index

When the sun is steady and the temperature has worked its way into the stone, our pale streets begin to stain. The façades do not crumble or flake as stone perhaps ought to; they perspire. An amber tincture seeps from cornices and lintels and runs in narrow lines down to the paving; the buildings seem exhausted by the continued effort of standing.

Municipal pamphlets assure us this is a harmless interaction between the air and the lime aggregate, a natural patina, though most citizens reject this explanation and call them tears. Once, as a boy, I trailed my finger through a drying rivulet and tasted my fingertip: metallic, bitter, and, inexplicably, cold.

People arrive in the City for the small curiosities and remain for the larger ones. One of those larger curiosities is this: on days of heat and clear light, a seam will appear in a wall that shuns the sun. It is not a door, not a gate; the scar opens as if the wall remembers being two walls that once stood apart. Out steps a man in a plain suit — charcoal or blue, the colour depends on your distance — who turns his head left, tilted as though listening for a single word. Then he begins walking toward the interior.

(In our City this phrase, toward the interior, is an elastic one. It means away from the dark harbour and the wharf and the squares with public clocks. It means towards postcodes we have not memorised and brick courtyards where the dust never settles.)

Some people watch him as one watches a passing shower: mildly interested, a little inconvenienced, prepared to go on with the day. Others — fewer and fewer, lately — decide to follow. Of those who do, many reappear the following week, or the following year, carrying an extra summer upon their faces and forearms. They move more slowly than before and are incapable of pointing out cardinal directions without hesitation. In conversation their sentences take unnecessary detours. A subset never returns at all. That is to say: perhaps they return as someone we nod at without recognition.

I was not born here, not really, but the City absorbed me with a thoroughness that left me suspicious of maps. Once I copied charts for a living, a minor clerk in the Office of Orientation. The window by my table gave onto a wall that faced the pole, and I would watch the chalky surface grow darker over the day as if it were considering what to do with itself. In time I began noting the appearances of the suited figure. The entries took the form of a calendar: date, hour, barometric pressure, and a few remarks concerning the man’s posture or stride. Only in the act of writing did I recognise the repetition. The head turned to the left. Always the left. The same measured pace. No glance behind.

A colleague named Michael, who had little faith in dogma and less in anything printed after 1848, invited me to dinner and produced, after the second course, a stitched booklet. It was titled, with a scrupulous seriousness, Considerations on the Metallurgical Afflictions of the City, and Other Phenomena Certain Inhabitants Take for Omens. The author called themselves “An Observer,” as if there were any other role to play here.

Among the pages were several accounts — always second-hand, always dubious — of figures stepping from fissures and walking inwards. The most interesting pages, however, concerned the compass. The Observer maintained that, within the length of a man’s patience, the instrument will tell the truth; beyond that length it will point wherever your longing points. They appended a footnote to that claim, which read in full: “Doubters of this proposition are politely advised to take a long walk.” I admired the admonition enough to accept it as doctrine.

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I do not know why I decided to follow the suited man. It was not zeal. It was not boredom. There is a third motive that sits between them, of decisive abandon. The wall opposite my office window had grown slick and ochre by noon. At half past three it unzipped a precise vertical line. The suited figure stepped out, glanced left, and set off toward the interior at the usual tempo. I closed my notebook. I did not tell anyone where I was going, because I did not know.

He kept a pace that punished attention. When I walked faster, he did not seem closer; when I lingered, he did not seem further. He was as near to me as my conviction. Streets I had known as boy and clerk became uncooperative. A row of iron railings went on for several blocks longer than it had any right to, and a narrow lane unfolded into a market under tarpaulins of indeterminate colour. I passed a watchmaker who pried open a brass pocket watch and showed a client a small map inside; the client nodded soberly, as if acknowledging a diagnosis. In a vestibule, a girl chalked a line on the floor from east to west and then, dissatisfied, rubbed it out with her shoe.

It is easy to pretend you are alone in such pursuits, but I soon found I had company. An old man in shirtsleeves, hairless and freckled like a plucked bird, kept to my right for half an hour. Every time our eyes met he looked as if he meant to ask me a favour and then changed his mind. A woman in a green dress trailed us both while holding her shoes in her hand, as if the extra contact between skin and ground might help. The suited figure neither acknowledged nor punished our attention. When he came to corners he turned without signalling. When he reached empty sections he crossed them at diagonals that displeased the geometry of the place. Once, at a grated window, children rapped with knuckles and counted passing followers in whispers: nine. ten. eleven. I was twelve that afternoon.

