Chapter 4: Blue Yarn

The peach jar’s label had a seam down the back where the paper had been lapped over itself, and the print was small, and the woman on the front had a smile drawn by somebody who had never once been hungry. Rook turned the jar around and began at the top left corner.

Water. Sugar. Two words he could take off the paper now and keep.

The third thing in the list was long and had a hard knot of letters in the middle of it. The same shape sat in the same position on the meat can and on the grain can, and he had decided to call it antibiotic, because that was the sound it made in his head and nothing else that turned up in that slot on that many labels could be anything else. Whether he had the word right, he had no way of knowing. That it was the same word in three places was enough to build a wall on.

Charles came in the mornings, after the matron’s first pass with the rag, and he came with cans. Mostly fruit — pears, more peaches, a purple thing in halves that stained Rook’s fingers — sometimes a paste of meat that came out of the tin in one grey cylinder, sometimes grain in a squat can with a pull ring on top. He lined them up on the floor by the pallet where Rook could reach them, and then stood over him with his paws folded and talked.

“He’s to be eating,” he said, to the room, to the matron standing behind him with the rag hanging off her hand. “Not lying there working at something. A thing that works burns it off itself. Mr. Charles has a man coming, and Mr. Charles is not going to have a man come and find a bag of bones in a coat.”

Rook lay and looked up at him with his mouth a little open, which was the face he had settled on as his best one. Charles took it for agreement and was pleased.

“Cat’s teeth, listen to that breathing. That’s a good sound. That’s the sound of money.”

On his way to the door he kicked the matron’s ankle, not hard, the way a man kicks a chair that has got into his road. She went a half step, set herself, and stood. “Somewhere useful,” Charles told her, and went out.

The latch turned over. The matron came back on. Not warmly. The slack went out of her and something else came in, and the rag started working, and Rook lay and watched the ceiling and let her get on with it.

He could not be funny in front of anything that was alive. That was a rule he had made and a rule he kept, and it cost him. So he talked to the cans.

He had three girlfriends, all of them printed on labels, and two sworn brothers, one of whom was a man in a checked shirt holding up a spoonful of grain. The blonde off the peaches he had gone off, partly because she had put him in the way of breaking his rule about sweets and partly because she had the flat painted eyes of a woman who reads a contract before she signs it. The one on the pears was warmer. The purple one was trouble, in a good way.

The girls did not answer back. He had thought about that, lying on his back with his hands folded on his chest, and had decided it was a fair arrangement and that he was not going to be sad about it, and then he had gone to sleep and dreamed of nothing at all.

The labels had another use in them, and it paid out slow.

He took the words he knew and used them for measuring. A can that tasted of nothing but sugar and fruit had a short list. A can that tasted of smoke and salt and a thin slick on the roof of his mouth had a long one, and the new long words turned up in it twice, at the front and again at the back, and by the third can of that kind he could find them without hunting.

The quantities were a problem until they were not. Every ingredient had a number after it and a small mark beside the number, and the same words kept the same numbers from can to can, and the numbers moved in tens, and his eye could follow that even when his head lost him halfway.

Ten of them. He counted the shapes and there were ten shapes, and when they ran out they turned over into two shapes and started again.

Ten. Not eight.

He sat up straight with the pear can in his lap and thought about the master’s front paws. He had looked at them a great deal, because there had not been much else to look at. Four fingers on each hand, one of them doing the work of a thumb, the whole arrangement clever and sad, and it carried a pencil and a key ring. Eight fingers.

Eight fingers, and their own cans went by tens.

Which was not proof. A man could count in tens on eight fingers if he had been taught it early enough, or if the teaching had come in from somewhere else — the same somewhere the pencils came in from, the same somewhere the cans came from. But a people who built the cans and wrote out the labels would more likely build ten into everything, and a people with eight fingers would more likely build eight. The arithmetic sat on the floor being what it was. The rat-headed folk were probably not the ones at the top. More likely they were somewhere in the middle, doing the buying and the selling and the shouting, and there was something over them that he had not seen and had no name for.

He turned it over a while. Then he got to the sugar, and the sugar took him somewhere worse.

Because he could do the sums.

