Episodul 107 · A Weight He Could Move

They started with the roof tiles.

Soles took one from the stack, held it between thumb and forefinger of his good hand, and pressed. The tile held. He pressed harder. It held.

— Nothing, Maxim said, and wrote “tile — nothing” in his round delivery-note handwriting.

— Another one.

On the fourth tile, Soles thought of the archive. The rumble of cabinets on rails. Alden with his hands raised. The tile did not crack. It turned to dust between his fingers, a fine red powder, and something snapped once in Soles’s wrist and went quiet.

Maxim did not write anything for a while.

— You thought of something, he said.

— The archive.

— So it isn’t how much you want. It’s what you’re thinking about.

Elias’s attention sharpened. He was not convinced. One observation was not a rule. He wanted ten. He wanted a hundred.

They experimented all morning. He pressed his palm against the end of a concrete post lying on the ground while thinking about the tile, and the post remained a post. He pressed again, thinking of Krista with the green register against her chest, and the post split along its entire length with a dry crackle, the iron reinforcement jutting through the break like a rib through a wound. Soles felt, with a cold dread, that far more remained in him than he had used.

His nose began to bleed. Maxim tossed him a rag from the cab without asking.

— Write it down, Soles said through the rag.

Maxim wrote. Post — intact (tile). Post — broken (Krista). He looked at what he had written, crossed out the word in parentheses, then wrote it again.

By noon they had filled a whole page. Soles sat on the wheel-less trailer and read it. Elias followed the figures with him, line by line, and Soles liked how quiet everything became when he read that way. As though fear were only a number he had not measured yet.

The strength did not come when he called it. It came when he had something to lose. And when it came, he did not know how to stop it halfway.

It was not a rule. It was all they had.

— Let’s try once more, Soles said. With something else.

— With what?

Test.

The word came with a clean, terrible possibility. A person in front of him. Something to lose, someone to strike toward, and the measurement of how close he could stop. Soles could see how to arrange it. He could also remember Elias staying at the laboratory after he knew what the work would do.

Maxim would be the distance he measured.

Soles looked at Maxim, who held the notebook on his knees and watched him with the eyes of a man who never left first.

Soles was afraid. Not of the strength. Of how natural the thought had felt.

— Nothing, he said. That’s enough for today.

Elias’s interest faltered. The unfinished calculation remained between them. Soles let the question end without asking Maxim to stand in front of him.

Maxim closed the notebook. Around three, his phone buzzed again. He did not look at it. Soles saw him not looking and did not ask.

Before they left, Soles lifted the edge of the tarp over the boat engine. An old two-stroke, the carburetor caked in oil, the spark-plug wire cut.

— This runs, he said. It needs an afternoon.

— I don’t have a boat.

— Neither do I. But it runs.

Maxim pulled the tarp back into place carefully, the way you cover something sleeping.

— Nothing needs fixing, he said.

Maxim drove him home by the short route past the silos. At the railway crossing, the barrier was up. Maxim drove through without slowing, but his hands tightened on the wheel until the rubber creaked, and Soles saw it and looked away.

That evening Maxim did not go home. He drove to the print shop, where the day’s pallet was waiting, and loaded it himself because the dock man had left at five. The printer signed the delivery note on the hood and, without looking up, told him that from next month they had found someone cheaper, no hard feelings. Maxim said he understood. He had understood since morning.

The truck faced the closed sheet-metal loading door, a few steps from its nose; the yard entrance was behind it. The lamp above the door lit the cab and left the rear of the truck in shadow. Maxim was tightening the forward strap when the gray car entered the yard with its headlights off.

Maxim felt it before he heard it. Not the engine. The man behind the wheel, the way you feel a door open somewhere far away in a large house. The car stopped with its nose against the rear bumper so he could not reverse out.

Two men got out. The broad one, in a short leather jacket, came along the driver’s side and stopped between Maxim and the loading door. The thinner one, in a gray jacket, stayed by the car, his right shoulder slightly higher than the left.

— Evening, the broad one said. This won’t take long. Castell’s finished, but your mechanic friend is still digging around. You drive him everywhere, wait for him at the gate.

The man in the gray jacket moved behind the truck.

— It’d be better for everyone, the broad one went on, if starting tomorrow—

His hand rose toward Maxim’s chest, one finger extended, the way you show a man exactly where his place is. His fist moved before the finger got there.

He hit him in the mouth. Maxim did not know how to punch. He hit the way he lifted a pallet, with his whole body from the ground up, and the broad man stumbled back three steps into the loading door, which buckled with a drumlike bang and stayed that way, the shape of his back pressed into the metal.

Maxim looked at the door. Looked at his fist. It did not hurt. Not yet.

The broad man peeled himself off the door, spitting blood, and came at him, angry and quick. Two short blows to the ribs, the kind thrown by men who had done this for money, and Maxim felt both like doors slammed into his chest and did not fall. He grabbed the man’s jacket with both hands. He did not know what to do next. He simply held him.

Then he felt the second one coming.

He had lost sight of the man in the gray jacket behind the truck, where the lamplight did not reach. But he felt him the way Tertius had felt the ships: a weight approaching from the left, low, something long and heavy in hand. He knew where the crowbar would be before it was there.

He ducked, still gripping the jacket. The crowbar passed over his head and burst the side mirror with the sound of a bell.

Maxim straightened and shoved the broad man into the other one. He did not hit them. He pushed them both with all his weight, the way you push a jammed trailer, and they went down tangled on the asphalt, the crowbar clanging beneath the truck.