pause, the way you press a doorbell no one answers.

No train had passed. Or it had, and he had not seen it.

Maxim started moving. His hands were shaking on the wheel. They were black. Black across the palms and between the fingers, all the way to the wrists, like hands that had lifted wood from a dead fire. He looked at them at the first traffic light. Rubbed them on his pants. Nothing came off. It was not soot.

At the next light on the boulevard, he felt something coming from the right, around the corner, an instant before it came. He braked. A bus ran the red light half a meter from the truck’s bumper with a long hiss of brakes and disappeared.

Maxim kept his foot on the brake until the light turned green, then a little longer.

He had known. Known before it came, the way Tertius had known the ships.

Except this time he had not been standing on any tower.

Soles sat on the front step with a mug in his good hand and the other, the stitched one, resting palm-up in his lap. Lucky slept beside him with his leg in the spoon splint. Mina was in the yard sniffing a tire track in the gravel with the seriousness of an investigator.

— You’re early, Soles said.

— Had somewhere to be.

Maxim sat beside him on the step. He kept his hands between his knees, palms down.

— The investigator came by around seven, Soles said. Castell admitted the fraud. The blocks, the money, everything. Says he didn’t hire anyone for my parents. Kerr says he did. The crane log says Dad saw something. The investigator says it’s enough.

— And?

Soles looked at the mug in his hand.

— I should feel something. I’ve been waiting for this since I got out of the hospital. A name. Someone who can stand in front of me and have a face. Now I have a name, a face, and an umbrella, and I don’t feel anything. It’s like putting a part back into an engine and the engine still doesn’t start. The part is good. It just wasn’t the one.

Maxim said nothing. He was no good with things like that. He was good with engines that did not start.

— Maybe you need time, he said at last, because that was what people said.

— Maybe.

Soles looked down. Maxim realized too late that his hands had slipped off his knees and now rested on the step, palms up.

— What happened to your hands?

Maxim turned them over. The blackness had faded from his fingers, but it remained in the hollow of his palms, gray, and would not go away.

— I stopped at the railway gate, he said. By the silos.

He told him. Not all of it. Not that the first dream had come weeks ago, against a tire in Soles’s own yard. The tower, the fire, the old man who could feel ships an hour away. The boat. He did not say what had happened to the fire after the old man climbed down. He did not mention the bus either. Soles listened the way he listened, head tilted slightly, without interrupting.

— The one from the temple, Soles said when he finished. The man with the fire. The one who told you to look at the fire.

— Him.

— And what happened to him?

Maxim looked out at the yard, at Mina, who had abandoned the track and was watching him now.

— He left his post, he said.

Soles waited. Maxim said nothing more, and Soles did not ask again. Between them on the step, the coffee cooled.

Maxim’s phone buzzed in the breast pocket beside the cards. Maxim took it out, looked at the screen, turned it face down on his knee, and did not answer.

— Don’t you have a delivery today? Soles asked. It’s Monday.

— They postponed it.

It came out easily. Easier than he had expected. Soles nodded and looked again at his stitched palm.

— I need help, he said.

Maxim turned toward him. It was the first time Soles had said those exact words, without going around them, without a joke at the end.

— I don’t know how hard I can push, Soles said. Saturday, at the archive, I didn’t know. I stopped ten cabinets with my hands. Then I pushed them back and broke the rail. If Alden had been standing on the other side… He stopped. I need to find out where I stop. I can’t find out here. I’m afraid to lean against a wall.

Maxim thought of his yard. Of the trailer without wheels, the stacked tiles, the engine under the tarp, the concrete posts he had bought for a fence he had never built.

— I’ve got a yard full of things I never finish, he said. You can break a few more.

In daylight, Maxim’s yard was full of things started and never finished. Soles paused with his hand on the gate and closed his eyes. Elias stood beyond the fine, luminous stems, studying something Soles could not see. When Soles approached, the man’s gaze passed over his work clothes and returned to the invisible problem.

Measure.

Soles opened his eyes. He could begin with what was actually in the yard.

That man did not want to command anything. He wanted to know.

The yard changed with him. It did not become a hall, the way the archive basement had for the king. It became a laboratory. Every object turned into a question with an answer that could be measured. The trailer: how much did it weigh, what did it rest on, where was its center of balance. The concrete posts: how long, how thick, reinforced with iron or not. The roof tiles: how many, what did one weigh, what did a hundred weigh. Nothing frightened him anymore. Everything interested him.

— Do you have a notebook? he asked Maxim.

— I’ve got a delivery notebook.

— Get it.

Maxim took it from the cab and opened it to a blank page at the back, where there were no more deliveries. Soles caught sight of the rows crossed out with straight lines on the earlier pages. Elias’s attention brushed the crossed-out rows and moved on to the objects they could measure. Soles did not look longer.