“If that’s true, then I’m glad,” R said.
I turned my palms up and held them out. Then we stared at them for a time, without so much as blinking, as though I were actually holding something in my hands. But no matter how hard we looked, it was painfully clear that they were empty.
The next day, a call came from the publishing house. From the new editor who had taken over responsibility for my work.
He was short and thin, a few years older than R. His face was so ordinary that it was difficult to make out the expression it wore. On top of that, since he spoke almost in a whisper and mumbled a bit, I missed a good bit of what he had to say.
“When will you be finished with the novel you’re working on?”
“I have no idea,” I told him, realizing R had never asked me this sort of question.
“The story seems to be reaching a delicate phase, and I think you need to proceed cautiously. Please let me know when you have something more to show me. I’m very anxious to read the next section.”
I leaned forward, my elbows on the table.
“By the way,” I said, as casually as I could, “what has become of R?”
“Well,” he mumbled, and I could hear him picking up his glass and gulping down some water, “he has… disappeared.”
The last word of this I heard quite clearly.
“Disappeared…,” I repeated.
“Yes, that’s right. Have you heard anything from him?”
“No, nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.
“It was quite sudden,” he said, “and everyone is a bit baffled. He simply didn’t show up at the office one morning. No message, nothing. Just your novel, sitting out on his desk.”
“Really?”
“Yes, that was all. But of course I suppose it’s not that unusual nowadays for someone to disappear.”
“I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. You don’t suppose…”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I have some records I’ve borrowed from him. I don’t know how I’ll be able to return them.”
“If you like, I could take them for you. I may get the chance to pass them along to him.”
“I’d be grateful,” I said. “And if you find out where he is, could you let me know?”
“I will. If I find out,” he promised.
We decided it would be the old man’s job to be in touch with R’s wife. The toolbox on the back of his bicycle let him pass as a repairman, allowing him to visit her without attracting attention.
Soon after R vanished, she went home to her parents’ house to deliver the baby, but that plan had been made well in advance and had nothing to do with recent developments. Her parents owned a pharmacy in a town to the north that had once been home to prosperous smelting works, but that was deserted now that the factories had been closed.
We decided to use the abandoned elementary school in the town as our point of contact. On days ending in zero—the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth—she would leave things she wanted to send to R in a wooden box in the courtyard that held meteorological instruments used by the children at the school. The old man would go on his bicycle to retrieve them, leaving items R wanted to send to his wife in their place. That was how we had arranged things.
“Everything seems quieter in winter, no matter where you go, but that’s the loneliest place I’ve ever seen,” the old man reported after his first trip. “As soon as I got over the hills, a cold wind hit me in the face. That must be right where the north wind starts to blow. The streets were nearly deserted, more cats around than people, and the houses were old and mostly empty. I expect folks moved away when they closed down the smelters, which look pretty spooky just sitting there, like crumbling rides at an amusement park. No matter where you go, there’s another one, sad as can be, as though they died, trapped in place by layers and layers of rust.”
“I had no idea,” I told him, filling his cup with hot cocoa. “When I was little, there was a beautiful orange glow in the night sky that came from just over the hill.”
“I remember, too. There was a time when the men who ran those works were respected all over the island. But that’s gone now, and lucky for us it is, since the Memory Police don’t go there anymore. It’s not likely they’ll ever suspect us.” He took a deep breath and lifted the cup with both hands.
“How is R’s wife?” I asked.
“Tired, as you’d expect. She told me she’s having trouble understanding what’s happened to her, but that’s normal enough. Her husband’s been snatched away just as she’s about to give birth to their first child. But she’s smart and tough, and she didn’t try to find out where he is or who’s hiding him. She just told me to say how grateful she is.”
“So she’s gone home to her parents to wait for the baby to be born?”
“Yes. But their pharmacy doesn’t seem to be doing too well. While I was there they had just one customer, an old woman who’d come for a bottle of Mercurochrome. It’s a tiny little place and everything’s showing its age—the sliding door, the floorboards, the old glass cases—I almost wanted to get my toolbox and go help fix it up. R’s wife works behind the cash register, but I could see her big belly when she moved around the shop.” He sipped his cocoa for a while, and then, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, he unwound his scarf from his neck and stuffed it in his pants pocket. I refilled the kettle and set it back on the stove. Drops hissed as they fell on the burner.
“And there was no problem with the handoff at the box?”
“Everything worked perfectly. The school is small and there was no one in sight. The whole place seems to have gone cold, with no lingering warmth or smell from the children, not so much as a footprint. It was freezing, like a laboratory of some sort. Not a place I wanted to hang around, so I came straight home.”
The old man retrieved the cloth bag that was hidden under his sweater and pulled out a white envelope and a package wrapped in plastic.
“These were in the box,” he said.
I took the package from him. It appeared to be several items of carefully folded clothing and a few magazines. The envelope was thick and tightly sealed.
“The box hasn’t been used for a while and it’s in pretty bad shape,” he continued. “The paint is peeling and the latch was so rusted it was tricky to open. But I figured it out. The instruments are all broken—no mercury in the thermometer and a bent needle on the hygrometer—but that means no one else is likely to look inside. R’s wife had left the package tucked out of sight in the back, just as we agreed.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry to have put you in so much danger.”
“No, that doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. The cup was still pressed to his lips and I worried the cocoa would spill. “The important thing now is to get these things delivered.”
“You’re right,” I said. I clutched the packet and the envelope to my chest and started up the stairs, feeling the warmth of the old man’s body still lingering in the objects.
Chapter 12
I was a bit surprised when he appeared for the first class I took at the typing school. He did not look anything like a typing teacher. For one thing, for no good reason perhaps, I had it in my head that typing teachers were always women—women of a certain age, with an overly polite way of speaking, heavy makeup, and bony fingers.
But I found, instead, a very young man. One of average build, dressed in well-cut clothing in understated colors. He was not particularly handsome in a classical sense, but each feature—eyelids, eyebrows, lips, jaw—made a strong impression. His expression was calm and thoughtful but tinged with a distinct shadow, something you would notice if you focused solely on his eyebrows, for example.