Not the way a man did sums, with a pencil and a margin and a second pass to check himself. Rook did them the way a dog runs, without consulting anything, and when he arrived at the answer he had to go back and see how he had got there. He could hold six numbers in his head at once and turn them over. He knew what happened to a can of fruit when it sat too long and the seal went. He knew what the long words did inside a body. He knew that the thin slick on the roof of his mouth had a name, and a purpose, and a reason for being written down.

He was illiterate. He was just not illiterate all the way through.

He thought about the word teacher for a while. Nothing came of it, and he put it back.

Six did not come again.

Rook missed him with an honesty that surprised him. Six had been a machine you could ask a thing and get the whole answer out of, a fat toy with a string in its back that talked until it ran out of string, and Rook had not understood how much of his map of this place he had built out of that string until the string stopped being there to pull.

The matron came twice a day and cleaned. She was not much of a housekeeper — the floor drain stayed grey and the rag got moved around more than it got used — but she finished the room from one end to the other before she left it, in the order a person does a thing they have done a great many times.

With the master in the room she was a tool with the switch off. She stood where she was put. She fetched, and set down, and took her hand back. When he kicked her she went a half step and set herself. When he talked she heard none of it.

The door would shut and the latch would turn over and she would come back on, and once or twice in a day she would stop in the middle of the floor with the rag still in her hand and stand there a while, and Rook would look at the wall and wait her out.

The food was in a barrel in the corner by the cabinet, and the barrel was not kept shut. The cakes inside were the size and shape of a thumbprint and the color of a wet brick. They had been soft when they went in and were softer now, and nobody had sorted them, so a handful could be salt and sweet and a bitter ash and a fourth thing that was probably meant to be beef, in any order, and no handful came out twice the same.

Rook chewed them and thought about the fat kid, and the thinking tipped over into respect, and he chewed and gave the respect time to settle.

The marks on the wall were where they had been the first day he looked at them. He looked at them again and they said nothing, and he left them alone.

Somewhere in the fourth or fifth sleep he woke up well.

He knew it before he moved. There was a slackness in his arms and legs that had not been there the day before, and his chest went all the way down and all the way up and nothing caught in it. He got up and walked the room, one end to the other, and did it three times, and his knees did not go soft.

Then the second thing came in behind the first.

It was like being let out of a cast. The parts were his, they had always been his, and the walking was there underneath everything, known and sure; it was only that the first time he put a leg forward it did not land where he expected, and he had to take a second step before his body believed him.

He stood in the middle of the room and let it come into him and did not pick at it. Pleasant and wrong in the same mouthful.

Then the pull.

It had been with him in the bad days, when he was too sick to argue with it. Not a voice. Not a hand on his sleeve. More like standing on a slope in the dark and having one leg decide, on its own, which way was downhill. It took him to the cabinet.

The cabinet was wood, old, and the back panel had swollen out of its frame. It stood on four short legs and there was a gap under it, two inches, less where the floor rose, and the gap was full of dark.

He got down on his knees with his cheek to the floor and could see nothing at all. The spoon he ate the fruit with had a long handle. He got it off the pallet and came back and lay down on his side and pushed the handle into the gap and swept.

It came out grey. Hair, or the lint of a hundred years. He put it in again, further, along the underside of the cabinet, and hooked something, and drew it out slowly so it would not tear.

A ball of black yarn, or the beginning of one. He sat up cross-legged with it in his hands and turned it.

A head, tied off and finished, round, with two knots for eyes. Below the head the yarn ran out loose in a tangle that had not been shaped into anything; there was a loop of it pulled out of true, and a small knot near the bottom of the loop that had been tightened and then tightened again, and there was a little grease on it where his fingers had come off the fruit.

Somebody had made a doll, got as far as the head, and stopped.

He turned it again.

What was it for? Cursing somebody, he supposed. A poppet. You made one of these with a name in it and a hair in it and you put it somewhere, and the man it belonged to had a bad year. Which meant that somebody in this room — a feeder, a stocker, a child, a woman with a rag — had been making one and had lost it under the cabinet and never come back for it. Or had been interrupted.

It had one knot too many for a toy. Toys did not get tied off that careful. And no child on this side of the wall got yarn to play with.

He sat with that. Then his chest did something.

It was not pain. It was the wrong way round, a beat arriving where no beat belonged, and his left socket went warm, and the warm went to hot, and his left eye went black.

The room stayed where it was in the right of him. Bin, barrel, wall, drain, door, and the grey yarn in his hands with its two knot eyes and its unfinished body.

