Chapter 46Who Laid the Floor

It was the first time the five of them had walked this path together.

Every time before, each had walked it alone. On a stage, on a flight of steps, in front of a seam. A step of stone would suddenly appear underfoot, and that step would hold the person up, carrying them upwards, or downwards, with no one else within reach. This time no one was pulled. The five of them stepped down onto the first step together; no one went first, and no one stood out in front. The first step was half a finger lower than the soles of their shoes. Five pairs of feet came down, five sounds, and no two of them fell on the same beat; they were half a beat apart.

There was no wind in the corridor. To the left was empty, and to the right was empty too: no walls, no railings. The stone steps ran downwards one after another; looking up, there was no end to be seen, and looking down, no bottom. Footsteps fell and did not echo. The stone held the soles of their shoes more firmly than anywhere else. The satin pointe shoe on the left foot made a sound when it came down too; the trainer on the right made a slightly heavier one. Every step landed firmly, and no one trod near the edge.

They went down a few steps. At each one they had to find where the next step was first, and only once they had found it could they step. When they reached the fifth step, Mitsuki looked back. The path above could no longer be made out clearly; only the edges of the steps were left, a fine line, folding step by step into the place where nothing could be seen.

They all knew there was a break ahead. No one said it.

※

Qingluan crouched first. She braced her hand on the nearest step. The stone was cool, evenly cool, with no one spot cooler than the rest. Mitsuki stood on her left, feet apart, the straight blade along her right forearm, unsheathed. Swan stood on the right, drew her pointe shoe aside, and let the trainer settle first. Jaewon stood behind them, his light not yet raised. Andrew stood at the back of the line, still half a step from the stairs. No one looked at anyone else. Each looked at the step under their own feet.

There were very fine lines in the stone. The lines all ran in the same direction, from one end of the step all the way to the other.

The edge of this step had been worn round, trodden by a great many shoes. Where it was worn round, the stone was a little lower than elsewhere too. Going up, each edge was sharper than the one below.

The break was rough. It had been snapped off, not cut. The pad of her finger slid across it, met little pits, met bumps that dug in when she pressed. When a sole ground against it, a few grains of grit came off the edge and fell into the black below the break, one, two, three, and none of them made a sound. Mitsuki tapped the stone with the back of her blade. The sound was very short; it stopped as soon as it was struck, and did not come back.

The side of the break was uneven, and there were carvings on it. At the bottom of the carvings there was dust, white, and it would not blow away.

They were not glowing symbols. They were words. Written by human hands, crooked, one stroke deep and the next shallow. None of the characters was large; each was squeezed into a space a palm wide. Some had been dug out with a fingernail, and the width of the nail was still there in the stone. Some had been scratched with something hard, scratched very hard, and halfway through the hand had changed, and the stroke after the change was a good deal shallower than the one before. Beside one character there were four faint marks in a row, left where a hand had pressed. There were names of two characters, of three, and of four. One name’s last stroke reached the edge of the stone, and could be carved no further.

Her finger stopped on one character. Its edges had been worn, worn round, but the strokes were still whole.

In a few places there was only a single horizontal line. One line, very short, uneven in depth; some were so flat you could not tell they had been carved by hand. Not a character, only one stroke.

※

Jaewon raised his right hand. The beat tattoo on the back of it lit up, electric violet, and the light fell on the carvings and showed the edges of the strokes. He was too close, and the characters blurred into one. He drew his hand back half a foot, and only then did the light separate. It threw five shadows, one for each of them, none overlapping.

Swan said nothing. She raised her left arm, and the hexagonal scales that rose on her wrist opened one by one into a flat surface, the pearl-white side turned towards Jaewon. The light bent back off the scales and fell on the side of the steps, and every carving lit up as a fine line. The fine lines ran on one after another until they reached the break, and there they stopped. The edge of one scale curled up; she did not press it down.

“This will do,” she said. Her sibilants were very clean.

They counted the steps.

They went back to the first step. Qingluan counted down from there, as far as the break. At each step down, her knees had to bend first, then straighten. Mitsuki counted with a fingertip, one dot per step; at the twentieth she paused, then went on. Her lips did not move; the numbers were all in her fingertip. Jaewon counted only the steps with writing on them. Each time he reached one, he said it over once in his head; his lips moved as he did, the sound half a beat behind his hand. Andrew did not count. He touched the edge of each step with the toe of his boot, and when he touched it, he moved forward one.

