The City in the Middle of the Night Read online

  The Invention.

  “Where?” Mouth coughed. Heart thrashing like a wild snake. “Where did this item end up? ‘The Invention.’ I have a friend who, uh. I have a friend who would kill to get their hands on this.”

  George groaned. Mouth had interrupted just as he and Omar were getting to the fun part of their conversation about the crazy shit that went down in Argelo, the City that Never Sleeps. “Which list is that?”

  Mouth scrolled back up to the top of the list and scanned for the title. “The McAllister Acquisition.” There was an amount, in luxury coins, plus some time-related details which would only make sense to a Xiosphanti.

  George tutted for a moment, then said, “Oh. Right. Yeah, that was a special auction. Some rare items. As near as I can recall, it all ended up in the Palace.” Sure enough, the bottom of the manifest had a notation that included the prince’s personal seal.

  The Invention was here. In Xiosphant. In that stupid cotton-candy Palace. Everything Mouth had lost, everything that the Resourceful Couriers had failed to replace. Just sitting there, and Mouth only had to go in there and grab it. Mouth lost a breath, thinking about holding the Invention, opening it up, looking inside.

  She felt like passing out from happiness.

  SOPHIE

  The new boy is named Jeremy, and he doesn’t know how to do anything. I have to lace his sandals for him five times, and his polished leather tunic keeps threatening to fall off one shoulder. He can’t hold the tray steady, or light the candle with a supple enough wrist. He doesn’t breathe right. He keeps asking me questions, in a precise accent that reminds me of Bianca. I just shrug and keep redoing his laces and buckles and flower arrangements, hoping this time he’ll get it.

  “Please,” he says. “If you won’t even talk to me, how can I ever understand anything? Hernan said you would help.” Jeremy is pale, with wavy reddish brown hair and narrow eyes with dark brown pupils, and he shuffles around in the antechamber between our tiny shared bedroom and the staging area for all the client sessions, with its racks of ornate samovars, fine plates, and tiny serving implements.

  It’s true, Hernan did ask for my help: putting his hand on my shoulder and crinkling his gray eyes underneath his pale wispy eyebrows. “Sophie, I know this is hard for you. But just try to remember when you were new at this, and you felt like you were going to break everything, all the time. Other people, including Kate and Walter, went out of their way to help you. So now, it’s your turn. Please help us with Jeremy.”

  As if I could forget those times when I was still so raw, one layer beneath the skin, that I felt an endless ice storm raging in my blood and my bones. The time, right after I came to the Illyrian Parlour, when I was sure the police would arrive at any moment to finish what they started. I’ve lived here long enough that I can venture out into the street, even walk past a police lorry, without trembling or trying to hide my face. Nobody would recognize me now, even if they somehow knew me from before, since I’ve grown a few centimeters, while also forcing myself to learn a whole new posture and way of holding my body. I walk even slower than I breathe, and each new breath comes and goes, as gradual as the blooming and wilting of a flower.

  Yet I still can’t venture into the temperate zone, or anywhere near the Gymnasium, without hearing the drone of police engines and the shouts of the mob, echoing in my memories. Some part of me is convinced that if I walk too close to campus, men in uniforms will instantly cuff me and throw me into a police lorry.

  So I try to help Jeremy as much as I can. I owe a lot to Hernan, and to all his staff, past and present. But I never liked talking to people before, and now I hate it twice as much. Part of me is still waiting to finish telling the joke I started blurting out in the basement of the Zone House. As though time halted in the midst of that one syllable, and has never found a way to resume, no matter what the calendar says.

  Speaking of the calendar, it’s already 4 Wander before Blue, which means Bianca must already be at least halfway finished with the whole program at the Gymnasium, maybe closer to two-thirds finished. She’ll have forgotten me by now. She’ll have an incredible life, help so many people, make so many friends. I make friends even slower than I walk, but everyone who meets Bianca wants to love her. I’m trying not to think about it too much.

  “Please,” Jeremy says again, in his voice that reminds me so much of hers. “I need to learn. I don’t have anywhere else to go but here.”

