Cafe

It started because of rain.

They were in the room over the stable with a contract cancelled under them and nowhere to be, and Poppy had got bored inside about forty minutes, and boredom in Poppy expressed itself as conversation the way water expresses itself as downhill.

Itta was there, which was new. She had begun turning up on days when there was nothing to do, and nobody had discussed it, and she sat at the end of the table doing something to fletching and contributing about one sentence an hour.

Maren was mending a strap.

Alaric was sitting with his back to the stove, entirely content, in the way he was learning to be content, which was quietly and without announcing it.

Then Poppy said something about a cafe.

* * * *

He did not catch the shape of it at first.

She was complaining. That much was clear. There was a place, and it had been good, and now it was not good, and the reason it was not good involved a change of ownership and a new person behind a counter and something about the price of a thing he could not identify.

He waited for the location.

It did not arrive. She talked for two minutes and never said where it was, and the not-saying was not evasive; it was the tone of somebody describing a place that everybody present could obviously find.

Itta said, without looking up, "The one by the station?"

"The one by the station," said Poppy.

Alaric knew every road out of Grennet by then. He had walked four of them and had the fifth on his map from a ridge.

There was no station.

* * * *

Then it got worse, because Maren joined in.

She did not join in often, and when she did it was usually to correct something, and she corrected something now. The cafe had changed hands twice, not once. The previous owner had gone to do something else, and the something else had a name that meant nothing to Alaric, and Poppy made a noise of recognition.

"He would," she said. "He absolutely would."

And they went on for a while about a man Alaric had never met, who had done a thing he could not identify, in a place that was not on his map, and both of them were entirely certain about all of it.

He listened with total attention.

He was extremely good at listening by then. It had been his primary method for two months and he had got the technique down: you did not interrupt, you kept the sounds in order, and you sorted them afterward.

He understood not one noun.

* * * *

Poppy's mother came into it about ten minutes later, and had opinions.

The opinions were on the subject of the exams.

The exams belonged to somebody Alaric had also never met, who was apparently a person Poppy was related to or possibly not, and who was in some difficulty about them, and the difficulty had a timetable attached.

Poppy was aggrieved about the opinions. Itta made a small noise that indicated familiarity with mothers as a category.

Alaric sat with his back against a warm stove in a room he liked, among people he liked, and understood that a conversation was taking place in front of him in which every single proper noun referred to something that was not in the world.

* * * *

So he asked.

He picked the smallest one, because he had learned that the smallest question got the shortest answer and the shortest answer was the easiest to work with.

"What is a station?"

There was a pause of about half a second, which he had come to recognise, and which meant somebody was deciding whether he was being funny.

"It's where the trains come in," said Poppy.

He waited.

"Trains," said Poppy.

"Yes," said Alaric, in the voice of a man agreeing rather than understanding, which he had by then developed and which worked about half the time.

It did not work.

"Alaric." She turned round properly. "You know what a train is."

"Yes," said Alaric.

* * * *

The answers made it worse.

That was the discovery of the evening and it arrived fast.

He asked three more questions over the following twenty minutes, spacing them, choosing the moments, and every single answer was constructed entirely out of further things that were also not here.

A station was where the trains came in. A train ran on rails, between cities. A city was a large place, larger than Grennet, larger than the province, and there were several of them, and people went between them for work and returned.

He tried to hold that.

There was a place larger than the province, and people went there and came back, and there was a system of some kind that carried them, and none of this was on any map he had ever opened.

He asked where.

"Where what?"

"Where is it. From here."

And there was a longer pause, and Poppy said, "That's not really a from here question," and moved on, and it was the closest anybody came all evening to answering him.

* * * *

Each explanation opened two more doors into a building he could not see.

He worked at it after they had moved on to something else, sitting quietly with the stove at his back, and he mapped it the way he mapped everything.

Cafe required counter, which required money, which he had, so that was one thing standing on ground he knew.

But cafe also required street, and street required city, and city required a place larger than everything he had walked, and that place required a way of getting there, which was the station, which required the train, which required rails, which required somebody to have built them across a distance he could not conceive of.

And behind all of that, holding it up, was the fact that these three people had been there. Recently. Casually. In the ordinary course of their lives.

Every answer he got added two structures to a building whose foundations he could not find.

He stopped asking around the sixth question, because he had noticed the pause getting longer.

* * * *

Later, when the rain had eased and Poppy had gone downstairs for something, he tried to picture where they went.

He did it properly. He gave it real effort, sitting with his eyes half shut and his back to the stove, and he was good at this kind of work.