When one person counts, the numbers get muddled. On the steps outside the hall, she had counted to seventy and the numbers had muddled, and she had had to stop counting. This time someone was counting with her, and the numbers did not muddle. She counted every step, and Mitsuki dotted every step too, and when they reached the break, the two numbers matched. Jaewon’s number was smaller than theirs; he had counted only the steps with writing, and the ones missing were the ones without. Andrew did not call out a number, but the toe of his boot stopped on the edge of the last step, in the same place. The edge of the last step was bright. It had been laid only recently.

The strokes of one name were rounded. Whoever wrote it was probably a small child; the characters were only half the size of the others. Jaewon looked at that name for a long time, and did not read it aloud.

On the steps with writing, there was white dust at the bottom of every carving. On the steps without, there was only a thin layer of dust on the stone, gone at a wipe of the hand. They ran down one after another, and from above you could not tell which steps had writing and which did not. It looked like a single path.

At the thirty-first step, Mitsuki’s fingertip stopped on that horizontal line and did not come down.

“I’ve crouched on this step,” she said.

When they had finished counting, the steps with writing held one name each. In her head Qingluan went over the people whose names had been called along the way, and matched them to the steps one by one. Not one more, not one fewer.

※

Qingluan came back from the break, back to the third step, and crouched.

There were three characters on the third step.

The pad of her finger felt from the first character to the third. The order of the strokes was right. Where each stroke began, where each stroke ended, she knew them all. What she knew was not the shape of the characters but the force of the strokes, and where she had felt it before. She did not take her hand back. Her hand stayed on the characters until she had felt the last stroke of the third.

She read the three characters aloud.

“Zhou Sulan.”

As she said it, her awakening markings lit from the innermost ring, one ring, two rings, three rings, each character lighting one. That night in the Hall of Harmony, every word she said had lit like this. The walls of the hall were thin, and her feathers of light were folded at her back, nothing left but a narrow band.

That woman she had always called Auntie. Every day she reached the sanitation depot at ten past four and swept one thousand one hundred metres, three times a day. The broom hung on the fourth hook, slanted end up. There was a crease in the brim of her cap. The name she had heard later, at the door of the sanitation depot, from the mouth of a man smoking a cigarette: only three characters, nothing else at all.

Zhou Sulan probably did not know she was here. Her name lay on a stone step, the step lay on a path with no wind, and she still swept her one thousand one hundred metres a day, as always.

These three marks in the stone were the traces left by the voice she had sent out that night, once it had come down.

She remembered that on that night, on this path, she had said one sentence to the four others half a world away.

That night, Mitsuki had stood six paces off, her hand still open, palm up. Jaewon had stood among fragments that were still falling, dust on his white shoes. Over where Swan was, a hexagonal scale was catching the light. Five people half a world apart, seen eye to eye for the first time. That time, she had been the one to speak first. The sentence went like this:

“We don’t know each other. But I saw you.”

When she had said it, no one answered. No one walked away either. She did not say a second sentence to them. At that time her hand was still on the stone, and she did not take it back.

※

Mitsuki stopped on a step further down.

That step had no writing. Her fingertip touched the break first, then the stone, and then a small hole. The hole was round, not large, its rim ragged, and around it was a ring of very fine white flecks, the kind thrown up when a punch bites down.

She had seen holes like this at the company. In the slots of a time card, this was the kind of hole the time clock bit out. It bit with a very short sound, one slot for each quarter of an hour, and whichever slot the hole was punched in, the time in that slot was that moment. Cards with no clock-out hole stayed in the card rack, standing up one after another, and no one pulled them out. Every day she walked past that row of card racks; the edges of the cards were all even, and only the rims of the holes were ragged.

A clock hole recorded that someone had come. Twice a day, one slot each time. Whose coming this hole recorded, she did not know. If she were the one to punch it, which slot would she punch it in? She thought about it, and could not come up with one.

There were no slots in the stone of this step. She could not tell whether this hole was in “In” or in “Out”. If no one punched this slot, the slot was empty, and there was not even a fleck of white on the stone.

