Night shift

The school was above a laundromat on Canal Street, and it smelled like it.

Dryer heat came up through the floorboards all day and all night, which Vovô said was good for the joints and Ricky said was good for nothing, and the sign on the street door said ACADEMIA DE LUTA · SINCE 1979 in letters that had been gold once. Inside there was one long room with a wooden floor that Ricky had mopped every day for eleven years, mirrors down one wall, a rack of bamboo sticks nobody used, a Saint George on the shelf next to a Yemanjá next to a small brass dragon that everyone was very careful not to talk about, and Vovô, on a stool by the window, eating.

"Tonight," Vovô said.

Ricky stopped mopping. "Tonight what."

"Tonight you go to work." His grandfather held up a key on a loop of red string. It was an old key, iron, too big for any lock in this century. "Grand Central. Ten to six. You walk. You watch. You don't touch anything. If someone talks to you, you're the night porter's nephew. If something talks to you, you call me."

"What's the difference?"

"You'll know." Vovô went back to his food. "Wear the good shoes."

···

He'd been waiting for this his whole life and he still wasn't ready, which Vovô said was the definition of being ready.

Eleven years of it. The floor, the mirrors, the stick nobody used. Learning to fall, then to not fall, then to fall on purpose and make it look like a choice. The dancing came later and it came from the same place: Vovô had watched him try to hold still in a stance one afternoon, aged nine, with his whole body humming like a struck bell, and had said, not unkindly, Menino, you are not a wall, stop trying to be a wall, be water, be a drum, and had put on a record. The rest had followed. Samba first, then everything else, then a scholarship to a school uptown that he'd nearly lost twice for being late, because the mopping came first.

And underneath all of it, the thing they didn't say.

He felt the floor before he danced on it. Always. Vovô had taught him that before he'd taught him anything, and only later had Ricky understood it wasn't a metaphor. Old things had a beat. It came up through the arches of his feet like a drum that was slightly behind the music, and the trick wasn't to look for where it came from, the trick was to just know. He'd felt it under the brass dragon on the shelf. He'd felt it, once, aged fourteen, at Carnival in Salvador, a single man walking against the whole river of the parade with the drum going wrong under every step, and Vovô's hand on the back of his neck, steady: Don't look. Just know.

He'd felt it in Vovô every day of his life and had never, not once, been allowed to ask.

He'd felt it in Charlie too, which was worse.

His sister was four years older and had woken up at nine. Nine. She'd come down to breakfast one morning with her eyes gone the wrong colour and had told their mother, politely, that she'd like some water, and had then set the curtains on fire; and by the end of that summer she could hold it, and by the end of the next she could hold it in a room full of people, which Ricky, at nineteen, still couldn't reliably do in a room containing one trestle table. She spoke six languages. She'd finished a medical degree in Salvador and then, for reasons she'd explained twice and he'd understood neither time, another one in something to do with old stone. The council had sat her in the deep end of a drained pool at twenty-two and asked her opinion, which they had never once done to Vovô in front of his grandson.

The unforgivable part was that she was lovely. If she'd been cruel about it he'd have had something to hold. She rang on Sundays. She sent him money when he didn't ask and never mentioned it again. She said, every single time, you feel the floor better than I do, Ricardinho, that's the rare one, I just do homework, and meant it, and it helped for about an hour.

···

Grand Central at eleven at night was a cathedral somebody had forgotten to lock.

The last commuters had thinned to nothing. The big clock ticked over the information booth. High above, the painted zodiac went on doing its backwards thing across the ceiling, and Ricky walked the main concourse with his hands in his pockets and the good shoes on and felt for the floor.

The floor was fine. Marble, tired, a hundred years of feet. Old, a little, in the ordinary way that old buildings are old. He walked the ramps. He walked the lower level, past the shuttered oyster bar, past the whispering gallery where two people can stand in opposite corners and hear each other breathe. He tried it, alone, and heard himself, and felt stupid, and kept walking.