In the left there was light, thin as a winter morning, and the yarn in his hands was clean.

He could not turn his head. He did not try. Under the thin light his left pupil was no longer round: it had drawn itself out into points, one and then another, a six-pointed star opening on the iris and turning, slow, and then not slow.

The dust came off the yarn. It came off in a way that had no business being watched, and under the dust the yarn was blue — a good blue, a blue somebody had picked on purpose — and it was not a ball and not a doll’s head. It was a small flat shape with a loop through the top and a knot where the loop met, and in the middle of it, tiny, pressed into the yarn, was a fingerprint.

Dark. Child-sized. It sat on the blue like a coin in snow, and then it grew a hand.

The hand was thin. He could see through it. It made a wrist and then a forearm, and the forearm made a bend of elbow, and the whole of it unfolded out of the print in less time than a blink, and the room in his left eye had a girl in it.

She was seven or eight. She was so thin her arms looked borrowed. She had on a shift that might have been blue once, and her hair stood up in front, damp, and she was not looking at him.

She was looking at the pipe.

Rook watched her try to cross the floor. It was not a long way, and it took her a long time. She had to think about each leg separately. Her mouth was open and the skin around it was pale as a fish, and she stared at the bend of the pipe where a drop hung and did not fall, and she got one hand out in front of her, and Rook felt how badly she wanted that drop.

Her foot caught on something. Maybe on nothing.

She went down on her side and her hand got under her and she lay there with her mouth open, too tired to make a fuss about it, and she did not get up.

His body took it off her whole.

He was standing in the room with the yarn in his hands and he was also on a floor with his mouth open. Sweat came out of his forehead and ran down past his ear. His own face felt thin. There was not enough air in the room and his lungs did not know what to do with the air there was, and it was not his chest, it had never been his chest, and he felt it all the way down and he did not move.

He was not a doctor. He was a man standing in a small room with somebody else’s ending going through his chest, and he put it together in plain words anyway: most likely she had been born with it. Some hearts come out of the box wrong from the start and get the blood where it is going for a while, and then one night don’t.

The picture stopped.

She got up out of it. Not the way she had fallen, not the way a body gets up. She stepped out of it and stood, and the room behind her was not the room: grey, and long, and no wall on the far side of it, and she stood in the middle of that and reached her hand back toward him.

He knew what it was for. There was no learning in it. His hand was up before he had decided anything.

This time it did not go through. He got her.

Her grip was small and cold and real as wet rope, and there was a shadow over both their hands where the light from nowhere came down. Her face was turned up at him. She was in no hurry. She was not afraid of him, and she was too tired to be glad.

Something said, at his left ear, in a voice like a door being dragged:

“The present for the great Mr. Charles isn’t finished yet.”

It was a child’s voice, hoarse, out of a throat gone dry, and it had in it the carefulness of somebody who had been taught the right way to say a thing once and had spent it.

It said it again. “The present for the great Mr. Charles isn’t finished yet.”

The third time it was further off, going around a corner.

The dead did not talk. What he had was what she had left in the world, going around and around.

“Easy enough,” Rook said. “I’ll finish it for him.”

He squeezed her hand, and he did it gently, and then he let her go.

The shadow stayed on his hand and went solid.

It fell in on itself and went hard and thin and black, and it turned as he looked at it and kept turning, and then it pointed itself down like a nail and went into his palm.

He came back into the room on his own gasp, which was a stupid thing to do, and he was standing, which he did not remember deciding, and his left eye had the bin and the barrel and the wall in it again, and his pupil had gone round.

The yarn in his hands was grey and blue at once and there was no girl in the room.

He put his thumb into the middle of his left palm and pressed. The skin was not marked. That was the first surprise and he got over it fast. The second was that his hand knew the shape of what had gone into it. His palm had a memory of this — one of these, and another, a whole history of small black things going in and coming out — and his hand knew the feel of it before he did.

He stood there and tried to get at it. It was like reaching for a word in a language he had spoken as a boy. Nothing came. Not a picture, not a name, not a face.

He crouched back down with the yarn and held it out at arm’s length.

Blue. It was blue in both eyes now, the real kind, dusty and faded, and it was a blue somebody had picked on purpose.

The head was done. The body was not.

Rook turned the thing over in his hands, picked at the loose end with his thumbnail, found the loop that had been pulled out of true, and looked for where the rest of it was supposed to go on.