Wishingwell

For two weeks he did not sleep so much as get briefly interrupted.

Mornings at seven in the small studio with the ticking radiator and Ilse Varga on the piano stool, not playing it, watching his feet. Combinations, over and over, and every time the struck-bell thing rose in his chest she'd say "Smaller," not loudly, and he'd make himself smaller, and the trainers would go back to being trainers. Afternoons at the school with the mirrors, where Noor was learning the Halcyon choreography in the big studio and pretending not to be, and Dash brought coffee and asked no questions in the loudest possible way. Nights at Grand Central with the iron key, walking the ramps, feeling the floor, which was soft, which was still soft, which was not getting better. Nothing came up the ramp. The rock that had been a golem had been taken away by somebody before dawn that first night and he'd never asked who.

On the ninth day Ilse said, "Again," and he did it again, and on the tenth she said nothing at all, and on the fourteenth she got up off the piano stool, which she'd never done, and said, "Tomorrow. Rehearsal. Four o'clock. Don't be late. She hates late."

"I'm never late."

"No," said Ilse Varga, with those eyes. "But she'll think you are."

···

The rehearsal space was a former church in Brooklyn with the pews taken out and the acoustics left in, and he arrived at quarter to four, and she was already there, and she looked at him and said, "You're late."

"I'm fifteen minutes early."

"You're late," said Rose, "for the version of this where you're not."

She was smaller than the poster, which everyone is, and younger than the poster, which surprised him, twenty maybe, twenty-one, in a hoodie the size of a tent with her hair up in the ponytail that was already, that month, becoming a thing girls did on purpose. No sunglasses. She hadn't got to sunglasses yet. She had a coffee and a face that had not been photographed enough to know how to hold still, and it didn't, it moved all the time, quick and exact, and it was moving now, taking him in from the trainers up, and she said, "You're the one who stopped."

"Ilse told you."

"Ilse didn't tell me anything. Ilse doesn't tell people things, she waits for them to find out and then looks at them." She put the coffee down on a speaker, which someone would later move. "I saw it. Not, like, saw it. I don't get pictures. I get—" She made a shape with her hand, a small quick knot. "I get that. About two days before. Some guy at Varga's stops in the middle of a combination, and it matters, and I don't know why. So. Hi. You're the why."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he said the true thing. "I'm Ricky."

"I know. Don't be late." She turned to the other three, who'd been stretching at the far end of the church with the specific carefulness of people who have watched this happen before. "Okay. From the top of Wishingwell. He learns it by watching. Ilse says he learns everything by watching."

He did. That was the thing. He always had. He stood by the speaker with her coffee on it and watched three dancers he'd never met move through a piece he'd never seen, and felt the floor, which was a church floor, old in the ordinary way, and felt the beat of it, and felt her.

It wasn't old. That was the first thing. Everything he'd ever felt through the arches of his feet had been old, that was what the feeling was, and she wasn't, she was the opposite, she was so new that it came through the boards like light through a door, and his feet didn't have a word for it because Vovô had never taught him one. And under the new, faint, something else. Something that kept happening. As if the room were being very slightly, very continuously, arranged.

A cable that should have caught her foot on the turn didn't. It had been there. He'd seen it. It wasn't now.

"You're staring," said Rose, without looking round.

"I'm learning."

"Then learn faster. First date's Thursday."

···

The room on Thursday held five hundred people and it was full, and it had been full for an hour before the doors opened, in the street, in the rain, and Ricky stood in the wings of a stage the size of a kitchen and understood, for the first time, what Ilse had meant about rooms where a person can see the whole crowd.

You couldn't not see them. They were right there. Five hundred faces, wet-haired, lit from the stage, and every one of them turned the same way like a field in wind, and the way was her.

She'd said almost nothing before. In the dressing room, which was a corridor with a mirror in it, she'd sat with her eyes shut and her hands flat on her knees, and the other three had left her alone, and he'd left her alone, and at one point she'd said, eyes still shut, "Third row. Left of centre. Don't."

"Don't what?"

"You'll want to. Don't."

And then the lights went down and the noise came up and she walked out into it, and became, in the space between the wings and the microphone, the person on the poster. He'd have called it a costume change if she'd changed anything. She hadn't. She'd just decided.

He went out after her, into the light, into the field of faces, and felt the floor.