Around one a girl's voice came out of a phone somewhere, tinny, a cleaner on the platforms with earbuds in, one of them out. A song. He half knew it. Something that had been everywhere for about three weeks, one of those, a voice going up where you didn't expect it to and staying there. There'd been a poster going up on Houston that morning, a face, a name, one word. He hadn't caught it. The cleaner hummed along and pushed her cart onto the escalator and the song went down with her.

At twenty past two the floor changed.

Not the beat. The bottom of it. As if the whole building had been standing on something all along and that something had just shifted its weight. Ricky stopped in the middle of the concourse with the clock ticking over him and the zodiac going the wrong way and his arches suddenly, sharply, aware.

Then, from the ramp to the lower level, running.

Light feet. Very light. Three of them, small, fast, and behind them something that wasn't light at all, something that came up the ramp like a piece of the ramp had decided to come too.

The three came out onto the concourse and he saw them and did not, for a second, understand what he was seeing. Children, he thought, and then: no. Not children. Small, and quick, and wrong in the eyes in a way that was beautiful rather than frightening, and dressed in what looked like it had been cleaners' overalls before someone had done something to the cut of them, and the beat under his feet when they crossed the marble was so old and so clean it made his teeth hurt. Elves. The word arrived in his head fully formed, from somewhere behind eleven years of not asking.

The thing behind them came out of the ramp, and it was the ramp. That was the only way to say it. Stone, wet-looking, roughly the shape of a person if the person had been described to a sculptor over a bad phone line. No face. Where a face would be, a smear of something that might have been writing. It didn't run. It didn't have to. It walked, and the concourse came with it, and the elves went past Ricky like leaves and one of them, the smallest, looked up at him as she passed and said, clearly, in a voice like a bell in a well: "Move."

He did not move.

Later he'd try to explain it to Vovô and get nowhere. There hadn't been a decision. There'd been the floor, and the beat, and the thing coming across the marble toward three small people who were running, and something in his chest that had been humming like a struck bell since he was nine finally, simply, rang.

He felt his good shoes split.

It hurt. Nobody had told him it would hurt. It hurt the way growing hurts, all at once and everywhere, and he was bigger, and then bigger, and the concourse tilted and the clock was at his eye line and then below it, and his hands weren't hands, and he was hot, hot from the inside, hot in the way the school was hot with the dryers going, except the dryers were him, and he opened his mouth to shout at the thing and what came out was fire.

It was a lot of fire. It was, he would think afterwards with something like pride and something like shame, a truly stupid amount of fire, a rope of it, orange and roaring, across forty feet of marble, and it hit the golem full in the smear where its face should have been.

And went out.

Not bounced. Not scattered. Went out, like a match dropped in a sink. The golem stood there, wet stone, unmarked, and the writing on its face moved, and Ricky understood with a terrible slow clarity that it was laughing.

Then, worse: from behind him, three small bright voices. The elves. Crouched by the information booth, safe for the moment, watching a dragon that had just tried to set fire to a rock, and laughing, and laughing, hands over their mouths, the smallest one bent double.

"He breathed on it," one of them said.

"He breathed fire on it."

"On a golem."

Ricky, who was fifteen feet long and had been a dragon for approximately forty seconds, tried to say I know, and it came out as smoke.

The golem took another step. The floor came with it.

And then the floor changed again.

He'd felt this beat every day of his life. He'd felt it coming up through the stool by the window, through the mop handle, through the hand on the back of his neck at Carnival. He'd never felt it arrive before. It came down the stairs from Vanderbilt like a bass drum falling, and the elves stopped laughing, and the golem stopped walking, and Vovô walked out onto the concourse in his slippers with a paper bag in one hand, and put the paper bag carefully on the information booth, and became a dragon.

It wasn't like Ricky's. Ricky's had been a shout. This was a sentence, spoken slowly by someone who had said it many times. One moment an old man in slippers, the next a long dark shape the colour of a river at night, not so much bigger than Ricky as more, more there, more decided, with the whole hundred-year-old weight of the building suddenly leaning toward him like a crowd toward a stage.

