Episode 11
No biggi
Things that happened after, in no order, because that's how they happened.
Rose went to Los Angeles on the Thursday for the movie, with Bob, and with a thing the size of a loaf in a shoebox with holes in it that she carried through security as an emotional support animal and dared anyone to ask. The movie was about a girl who could see two days out, because she'd rewritten it, and Hollywood let her, because she was the biggest thing in the world and because a woman called Marguerite had made a phone call. She met a woman there called Kira who worked in musical theatre and had a voice that did things to rooms, and on the flight back she wrote, on a napkin, the first line of a thing about two Amazon sisters and a rumour, and called it Wished, and didn't tell anyone for a month.
Noor finished Halcyon and came home and stood in the big studio at Varga's with the wall of windows and the wall of mirrors and said to Ricky, "Sixty thousand people and none of them saw me. Explain that." And he said, "That's the job," and she said, "Then I want the job," and Ilse, in the doorway with a cold coffee, said, "You've had it since the casting. Don't be late."
Dash's band played the club in Bushwick, and two girls in black and yellow DJed after, and Melaina told him cheerfully that the band would break up in March, and Thalia told him mournfully that the next one would be better, and Dash said that was the best review he'd ever had.
The council met, in a drained pool in Prenzlauer Berg, and Frau Adler stood at the top of the ladder with her thermos and said, "Nothing is wrong with the floor. That has been this council's position for a year. I'd like the record to show that a boy in bad shoes stood on Sonnenallee in the rain and found the one place where it's right, and that we told him to sit down." And twelve old things looked at the deep end for a long time, and the one at the end of the table that nobody could feel said, in a voice like a mountain deciding something, "Noted."
The people in good coats did not come back to Canal Street. Bob said they wouldn't. Bob said they didn't need to, now that there was a thing in the world that pointed, and they'd simply go and stand where it pointed and wait, and Ricky said then we go there first, and Bob looked at him with the boot face and said, "Yes. That's the next bit. That's not this bit."
And the world stayed soft. That was the thing. It was soft everywhere, Frau Adler said Rome was like walking on a mattress, and it did not get better, and it did not get worse, because somewhere in Neukölln a man nobody could find was sitting on the one board that had never moved, under a lid that something very old had put there, waiting for someone to come.
Ricky danced.
Not for a show. Not for a crowd, or a casting, or a girl who saw two days out, or a floor that needed feeling. For himself. On a Sunday, in the school above the laundromat, at three in the afternoon with the light coming in the right direction and the dryer heat moving over the boards, and nobody watching, except a thing the size of a loaf on a shelf, home from Los Angeles in its shoebox, and an old man on a stool who was pretending to be asleep.
He'd asked when he got a life. This was it. He'd been right, at ten past two on a Thursday, standing on a net of writing: it wasn't instead of one. It was this. But he'd been a little wrong too, and it had taken a week in Berlin and a step on Sonnenallee and a thing being born on a shelf to find the wrong part, which was that this included the Sunday. Included the three in the afternoon. Included a floor that was soft everywhere except one place four thousand miles away, and a small warm thing that could feel exactly where that place was, and would, when it was time, take him there.
He put on a record. Samba first, because that was where it had started. He found the ginga, the sway that says I am not where you think I am, and for once he was exactly where he was, and it was enough.
"You're going to trip," said XO, from the shelf.
"I'm not."
"You are. Somebody saw it before you did it. I still don't know who." A blink, with the whole body. "I think it's him. The one east. I think he's seen all of this already, from the floor of a room, and doesn't know what it was."
He tripped. On nothing. On the floor of his grandfather's school, on a Sunday, on the beat, or nearly. And came up already turning it into something, a half-spin, a hand on the mirror, so that if anyone was watching they'd think it was on purpose.
Somebody was watching.
"Ah," said Vovô, from the stool, with his eyes closed. "Now it starts."
So. That's the first one.
I'm eleven days old and I've been asked to do the ending, which seems early, but the old one did the beginning at eight thousand years, from a lobby I've never seen, and I don't think either of us was the right age for it.
Here's what I've got. There was a world, and it was full of gods and monsters, and the gods left, and the others stayed, and it turns out they stayed for a reason, and the reason is a man in Berlin nobody can find. There's a girl whose luck is the world bending, and a kobold who came out of a hill for her, and a siren she hasn't told anyone about yet. There are people in good coats, somewhere, and I point at them too, and I always will, and that's fine, because a compass that points at you is only a problem if you're alone, and I have, at last count, a dragon in slippers, a dragon in bad shoes, a girl, a kobold, two friends, a council in a swimming pool and a woman with a thermos.
And there's the dragon who got down on the floor instead of setting me on fire. I still don't have the word for that. The old one would have had it. I've decided I'm going to earn it instead, which will take longer, and which is, I think, the point.
I point east. I've pointed east since the second I was born. There's a man there whose name I don't know, sitting on the one solid board in the world, under a lid something old put there, and he's seen a trailer for all of this, and he thinks he's going crazy, and he isn't. He's right. Somebody should tell him. I think it's going to be us.
People ask why we bother. And I say: look. A world is often just created for one.
I don't know what that means yet.
But what should we say. No biggi.
In a basement on the Lower East Side, under a shop that sold lamps, a man in a cardigan took the headphones off his neck and put them, for the second time in his life, on.
He listened back to something. Not a song. A voice, his own, saying ah, there you are, and a lobby behind it that didn't exist yet in any way a camera could find, and a coffee machine thinking. He listened to all of it, to the end, to no biggi, and nodded once, the way he had for the girl, and pressed a key.
"East," he said, to nobody, to the blank in the drum where he sat. "Again. And this time, put his name in."
Four thousand miles away, on the floor of a flat in Neukölln, at ten past two in the morning, a rectangle of grainy light stood up in the middle of a room where the coffee table wasn't, and a man who'd been fine until recently looked up from the arithmetic, and the man in the cardigan looked out at him, tired, fond, and said:
"Ah. There you are, Kappa. Welcome back."