  I give him what I hope is a kind look, and whisper: “Just watch me work.”

  * * *

  People arrive at the ornate front door of the Illyrian Parlour out of breath. They’ve rushed here from work, and they only have a short interval before they have to run back. The gears on all the timepieces keep chewing through moment after moment, and they can’t stand to walk under this cruel sky any longer. They buzz and knock a few times before the golden door opens, and we can see them out on our stoop, fidgeting and even chattering to themselves. Shoulders hunched, necks clenched enough to show tendons.

  When I finally open the door, I just wave them inside, and hold out a red-and-gold-woven bag to store their timepieces. Then I show them into the waiting room, where a pendulum appears motionless at first. On the other wall, to their left, words of comfort unscroll across a cream-colored sign, so slowly you could doze off and wake to see one new word. The hand-loomed Argelan carpet absorbs all sounds once they’ve removed their shoes. On one of the chairs, a marmot named Cyrus sleeps, with rippling golden fur and blue velvety pseudopods that can extrude or disappear as needed. Most people have never seen a marmot before, let alone a full-grown one that weighs as much as a human toddler. Some of them dare to lean forward and touch Cyrus, and his contented rumble first startles and then relaxes them.

  We don’t start preparing the soothing blend of coffee and the geometrically complex interlocking pastries until they arrive, and that process takes three of us a while. Most of the time, the customers’ breathing slows down little by little, and they stop jerking their heads in every direction. A few of them just get up and leave.

  After the waiting room, they come into the main salon and stare at the embroidered floor cushions, low tables, wall hangings, and shelves full of books so old their crystals are fogged. They stand there, still breathing too fast and hunching forward, and try to assert themselves. And the only person facing them in that cool, persimmon-scented room is me.

  I always smile and gesture for them to sit on the cushions with one palm, and then pour a little clove-scented coffee into their cup, in a thin stream. They start talking, to fill the silence, and I let them. When at last they make a silence, I whisper something, such as a line from one of Hernan’s favorite books, and they have to concentrate to hear. Eventually someone comes in, Kate or Meg, and plays soft tones on a zither.

  Behind me, a pinwheel slows down at an imperceptible rate, and the music, too, slows little by little—all the tricks, aimed at putting their Timefulness to sleep, just for a while. I count my breaths, and breathe slower each time, the way I practiced. I sit languidly, ankle-skirt tucked under my feet.

  And meanwhile, I study each one of them. Hernan has been training me to read people, to pay attention to all the little cues and hints about what’s really going on with them. So, in turn, I can soothe them with tiny actions. I’ve discovered a whole side to myself that I’d only glimpsed before, and I’ve found it’s easier than I expected to take control over a scene with another person, as long as I have a well-defined role and we start from a place of quiet. And I like helping these people, who keep the farmwheels spinning or the waste flowing through the reclamation plant, to believe that they can survive another turn of the shutters.

  Around the time they’ve settled enough to hear me, I do something that feels like a huge exertion. I make conversation.

  The Illyrian Parlour is designed to look like a coffeehouse back in Zagreb, the greatest city back on Earth at the start of the Brilliant Age. But at some point, Hernan
realized that what people in Xiosphant really needed was a place to lose track of time.

  * * *

  The latest client has burn scars on his face that occlude one eye and create a slight inlet of baldness on one side of his head. Due to an industrial accident, perhaps, or brief exposure to direct sunlight (I think of my mother and flinch, but not visibly, so as not to upset him). “They call me Mustache Bob,” he says, “on account of my mustache.” This is a joke he’s told many times—or not quite a joke, more a deflection. His mustache is certainly impressive: dark, bushy, and tapered on the sides of his full lips.

  My first instinct is to think that he just wants to be someplace where nobody will ask him about his injury, where someone can just look at him without drama. But I study him more closely: the downward eye movements, the way he clutches his multitool from work, the twinge of anxiety when I quote from a poem about the Golden Thread of obligation and care. He’s feeling guilty about something that he can’t talk about. Whatever it is, he’s afraid people will find out and destroy him—something I can identify with better than almost anyone.