The line on the thirty-first step was deep at one end and shallow at the other; the one on the forty-fourth was shallower than that. Whoever carved them had an unsteady hand, or had nothing handy to carve with at the time. She had crouched on the thirty-first step once, run the pad of her finger along it from end to end, and felt out a start and an end to the stroke. This step had no stroke at all, only a hole. No one had carved a stroke here, and no one had stopped their hand here either. The hole was very shallow, bitten only one layer into the stone, not through.

Mitsuki did not crouch. She stood and looked at the hole, looked for a long time. The crescent-shaped mark under her left eye lit up, from the corner of her eye to her cheekbone, and stopped there.

She drew her hand back, and her fingertip pressed on the knot of cord on the hilt, pressed it down, and it sprang back. The knot was cherry-pink. The back of the blade lay along her right forearm, cool; she had not changed hands all the way.

“No one has called this step.”

When she had said it, her voice sank, sank down to the stone and stopped.

※

Swan went forward two steps and stopped over a square frame.

The frame had been carved. Its four sides were very straight and its four corners square, and there was no writing inside it. The edges of the frame had been rubbed shiny. The shiny band was a shade paler than the stone, a sheen pressed into it by a great many fingers. She could not count how many people had pressed it. The prints of fingertips lay on top of one another, layer on layer, and the topmost layer was still new. In the top left corner there was a very fine scratch, made by a fingernail. There was no dust in the scratch; it was the newest mark on this step.

She crouched, and did not touch it.

The rejection slip in Paris had carried a red stamp just like this in the box for the issuer. Square, with no words on the face. That day she had stood in front of the window, and the person behind the window had not looked up, a pen in hand. She had folded that paper twice herself and stuffed it into the hole in the toe of her right shoe, where it just plugged the gap. That hole was black, white threads curling at its edge. The stamp had been pressed down hard, and a ring of it showed through on the back of the paper.

Her right foot had been taped, eleven turns, taped tight. The stone steps in Paris were wide, and the bottom three were wide enough to stand on; twenty-six in all, she had counted them. She had sat on the ninth step, and sat watching someone else’s whole passage through.

“There’s no writing here,” Swan said. “I’ll stand for a moment first. Standing on it doesn’t count as treading on it.”

She stood up. Her right foot, in the trainer, came down on the edge of the frame; her left, in the pointe shoe, came down in the very middle of it, the satin pressing on two sides of the shiny band. The sole of the pointe shoe was very thin, and the lines of the stone came up through it; she could feel every one of them underfoot. She did not crush it, and she did not jump away. She stood, waited a while, and only then shifted her weight across, bit by bit.

“You go on first,” she said. “I’ll stand here a moment.”

She did not move. Her gaze stayed on the edge of the frame, stayed a moment, then drew back.

※

Only then did Jaewon speak. He was standing behind them, his light still raised.

He was looking at the fifty-seventh step. On that step there was a horizontal line, and beside the line, a carving that had been smoothed away. Smoothed very lightly, so lightly that without looking closely it was just an ordinary patch of stone. The edges had been pressed flat, pressed down level with the stone. There had been something underneath.

He lowered the light on the back of his hand a little. One small patch of stone was brighter than the rest, as if it had been pressed by a thumb many times, pressed flat, pressed until you could not see it had ever lifted.

That mirror in Seoul: when a small piece of its seam lifted, someone would press it back with a thumb, flat. When it was pressed back, there was only a very faint sound, and no one spoke. It only pressed, and once it was done, the seam was flat. What got pressed back was just a small piece like this. He had stood in front of that mirror over there; from the door to that spot was eleven steps. Along the bottom edge of the frame ran a strip of black tape, level with the height of the jaw, one end curling up, and he had not pressed it down. He had stood on that line, seen only his own face, and not looked at what that small piece was.

On the wooden floor of the practice room there was a faint line worn by the soles of shoes, running from the front of the mirror all the way to the door. That line had been walked out over many days, the same route, day after day. At the end of the line was the door, and the door was not locked; he had pushed it open many times.

The inside of his knee tightened first. The tendon there had been damaged dancing the year he was fifteen. He shifted his weight onto his left leg, and only once it was shifted did he raise the light again.

Inside the break in his earring, the violet core flickered, then went dark.

“Lower the light,” Swan said. She did not turn round; her voice was very level.

He lowered the light a little more. As the light went down, the small patch could no longer be seen, and only an ordinary stone was left.

