Episodul 162 · Before the Turn

By morning he had found a way of sitting that left both shoulders alone. It worked until Mina decided she wanted the blanket under his elbow, and he surrendered it an inch at a time, with her watching from the far end of the sofa like a bailiff.

Krista came through with her coat on; the exhibition wanted its captions by Friday. She kissed him carefully enough that he resented how much care was needed.

— Call me when someone calls you. If you want me to come, say so before you’re on your way. Not after.

Maxim had taken the chair by the window again and was glaring at his phone. A customer wanted a delivery with loading, and Maxim could drive but not lift.

— Ask Dorin, Soles said.

— I’d have to pay him.

— I assumed you’d mention that part.

— He’d charge me for the conversation too.

Maxim scrolled, sighed and typed with one thumb.

— Fine. Dorin. But if he brings Piter, Piter talks the whole way there and back, and I’m not paying for that either.

Tesa had just put bread on the table when the knock came. Three, evenly spaced, the knock of a man used to doors being opened for him. Lucky went to the hall without barking, which meant the dog had decided it was nobody to worry about. Soles had stopped trusting that decision two days ago.

The investigator stood on the step in his good overcoat, with snow on his shoulders and a paper bag of bread of his own. His eyes went to the sling, then to the other shoulder.

— I heard about the gate.

In the hall, on his way to the kitchen, he paused. His lips moved. Kitchen door, living-room door, bathroom, bedroom, the cupboard under the stairs. At the end of the hall he frowned slightly, as if the number had come out wrong, and went on.

Five. There are five. He counted five, and it still came out wrong.

He did not sit. He stood by the table with his hands in his pockets and delivered it in the same flat order he drove in.

— One of the four was seen. Two nights running, in a laundromat on the north side. Clean, fed, warm. Not a man who’d been sleeping in a bus shelter in February. When the patrol came, he’d gone.

— Varren? Tesa asked.

— No. One of the others. The woman who runs it asked where he was staying. He said somebody had given him a place to sit.

Soles thought of a folding chair under a man’s arm, carried across a yard full of steam.

A place to sit. He’s already started.

Somewhere in this town a man with warm hands was sitting very still and calling it rest.

— She said he kept looking at the dryers, the investigator added. As if he wanted to put his hands in them. Because they were warm.

Nobody said anything to that.

— The other thing is why I came myself.

He took his right hand out of his pocket. It had been closed. He opened it with what looked like effort.

— Yesterday I carried a message I wasn’t asked to bring here. The east wing has been handed to the other branch. A team goes in to clear the site a week on Saturday.

Clearing sites. The words came back up exactly where Soles had put them.

— How? Tesa asked.

— Nobody told me how. Nobody told me not to tell you, either.

— Which is how you know they expected you to, Maxim said.

Soles did the arithmetic because someone had to. Twelve days. A team from the same branch as the man who walked out of walls, going into a building where the opening fed on exactly that kind of strength. He had pushed at it for perhaps ten seconds, and the ceiling had come down on him. He could still feel exactly where it had landed.

— They’ll make it bigger, he said.

— You don’t know that.

— I know what it did when I pushed. If they push the way that man walks, they’ll open it over everyone still standing near it.

— Then it’s closed before they go in, Tesa said, the way she said things in the gym, as a description of what would happen.

Soles looked at his hands. One arm would not lift past his chest. The other would not straighten. To touch the thread he had to cross that room without doing the one thing that made it worse.

So. Go further than the man in the corridor without being what I was in there. In twelve days. With these arms. Wonderful.

— Whatever I do in there, he said, it can’t be pushing.

— Then you learn to walk into a wind, Tesa said. You don’t push a wind. You lean at the right angle and keep your feet under you. That’s footwork. That’s the turn.

— That’s not boxing, Maxim said.

— Everything’s boxing if you do it properly.

— Then I’ve been boxing my accountant for years.

— And losing.

The investigator looked from one of them to the other, like a man who had come to deliver bad news and was no longer sure what he had delivered instead. He left his bread beside Tesa’s and went. In the hall his lips moved again. Soles did not count with him.

The front door closed. Through the window Soles watched him stop at the gate and look back at the house for a moment, the way a man checks a figure he has already written down, before he turned up his collar and walked to his car. Mina watched him go from the arm of the sofa and did not settle again until the engine had started.

Then Soles picked up the envelope of photographs and wrote on the back, under the date of the last inspection, the word Saturday. With his left hand the letters came out crooked.

— When can I use the gym?

Tesa looked at his left shoulder, then his right elbow.

— When you can lift your arm above your head without making that face.

— What face?

— That one.

He stopped making it.

— Four days. Maybe. If you sit still until then.

Twelve days had become eight before he had even started. He found he was glad to know the number at last.

Tesa did not wait for him to say anything else. She stacked the chairs by the stove, pushed the rug back with her foot and dragged the table to the window, where Maxim moved his phone out of its way without looking up. When she was done there was a strip of bare floor from the sofa to the hall, as long as a ring and half as wide. Mina got off the sofa to inspect it, found nothing in it worth having, and got back on.

Tesa stood in the clear space with one foot behind the other.

— Which one can I move first?

— The back one.

She lifted the front one. It left the floor without disturbing anything above it.

— You were looking at my face, she said.

— It was talking.

— It’ll be talking for four days. Look lower.

He sat still. This time he watched her feet.

Lucky came in from the hall and lay down across the clear strip, exactly where she was standing, and had to be moved twice.