The floor was five hundred people. That was what nobody told you. A stage floor wasn't wood, it was every foot in the room coming up through the boards at once, five hundred small ordinary beats and hers, new, arranging things, and he moved through the opening of Wishingwell on it like a man walking on a lake, and it held, it held, and then, about forty seconds in, third row, left of centre, one beat that was slightly behind the music.

Old. Very old. Not loud like the council would be, not wet and wrong like the golem. Old like a stone in a river is old, worn smooth, harmless, there. A man, he saw, at the edge of his vision, careful not to look, because Vovô's hand was on the back of his neck from across the river. A small man in a good coat with his hat in his hands, standing very still in a crowd that wasn't, with his eyes closed, listening.

And he wanted to. She'd been right. Something in him that had been a dragon for two weeks wanted to walk off the stage and down into the third row and put a hand on that beat and know. It pulled at his feet like a current.

Rose, mid-verse, with her eyes on the back wall and her voice going up where nobody expected it to and staying there, took one step to her left, into his line, between him and the third row, and kept singing, and didn't look at him at all.

He stayed on the lake. He danced. It held.

···

"You went for him."

"I didn't."

"You leaned. I felt you lean. Five hundred people in that room and I felt one guy lean." The dressing room corridor, after, the noise still going on the other side of the wall like weather. She had the hoodie back on and the poster off and she was furious in a small, exact, completely contained way, which he would learn was the only way she ever was. "I said don't."

"You said don't and you didn't say why. Who is he?"

"He's been at all of them. Every date I've ever played. Every open mic, every showcase, every school thing at Varga's when I was fifteen. Third row, left of centre, hat in his hands, eyes shut. He's never once come up to me. He's never once clapped." She picked at the cuff of the hoodie. "Ilse says he's something that stayed. From before. Something that heard a song once, a long time ago, and liked it, and couldn't leave. Harmless. Lonely. He just wants to listen."

"So why not let me—"

"Because you don't go into the crowd. Ever. That's the whole thing. That's the whole job. They come to me, I see who's in the room, I tell Ilse, Ilse's people take care of it. Quietly. Afterwards. A ticket to the next one, usually, for him. Sometimes a conversation. That's what taking care of it looks like, most of the time, it looks like nothing, and it only works if the crowd stays a crowd and the stage stays a stage and nobody, especially not a fifteen-foot lizard, walks down into the third row and puts his hand on someone." She looked at him. "You feel them. Fine. Good. Ilse says it's rare, and I believe her, because I've never had it and I've wanted it. But I see them, Ricky. Two days before. I've seen every single one of them coming since I was eleven years old and I have never once been able to do anything about it except be standing in the right place when it arrives. Which I was. Tonight. Between you and him."

"You didn't deal with him. You sang at him."

"That is dealing with him."

Above them, in the ceiling of the corridor, something gave. A bracket, a rusted bolt, one of the old lamps in its cage, and it came down in a shower of plaster and hit the floor exactly, precisely, where she had been standing a second and a half before, when she'd taken one step toward him to make her point.

She didn't flinch. She didn't look up. She looked at the lamp on the floor between them, and then at him, and there was something in her face that wasn't on any poster, tired, careful, older than twenty.

"You knew," he said. His heart was going. Hers, he could feel through the boards, was not.

"I always know. That's not the trick. The trick is that I'm always lucky. You have no idea how exhausting that is. Things fall and miss. Cars stop. Cables move. It's been happening my whole life and I don't do it, I just—" the small quick knot with the hand— "it happens near me. And one day it won't. That's the thing I see coming clearest of all." She stepped over the lamp. "So. New rule. Don't tell me what you feel. I'll have seen it. Tell me what you feel that I didn't see. That's the only thing you're for."

He thought about the floor. The soft place. The board someone had taken out from under the whole world at twenty past two in the morning two weeks ago, that he'd felt every night since and that Ilse had told him not to tell anyone, especially not the girl.

"Okay," he said.

Rose looked at him for a long moment, and he had the strong sense of being seen from two days in the future.

"You're lying about something," she said. "That's fine. Everyone is. Just don't be late."

She went out to do the encore. He stood in the corridor with the plaster on his shoulders and the lamp at his feet and the noise coming through the wall, and felt, faint, down through the boards, through the building, through Brooklyn, the place where the board was missing, and thought that it was, if anything, a little softer than yesterday.

In the third row, left of centre, a small man in a good coat put his hat back on, and did not clap, and went home happy.