Chapter 9: Edren

At night the berth was a good size for a man who was mostly empty. There was room in it for him and for the room he carried and not much else, and that was the right amount of room. He had worked out that he did not like spaces larger than himself. In a large space the absence had somewhere to spread.

He lay in the dark behind the small slit and did the thing he did instead of sleeping, which was not remembering — he could not remember, there was nothing to remember, that was the whole architecture of him — but holding. Holding the door. The door did not open onto anything. He had checked, the way you check a pocket you know is empty, a thousand times in the days he had been alive. Behind the door was a room and the room was his and the room was bare, swept, finished, a room after the work is done and the workers have gone and taken the light. He stood in it every night because it was the only place that was his and a man wants to stand somewhere that is his, even an empty man, even a room that is only the shape of where a life used to be kept.

He did not grieve in the room. He had explained this to the collector and she had not understood it, though she had tried, which he had liked; most people did not even try. The grieving had been in the room and they had taken the grieving when they took the rest. What was left was the frame of grieving with nothing hung in it — an ache shaped exactly like loss, around an absence shaped exactly like a life, and no way ever to know whose. He had decided, in the way he decided things now, slowly, from a distance, that this was the loneliest condition it was possible to be in, and that he was probably the only person who had ever been in it, and that he should therefore try to be interesting about it rather than only sad, because sad was a shape too and he was running low on shapes and ought to spend them well.

The collector was a shape. That was new. He turned her over in the dark the way he turned everything, carefully, from a distance.

She did not want to kill him. She had been sent to and she was going to and she did not want to, and these three things sat in her without agreeing, and he found them fascinating, because they were the most full thing he had been near since the platform. He was empty and she was full of a quarrel with herself, and being near her was like being near a fire when you have forgotten you are cold. He had not told her that. It would have frightened her, and worse, it would have sounded like the thing it was not, which was a plea. He had no plea in him. The man who would have pleaded was spent. He simply liked being near the quarrel, the way you like a sound, and he was sorry — distantly, from the room — that the quarrel was costing her so much, because he could see it was, he could see her sleeping less, he had the reader’s eye too, they were the same instrument, that was why she couldn’t put him down.

The other thing he did at night was feel the door.

Not the door in him. The one ahead.

He had no word for it and he distrusted the words he reached for, because words were shapes and his shapes were unreliable now, but the nearest true thing was this: there was a draught. The way a house tells you, without a sound, that somewhere far off a door has been left open — a thinning of the air, a direction the cold leans — there was a place ahead on the train’s long road where the air thinned, where the held thing that pressed on everyone all the time and that no one but him seemed to feel pressed less. He had felt it from the platform, faintly, a far-off slackening, and it had grown the nearer the train carried him toward it, and he understood it the way he understood the room: not with knowing, with holding. Somewhere ahead the watching thinned. There was a gap in the granary. Men like him — he did not know how he knew there were men like him, but he knew it, the way he knew the room had been his — men like him could feel the gap, and go to it, and step through, into a place where the eye that was always almost on you slid off.

He did not know what the eye was. He had told the collector the truth about that and it had been the only thing all day he’d been unable to give her: there was a place in him where the keeper would be, and it had been kept clear, swept like the room, and he could feel the cleared place the way you feel a tooth that has been pulled — by the smoothness, by the wrongness of how smooth it is. Something had stood in him and stepped back out and tidied after itself. He had kept the room by accident and they had never let him keep the keeper, and he was grateful for that, in the distant way he was grateful for anything, because he believed the collector was right, that the room could be survived and the keeper could not, and he had no wish to be the man who found out.

But he could feel the draught. And the draught said: ahead, there is a place where the keeper is not looking. And every empty night the draught was a little stronger, and the place a little nearer, and a thing in him that was not quite a wanting — he had no wantings, wanting was a shape — but was the ghost of a wanting, the frame of it with nothing hung in it, leaned toward the draught the way the cold leaned toward the open door.

He was not going to run. He had told the collector that and it was true. There was nowhere to run to; the man it would have saved was gone; a room cannot flee, it can only be somewhere. But he had begun to notice, lying in the dark, that the not-running was a decision he had to make freshly each night, and that the draught was making it harder, and that there might come a night — he turned this over slowly, from a distance, with the reader’s flat curiosity he turned everything over with — when the ghost of the wanting leaned far enough that he stopped being able to tell whether the decision was still his.

That was the danger. Not the Conductor. Not the collector with her quarrel. Himself. He was a man with a draught in him and a tidied place where the warning should be, and he could not entirely trust what he would do when the gap came near enough to feel on his face, because a man who has been emptied of everything that says no to him is a man who finds out, late, that no was a shape too, and that they took it with the rest, and left him only the leaning, and the cold, and the door ahead standing open in a house where every other door had been so carefully, so completely, shut.

He held his own empty room a while longer, because it was his.

Then he let it go, and lay in the berth that was the right size for a mostly-empty man, and felt the draught, and did not sleep, because sleep was for people with somewhere to go when they closed their eyes, and waited for the morning and the fire of the collector’s quarrel and the slow strange pleasure of being read by the one person on the train who could not put him down and could not, much longer, keep from setting him free.