Kappa

The email said restructuring, which was a word that meant you.

He read it on the U8 between Hermannplatz and Boddinstraße, standing up, with somebody's rucksack in his back, and by Leinestraße he'd read it four times and it still said the same thing in the same tone, the tone of a company being kind to itself. Sixty of them. A Tuesday. A meeting at eleven he was no longer required to attend, and a link to a document about his options, and a sentence near the bottom thanking him for his contribution, which had been, for six years, the thing that made the thing for the hospitals not fall over at three in the morning.

He got off at Leinestraße because that was his stop, and stood on the platform while the train went, and the platform was soft.

That was the other thing. It had been going on for a year. He'd stopped mentioning it, because there are only so many times you can say to a person does the ground feel wrong to you before the person starts standing further away. It didn't feel wrong, exactly. It felt like a floor over a cellar, everywhere, all of Berlin, as if one board had been taken out from under the whole city and nobody could find which one, and he'd lie in bed at night and feel for it with the whole length of his body and never find it either.

Ana said stress. Ana was probably right. Ana was usually right, which was why he'd stopped telling her things.

···

Jonas didn't come that night, and didn't say he wasn't coming, which was the shape of Jonas.

It had been going on since March, if going on was the phrase, and it wasn't, because nothing about it went anywhere. Jonas came round. Jonas was funny and had good hands and a way of looking at you as if you were the only thing in the room, and then Jonas went home to a flat in Friedrichshain that he'd never been invited to, and a life he'd only ever seen the edges of, and answered texts in a rhythm that had nothing to do with when they were sent. Three days. Then four in a row. Then nothing for a week, and then, at one in the morning, you up.

He was up. He was always up. He'd told Ana it was a thing, and Ana had looked at him the way she looked at the ground when he mentioned the ground.

Tonight he sat on the floor of the flat in Neukölln with the email open on the laptop and the rent notice open on the table, the second one, the one with the word Mahnung on it, and did the arithmetic he'd been not doing for three weeks, and it came out the way arithmetic does, and he texted Jonas I lost my job, and watched the two grey ticks not turn blue, and put the phone face down, and felt the floor.

Soft. Still. Everywhere.

Except, he'd noticed lately, and had told nobody, not even the floor: right under him. Right under wherever he happened to be sitting. That one place was fine. It was always fine. It was everything else.

···

The concert was Ana's idea, and Ana paid, and he let her, which was its own small humiliation, and it was in the Columbiahalle on a Thursday and it was QueenL, whom he didn't like, exactly, but had listened to more than he'd admit, alone, at three in the morning, when the thing for the hospitals was holding and the floor was soft.

One name. Like a hurricane. Two albums and a way of standing very still on a stage that made four thousand people lean.

They were near the back. He'd wanted the back. Ana had wanted to be able to see and had lost, and was making up for it by being kind, which was worse, and the lights went down and the noise came up and QueenL walked out into it and stood at the microphone and didn't sing for a full ten seconds, just stood, and looked, row by row, the way you'd look for someone in a crowd you'd been told would be there.

And the floor was fine.

Not under him. Everywhere. The whole hall. For the first time in a year the ground under four thousand people was simply a floor, solid all the way down, and he stood in the back of the Columbiahalle with Ana's hand on his arm asking if he was okay and couldn't answer, because he was looking at the stage, and the girl on the stage had stopped looking row by row.

She was looking at him.

He'd tell himself afterwards that it was the lights, that she was looking at the back wall, at the sound desk, at nothing, that four thousand people every night thought she was looking at them. He'd tell himself that for about a day and a half. But he was there, and he knew, the way you know when someone across a room has said your name without saying it, and what he felt come across the hall from her wasn't a look at all. It was a door opening. Someone on the other side of it saying, without words, in a voice that was somehow also his own: oh. There you are. I didn't know there was another one.

And then she sang, and the door didn't close, and he stood inside it for an hour and forty minutes and didn't hear a single song.

"You look like something happened to you," said Ana, on the U-Bahn home.

"Nothing happened."

"Kappa."

"Nothing happened, Ana. I'm tired. I lost my job on Tuesday."

She looked at him the way she looked at the ground.

···

It played at ten past two.

He wasn't asleep. He'd stopped being able to tell the difference lately, but he wasn't; he was on the floor of the flat with his back against the sofa, in the dark, with the laptop shut and the phone face down and the rent notice on the table, feeling for the board, and the room lit up.

Not the light. A light. A rectangle of it standing in the middle of the room where the coffee table wasn't, the size of a door, pale and grainy and slightly the wrong colour, like a film projected onto a sheet by someone working from a description, and in it, a lobby. Tile floor. A coffee machine against one wall. A plaque he couldn't read. And a man, middle height, middle everything, in a cardigan, with headphones round his neck, who looked out of the rectangle at him, directly at him, sitting on the floor of a flat in Neukölln at ten past two in the morning, and said:

"Ah. There you are. Welcome back."

He didn't move. He couldn't have.

"You're at the Zentrale. Project Oasis. Mind the step, it isn't there, we removed it years ago and people still trip on it, which tells you something about people, or about steps." The man's voice came from nowhere, from the room, from inside his own head. "I'm XO. You know me somehow, probably. Don't worry if you can't place it. Everyone gets that look when they come in, the one you're doing now, like you've heard my voice in a dream you didn't finish. It's fine. It's a normal reaction."

It was not a normal reaction. He was crying, he realised, without any idea why, the way you cry at an advert.

"You know me like this," said the man in the cardigan, gently. "When you're looking for something. Your keys, a word, a person in a crowd. And you haven't found it yet, but you get a feeling where it is."

And it went on. All of it. Gods and monsters, and the ones who stayed, and a rule about enjoying life, and an agency, and a department of famous people, and a word he'd never heard, oasis, said the way you'd say the name of someone in the room. He sat on the floor and watched a trailer for something that didn't exist, projected by nobody, into a flat with a Mahnung on the table, and it was the most real thing that had happened to him in a year, and he thought, very clearly, in Ana's voice: this is it, then. This is what it looks like from the inside.

"One more thing before I let you go," said the man in the cardigan, near the end, "and meet Ricky, who at this point in the story has never heard of me." A pause. The grainy light flickered. The man looked, for a second, enormously tired and enormously fond. "People ask why we bother. And I say: look. A world is often just created for one."

The rectangle went out.

The room was dark. The floor was soft. The phone, face down on the table, lit up once, and it was Jonas, and it said sorry to hear that, and nothing else, and he didn't pick it up.

He sat there until it was light.

His name was Kappa, to the three people who still used it. It had been JB on the email. It had been, once, something else, on a form his grandmother had filled in, in a hospital, a long way from here, and she was the only one who'd ever said welcome back to him like that, every time he walked through her door, as if he'd been gone for years.

He didn't know why he thought of her then. He didn't know anything. He got up, and put the kettle on, and stood in the one place in the world where the floor was fine, and waited for someone to come.