And then Vovô danced.

That was the only word for it, and Ricky, who'd watched him move for eleven years, still didn't have a better one. There was a step in it he knew from the floor above the laundromat, a ginga, the samba sway that says I am not where you think I am. There was a turn he knew from the stick nobody used. The golem swung, and where it swung there was nothing, and the nothing was Vovô, already behind it, already low, one long limb sweeping through the place where its knees would have been if it had been given knees, and the golem went down onto the marble with a sound like a building sitting.

It tried to get up. Vovô let it. Then, almost gently, he put one clawed hand on the smear of writing where its face should have been, and the writing stopped moving, and the wet look went out of the stone, and it was a rock. Just a rock. Roughly a person. Lying on the floor of Grand Central at half past two in the morning.

Silence. The clock ticking.

Vovô was an old man in slippers again, a little out of breath, retrieving his paper bag from the information booth. He looked at the three elves. They looked at the floor.

"Go home," he said. "The ones who sent this will send another. I know where. Go home, and tell your mother Ricardo's grandfather says she owes him a dinner."

They went, light as leaves, and the smallest one looked back once, at Ricky, and didn't laugh, and that was somehow worse.

···

He was a person again by the time they got back to Canal Street. He didn't remember deciding that either. His shoes were gone. He'd walked forty blocks barefoot and the good trousers had split down both seams and he was so tired that the stairs up to the school felt like a thing that had been done to him personally.

Vovô put the kettle on and opened the paper bag. Pão de queijo, from the place on 46th that stayed open all night for reasons Ricky had never asked about. He put four on a plate and pushed it across.

"Eat."

Ricky ate. It was the best thing he had ever tasted and he was going to cry and he didn't know which of those was the reason.

"It laughed at me."

"Yes."

"They laughed at me."

"Yes. Elves. They laugh at everything, it's how they stay alive. Eat."

"The fire just went out. I didn't even, it didn't even mark it, Vovô, I put everything I had into it and it went out like a—"

"Ricardo." Vovô sat down across from him, slowly, the way he sat down now. "How long have you been a dragon?"

Ricky looked at the clock on the wall. "Four hours."

"Four hours. And you stood between a golem and three children and you tried. You didn't run. You didn't call me. You should have called me, we'll talk about that. But you stood there, four hours old, and you tried, with everything you had, and it wasn't enough, and you were still standing there when I arrived." He took a pão de queijo off Ricky's plate and ate it. "That's all any of us ever do, menino. Stand there and try and not be enough and keep standing. The fire comes later. The fire is easy. Any idiot can learn fire. What you did tonight, nobody can teach."

"Charlie would have—"

"Charlie," said Vovô, "put out the curtains with her mother's good tablecloth and cried for two days. You have all got the same story, menino, you just get told each other's endings." He ate. "Also she would have called me. She always calls me."

Ricky put his head down on the table.

After a while Vovô's hand came to rest on the back of his neck, steady, warm, the oldest thing in the room.

"Also," Vovô said, "fire doesn't work on golems. Everybody knows that. It's water. You have to get inside the writing."

"Now you tell me."

"Now I tell you. Tomorrow I tell you something else. That's how it works." He got up. He turned off the kettle he'd forgotten. At the window, with the dryer heat coming up through the boards and the first grey starting over the rooftops, he stopped, and looked down at the street, and said, in a different voice, the one Ricky had heard maybe three times in his life:

"The floor moved tonight. Before it came. You felt that."

"Yes."

"Hm." A long pause. "Go to sleep. You have that school in the morning. The one with the mirrors."

"It's a casting. It's just an intern thing, it's for some tour, I'm not even—"

"Go," said Vovô, "and dance. And stand there. And try."

On Houston Street, in the grey, a man on a ladder was smoothing the last corner of a poster onto a wall, and the face on it was a girl with her eyes closed and her mouth open on a note nobody could hear, and the one word under her had just started, that week, to mean something.