  So we do what Hernan calls the Indirection Dance. I don’t ask him any questions, and we just carry on a superficial chat about art, music, philosophy, all of the things nobody ever talks about in Xiosphant. Back in Zagreb, at its height, fashionable people traveled all the way from the other city-states—even as far away as Khartoum, New Shanghai, and Ulaanbaatar—via slow railways that snaked far below the toxic surface. Just so they could sit in rooms like this, and talk about nothing.

  Bob won’t even let out a hint about his secret transgression, but meanwhile he gets excited talking about this cartoon he saw as a child, which they streamed at the Grand Cinema before shutters-up. He makes pictures with his hands while he tries to describe the story. Then, on a hunch, I mention other forms of art, specifically sculpture, and he shuts down.

  Just before our session ends, I find out Bob’s sin: he needs to keep his hands busy when he’s monitoring all the big machines at work. So he’s taken to carving tiny figurines out of spare chunks of banyan wood, and he wants to give them away to people. But gifts make Xiosphanti people uncomfortable, suspicious, maybe even angry. If someone just gives you something, they’re saying that you need help, or they’re trying to insinuate themselves into your life. Like everyone always says, “Freely given, twice cursed.” Except maybe Bianca, I guess.

  There’s no time left to find the right way to reassure Bob gently that he’s done no wrong, even though we pretend, in here, to have all the time in the world. So I just say in my soft voice, “If you come back, I’d like one of your carvings. I’ll keep it next to my bunk.” For a moment, he pulls away, because he doesn’t want my charity. But then he sees that the look on my face hasn’t changed, and he nods, smiling a little, then runs because he’s late for work.

  When I get back to the staging area, Jeremy babbles a stream of praise for my craft, but he’s more scared than ever that he can’t handle this job. I shush him, and he waits a long time for me to speak. “Maybe the next client we can deal with together.” He’s way too grateful, almost crying, and I remember the part about him having nowhere else to go.

  * * *

  I can’t help studying Hernan the way he’s taught me to study other people. He sits in an armchair that looks more comfortable than it is, with big white wings and carvings of waves and boats on the arms. Cyrus the marmot is snuggled in his lap, growling with pleasure as Hernan scruffs his ears with his right hand.

  Hernan is taking a huge risk—because Cyrus has rolled onto his back, exposing the gland on his belly that’ll squirt a half liter of acid if anything startles him. The acid won’t kill Hernan, but it would sting horribly, and could cause permanent damage. Still, Hernan looks contented, wearing his usual gold-threaded tunic and linen pants, just with no shoes. Except that Hernan’s left thumb is caught in a vise of his own fingers, like a fear he’s keeping at bay.

  I’m perched on a big pile of cushions, ready to topple at any moment, in Hernan’s personal study, which is tiny and crammed with beauty. The dark walls are covered with little statues made with precious stones that must have come from a treasure meteor, red-and-gold watercolor paintings of the Young Father that someone risked blindness to create, strings of vivid blue feathers from some creature I’ve never seen.

  I’ve worked here for ages, but I still don’t understand Hernan at all. Everything about him, and about the Illyrian Parlour, spits in the face of Xiosphanti values. Not just the way we try to loosen the reins of Timefulness around people’s necks, but also this elaborate tribute to Zagreb, one of the seven city-states that pooled their resources to build the Mothership and come to this planet.

  There was a man in my apartment building, when I was little, who casually mentioned in public that he thought he had ancestors in the Calgary compartment on the Mothership, and people whispered that he was trying to set himself apart from everybody else. I heard my parents whisper sharp-edged little phrases about him, right before shutters-up. Soon after, he lost his job and had to move out, and I don’t know what happened to him after that.

  “We’re all Xiosphanti now,” people always say, as if those seven cities dissolved into one people the moment we stepped onto this planet. Even Bianca would never talk about her roots when she and I whispered together after curfew.

