Episodul 266 · What He Is

On Monday night the bakery door had a one on it, chalked by someone from the detachment in a hand Varren did not know.

He stood in front of it longer than he needed to, then went in through the shop.

The kitchen behind it still held the afternoon’s heat. Zora sat at the table with her notebook shut under her hand. Noct had the chair by the back door, which stood open a hand’s width onto the yard, and a glass he had not touched yet. The surveyor sat on the flour sacks with his coat buttoned to the throat. That morning he had walked to the evacuation van for the second time and come back for the second time, and nobody had asked him why.

Halloran came in last, carrying the empty trays from the old customs building.

He set them on the counter. He did not take off his coat.

— They’re going in when the doors run out, he said. Tomorrow night.

— Who is?

— The entry teams. They were loading cases into the trucks. One of the men called it sterilizing. He said it twice, like he enjoyed the word.

Noct turned the glass a quarter turn on the table.

— And your friend? he asked.

Halloran answered before Varren could.

— His people go down first. Before the teams. The cook said the chief wanted it that way.

Varren laid both hands flat on the table.

— What else?

— He gave them a drawing of the room. The one under the river. It’s pinned up in the hall, by the coats. The cook asked me if I’d ever been down there. I said I bake bread.

— What else, Halloran.

Halloran looked at the trays.

— There’s a man in gray who asks every morning whether they’ve brought you in. They have a paper with your name on it. And Soles told them he found you. He told them he let you go.

Zora looked up.

— He let you go?

Varren had not told them about the hatch. He told them now, plainly, in order. The rope. The edge of the boards. His own arm across the frame and Soles’s hand on his wrist, closed, the cousin standing behind him with the line, the man who held the rope at the top watching them both.

— And he opened his hand, Zora said.

— With a witness at the hatch.

He heard how quiet the kitchen had become, and went on into it.

— The same night, he walked into their building and told them where I had been. Now he has a paper with my name on it, and a drawing of the room, and he goes down first, before anyone else can see what he does there.

Nobody answered. The surveyor’s hands moved in his lap.

— He killed a man called Bull, Varren said. You heard that before I did. He pulled at the root once, and you all got worse. You know that better than I do.

He looked at the sacks.

— And twice this week his people walked you to their van.

— I walked, the surveyor said.

— Twice.

Zora opened the notebook, looked at a page and closed it again. Varren knew that gesture. She made it at the river when a reading came out the same as the day before and she did not trust it.

— Every one of those things happened, she said.

— Yes.

— You’re telling them so there’s only one way to hear them.

— I’m telling you what he did.

She held his eyes a moment longer. Then she turned in her chair, away from him.

— Halloran. What do you want?

Halloran blinked at her as if she had asked him to spell his name.

— I want the oven to be empty when it’s empty.

— Noct?

— A drink that works. Failing that, a quiet one.

She looked at the sacks.

— And you?

The surveyor rubbed his thumb along the seam of his coat.

— I want it to stop calling me.

He swallowed.

— I want to go home. Then I get to the van and I want to come back here.

Zora nodded slowly.

— None of you said keep it open, she said.

— None of them said cut it either, Varren said.

The stove ticked. Somewhere above the yard a gutter let go of its snow all at once.

Varren pushed back his chair and went around the table to Noct.

— Give me your arm.

Noct looked at the offered hand, then at Varren.

— We’ve been through this. I said I’d think about it.

— Your forearm. Pull whenever you like. Tell me when to let go.

Noct put the glass down untouched and laid his arm on the table, palm up, like a man offering it for a blood test.

Varren set his fingers above the wrist and his thumb across the inside of the forearm. No grip. Contact, and the place in himself that answered contact. Then he leaned into that place.

Noct pulled. The arm stayed where it was.

Noct pulled harder, then came up off the chair and shoved Varren’s shoulder with his free hand. Varren let the shove turn him, stepped with it, kept his fingers where they were. The effort ran up through his own forearm and settled in his back. Sweat broke at his hairline.

— Now, Noct said.

Varren let go on the word.

They did it again. And again. The third time Noct said it in the middle of a pull, a liar’s timing, and Varren opened his hand exactly there. Noct went back two steps, caught himself without the wall and stood looking at his arm.

For an instant, under Varren’s thumb, the angle of that wrist had been familiar. The old voice said nothing at all. It seemed to be listening.

— You’re getting better at that, Noct said. The letting go.

Zora had not moved.

— That isn’t letting go, she said. That’s deciding when.

Varren dried his palms on a cloth from the oven rail. Nobody had asked him what he was practicing for. Zora was the only one who did not need to.

Halloran started stacking the trays. The surveyor watched the open door. Outside, someone from the detachment walked past the shop window with a lamp, slowing at each door to read the chalk.

Noct sat down again and rubbed the inside of his forearm.

— So what is he? he asked. Your brother, or the thing down there?

Varren lifted his bag from the back of the chair and settled the strap on his shoulder. Through the canvas he could feel the wrapped length of the pale blade lying against his hip.

— He’s the one with the knife.