He had built a picture of Ashfield before seeing it, out of the words village and harvest stores, and had been about a third right. He had built a picture of the flooded quarry off Maren's description and had been close enough to move confidently on arrival.

He tried to build the place they went to when they vanished.

He got nothing.

It was not that he built it badly. It was that there was nowhere in his head for it to stand. When he tried to put it somewhere, there was no somewhere. Every place he knew was on a map, and the map was a thing that grew where he walked, and this was not on the map and never would be, because nobody was going to walk him there.

He had built a picture of a village out of two words.

He could not build this out of an evening.

* * * *

He asked Maren.

He waited until Poppy was still downstairs and Itta had gone, and he asked her because she was the safer of the two, in a way he could not have defended and which turned out to be correct.

"Where do you go?"

She did not look up from the strap.

"When?"

"When you are not here. When people," and he did not have a word for it, and used the one he had, "stop."

Maren finished the stitch she was on.

"Out," she said.

"Out where?"

"Out of it." She set the strap down. "Home. Bed. Work in the morning. It is not somewhere you go, it is where you already are. Here is the place you go."

He turned that over and it did not fit anywhere.

"Then what is this?"

"This is where I am when I am not there," said Maren.

She said it plainly, without impatience, and it was an entirely honest answer given in good faith by somebody making a real effort to be clear.

It did not help at all.

* * * *

He sat with it after she had gone.

The room emptied around him in the ordinary way. Poppy came back up and went out again. Maren said something about the morning. Itta had already gone and had said goodbye by putting a hand briefly on the doorframe, which was her version.

He banked the stove.

Then he sat down at the long table alone in a room over a stable, with the kettle cooling on its hook and the rain starting again on the roof, and opened his panel.

* * * *

He went to the fourth section and looked at the greyed word.

LOGOUT.

He had first seen it at a counter in a guild hall on the day he took his first posting and had gone straight past it, because it was grey and did nothing and he had a village to walk to.

He had found it again in a rented room at the Third Bell six days later, and had pressed it eleven times, and had examined the greyness itself and concluded that it was not the grey of a door but the grey of an option declined, and had put it away and slept well.

For two months it had been a curiosity.

He had a whole collection of those. Things that did not work, words he did not have, sections of the interface that were furnished and empty. It sat in that collection and had never distinguished itself.

He looked at it now for a long time.

* * * *

It was not a curiosity now.

That was the whole of the chapter and it happened in a warm empty room with the rain on the roof, and nothing about the word had changed at all.

He had two facts and they had finally been put next to each other.

The first was that people stopped, and came back, and that where they went was called out, and that out was somewhere their actual lives were, with beds in it and mothers and exams and a cafe that had changed hands twice.

The second was that this word was how you went there.

He did not know that. Nobody had told him. He arrived at it by putting a grey word in the section where the things you did were, next to a whole evening of a place he could not build, and finding that they were the same shape.

And his was grey.

* * * *

He tested it, because he was still himself.

He pressed it again, at various pressures, and nothing happened in exactly the way nothing had happened at the Third Bell.

Then he stopped, and did the other thing, which was worse.

He held it up against everything else he could not do. There were four or five. A section that pushed back faintly when he opened it. A word he did not know. Things in the world that were beyond him.

All of those had felt like walls.

This did not feel like a wall. It felt like a corridor that went somewhere, that everybody he knew used regularly, that had been built into him the same as into them, and that had been turned off before he ever arrived.

He sat with that.

He was not frightened. He examined for that specifically and did not find it, which he noted with some interest.

What he found instead was something with no name, which had a shape like a room with a door in it, and the door led somewhere three people he sat at a table with went every night, and he was not going to go there, and he had not been going to go there since before he had a name.

* * * *

He told nobody.

He considered it. He got as far as constructing the sentence, sitting in the dark, and the sentence was: I cannot do the thing you do.

And then he had to imagine the next part, which was them asking what he meant, and him having to explain, and the explanation requiring him to describe what he did not have, and he did not have the words for it.

He had a grey word and an absence.

He could describe the grey word. He could not describe the absence, because he had never had the thing that was absent and did not know its shape, and every attempt would come out as a man complaining that he could not do something he could not name.

He suspected, sitting there, that the words did not exist.

Not that he lacked them. That nobody had ever needed them, because nobody had ever been in this position, and language did not get made for one person.

He closed the panel.

He sat in the dark for a while with the rain going on the roof and the stove ticking as it cooled, in a room he liked, above a stable, in a town he had walked into two months ago with nothing.

Then he went to bed, because there was nothing else to do about it.