  Hernan proudly mentions his family came from Zagreb, which is an even more shocking confession, given what the history books say. He doesn’t flinch, or cavil, or act embarrassed by his own rudeness. He just comes out and says it, often right before he lectures me and the other servers about the beautiful way that everything was done in Old Zagreb at its peak.

  He doesn’t talk so much about what came later.

  But still, Hernan is afraid of something, or perhaps just waiting for tragedy to arrive. This place can’t last, we all know that—but he knows it more than we do.

  “Do you know why your mother used to come here?” Hernan asks me, without looking up from Cyrus.

  “Yes,” I say, without thinking about it.

  “You do? Oh good. Please do tell me. I always wondered.”

  “Oh, uh, well,” I say. “She was always so frazzled. My mom, you know, she was a bank for one of the farmwheels. And it was her job to fix everybody else’s messes, all the time. And then she would come home, and my father…” I stop, and pull the conversation back from what was about to be a bad place. “So she came here, to be at peace. That’s what I thought, anyway.”

  “Your mother was a very talented artist who never had a chance to share her art with anyone,” Hernan says, “which you’ll find is true of many of our clients here. But she also believed in assimilation and being a good Xiosphanti, and she spent her life keeping all these wheels turning. I think on some level she disapproved of the Parlour, with all our decadence, but we were the only ones who could give her what she needed. Whatever that was. As I said, I still don’t know.”

  “What kind of art?” I say, in a whisper that’s not my usual whisper. I don’t want to ruin whatever is happening here, this moment that Cyrus and I have catalyzed.

  Hernan just gestures at one of the paintings cluttering the wall: a little girl, standing in front of a pile of barley fresh from the farmwheel. The girl is a smudge of light brown, set off by green-and-white highlights on her chemise and ankle-skirt, and the stalks of barley are a rusty blond.

  My mother painted my picture, and I never saw her do it.

  I stare for a long time, until the image resolves into brushstrokes, but I can’t turn it into a scene whatever I do. It’s just a girl, and some barley, and no context. The harder I try to imagine the whole moment and place my mother in it, the more powerful the sense of absence becomes, until absence is the meaning of the picture. I hear stuttering breaths from my own mouth, like an echo of Cyrus’s purr; I suckle my own lower lip.

  When I get my voice back, I say: “She couldn’t have disapproved of this place too much. Sh
e brought me here with her.”

  “True,” Hernan says, just cradling Cyrus now. “Or maybe she just thought you would need this place eventually, even more than she did.”

  mouth

  Alyssa and Mouth met for drinks at the Low Road, right after Mouth had come back from yet another one of those political meetings where everyone kept quoting from ancient thinkers like Mayhew and Grantham. (“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” and “People are most imprisoned by the walls they help to build.”)

  “What are you even playing at?” Alyssa demanded, once she caught the stench of another dank factory basement on Mouth’s clothes. “Why are you getting sucked into politics anyway? You always told me politics is for settlers.”

  “Politics is a bloody waste of time,” Mouth snorted. “This isn’t about politics.”

  Alyssa knew Mouth too well, that was the problem. She was the one who held tight during all of Mouth’s bad dreams, nursed Mouth through her bouts of lightsickness, and cried on Mouth’s shoulder when the road started to eat at her soul. Mouth had shown Alyssa how to catch those little weasels under the crust of the road, which you could live off if you had to, and Alyssa had trained Mouth to shoot a gun. Alyssa even taught Mouth some of the songs from her bat mitzvah, and the stories from the Torah, some of which were about nomads. By now, Alyssa knew all of Mouth’s tells.

  “This is about what I said before, that you and I might be getting too old to be smugglers.” Alyssa sipped and made a face. “Now you’re trying to prove something by hanging out with Granthamites who are barely old enough to wank. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, love. You’re not even that much older than me. And anyway, I didn’t mean ‘old’ in terms of physical decay. I meant that I’m burning out. I have dreams about the road, and they all end with my bones in a hole. Even if we had a tunnel and a supplier, we might still be stuck here.”