The heat clarified things. It burned off ornament. It made the streets deliberate. There was a moment on the third or fourth hour when I was overcome by the idea that to turn my head was to waste myself. Then, of course, I turned it. The harbour was nowhere. The wharf was relocated to some other life. A shadow brushed the street, and I realised all at once that we were not walking toward the interior; we were being walked by it. The phrase cheered and terrified me.

We came at last to a place that had no right to be where it was: a small triangular green drained of shade, edged by three stone buildings whose cornices were etched with an alphabet of leaves and birds. The suited man halted. He looked left. A seam appeared at the base of the northernmost structure — do not argue with the word; I will not — and opened. He stepped through. The seam closed as if it had been put there solely for him and had fulfilled its duty. We who had trailed him stood like extras dismissed from a scene, unsure whether to applaud.

The freckled man broke ranks first. He laughed, one dry cough after another, and wiped his forehead as if lowering a curtain. The woman in green slipped her shoes back on with a practical gesture I admired. The girl with chalk — no, that was memory migrating; there was no girl with chalk here — pressed a coin into my palm and said nothing. I stood quite still and refused, almost successfully, to be disappointed.

What changed everything was a small fact. Standing there, I realised the suited figure had not, as I believed in my ledger and in my heart, turned his head to the left according to a fixed city plan. He had turned to his own left. That is to say, his left had been a private arrangement, a subjective wind. If he had faced me then, across even a narrow distance, my left would not have been his at all. This trivial insight had the force of weather. It made my notes useless and perfect.

In case there is any doubt, I did not immediately become the sort of man who forces doors. I went home. I took a bath. I told no one. The coin in my palm showed, upon cleaning, a bird whose beak had been filed into a point that might double as an arrow. That night I dreamed a corridor composed entirely of doorframes with no doors, the frames growing incrementally narrower until I had to turn my shoulders to proceed. I woke feeling taller, which is a ridiculous sensation for a man of my age.

Over the next weeks I followed the suited figure twice more. Both times he led different routes to the same triangular green. The first time, we lost two followers to a pastry shop and one to a boilermaker’s apprentice who insisted on offering directions he did not possess. The second time, I was alone with him for a block, and in that block I saw — do not ask me how, it is a matter of air and light rather than optics — the line of his jaw slacken, as if he were listening again for the word I could never hear. We reached the green. He entered the seam. I stood and watched the wall heal.

On the next occasion he emerged, a day that belonged to late summer but claimed early autumn’s virtues, I arrived at the green before him. Do not imagine this involved cunning or even foresight. It required accepting that directions are a form of etiquette, and that manners can be violated with impunity if one is prepared to live with the consequences. The three buildings waited soberly. The north-facing wall — there, I have given you the superstition plain — presented its pale, unhelpful surface. The seam did not appear. The suited man was nowhere. Children behind a grate, or my memory of them, counted nothing.

I approached the wall and set my palm against the stone. It was cooler than I had expected. It felt like an answer. I kept my hand there until numbness set in and then became a kind of intimacy. When at last the seam arrived, it did so without spectacle, as quietly as a new thought. There is no other honest way to state the next fact: I stepped through.

Readers demand an account of what is inside, as if interiors were a species of furniture. I will not be miserly, but I will be exact. There was not darkness so much as a revision of light. The air was salted, though we had come away from the harbour. My feet knew where to go. I did not meet the suited man within, nor did I become him, because these categories do not hold. I moved a certain distance — a minute’s walk or a decade’s — and emerged into a street I had not known that morning, in a neighbourhood that took my name and wore it like a borrowed coat. The first person I saw was Michael, who lifted a hand and did not wave. “I thought you might,” he said. I asked what he had thought. “Take a long walk,” he replied diplomatically, as if quoting a polite footnote.

Now that I have written this, I am obliged to tell you what is not in the municipal literature. The City rewards the disciplined imagination and plays tricks on the sentimental rationalist. Those who follow the suited figure come back with time in their skin, which is to say: they have made a trade. They have given up the luxury of believing that north is a place, or a preference. They will stand with you at a window and point in three directions at once. They understand that a man’s left is a perpendicular fact that can shear you from your life if you lean too hard upon it.

As for me, when the heat settles and the façades begin their slow alloy of shame and pride, I look for the seam. I still go to the triangular green. Sometimes I arrive before him, sometimes after. Once, briefly, we arrived at the same moment and faced each other like two paragraphs in a contested text. He looked to his left. I looked to mine. We nodded, each in receipt of the other’s inattention. Then he walked toward the interior, and I — obeying my instrument and my longing — took a different street entirely.