When he spoke, he was half a beat behind the light.

“There’s writing here,” Jaewon said. “It’s been pressed down.”

Qingluan asked him, “Where have you seen it?”

Jaewon said, “Seoul.”

※

Andrew measured with the toe of his boot.

What he measured was the breaks, not the steps. He set the toe of his boot on the edge of the first break, measured across to the stone on the other side, stopped, drew back, and kept a number in his head. He did not say it aloud. He changed feet and measured the next one. The toe of the army boot was worn very flat, and when it touched the stone it made a very soft sound.

He did not use a ruler to measure things. His boot was his ruler.

The stone was cold, cleanly cold. When the toe of his boot touched it, it did not stick, and it did not slip.

He thought of the hammer. Its head had been recast from a dismantled steel beam, and when he gripped it, his palm could feel every weld seam. The stone here had no weld seams, only lines.

Where it was narrow he did not tread fully, only half: the toe went over first, then the heel came down. The first was one stride. The second was a little narrower. The third was a little narrower again. Narrower by very little, too little to see with the eye, but the toe of a boot could measure it. Each one narrower than the last. Narrower, not all at once, but one by one, closing in slowly. A grain of grit was caught on the edge of the fourth, and did not fall.

He measured them one by one, and at the seventh he stopped and measured no further. The toe of his boot was still a finger’s width from the eighth, and that finger’s width he did not measure.

The dog tag on his chest lay against his shirt. The dog tag was cool, a little cooler than the shirt. There was nothing on it. He did not take it out.

“Who laid it?” Mitsuki said from in front, without turning round. Her voice sank.

Andrew did not look up.

“Not evenly spaced,” he said. The sentence was very short; when it was done, he stopped for a while before the next. “The further on, the narrower.”

He stopped again.

“It was laid as it was walked.”

That night, when Qingluan looked at the break, she had seen only one stride. The breaks all looked the same, and no one had measured them.

※

Qingluan stood up.

She wondered why this path had opened on that night.

It was not because the five of them had become stronger. That night none of them had become stronger, none of them had learned anything. Jaewon’s earring was still broken, Swan’s shoe still had the hole in its toe, Mitsuki’s hand was still open, and when she herself spoke, her awakening markings had lit only to the first ring. That night was the first time each of the five had been seen eye to eye by another person. Half a world apart, five pairs of eyes had met. The path had existed from that moment on.

Mitsuki’s first sentence, she remembered. Swan’s first step, she remembered too. Jaewon’s feet had come down only on the last half beat, and Andrew’s line had been very short.

Those three characters were her voice; that she did not doubt. But whether her voice had come first on that step, or the step had come first, she could not say.

She leaned forward, braced her hand on the edge of the break, narrowed her eyes, and looked across it.

She did not let go, and she did not step over. Her fingertip moved slowly along the edge of the break, moved into a small pit, and stopped. A little white dust came away on her fingertip.

She looked ahead. The break in front was narrower than the first, narrow enough that the black beneath could be seen. On the other side of the break there was no writing, no line, no hole, no square frame, and no small patch pressed flat. That side had not yet been called by anyone, nor seen by anyone. Beneath the other breaks a little white light showed through; beneath this one, none.

Whether there was any path further on, no one knew.

The five of them stood in a row, with no one standing at the very front and no one at the very back. The break was before their feet, narrower, black beneath. Their shadows lay on the stone, still one each. No one said they should go back, and no one said they should cross. Mitsuki drew her gaze back from the hole and let it fall on the black of the break. Swan had already come down from the square frame and stood in the row, the scales on her wrist slowly drawing back in, one by one, until they could not be seen. Jaewon turned the break in his earring towards the far side of the break; the violet core did not light. The toe of Andrew’s boot stopped on the last edge, and his heel came down without a sound.

Qingluan looked back. The horizontal lines were all still there; no one had filled them in, and no one had carved another stroke.

Mitsuki looked at Qingluan once, only once, and drew her gaze back. Swan looked at Jaewon. Jaewon looked at Andrew. Andrew looked at no one; he was looking at the break.

Qingluan was in no hurry to cross. The break was there, waiting.

Qingluan moved her right foot forward an inch, and stopped. The toe of her shoe was still a finger’s width from the break.

Grit at the edge of the break was still falling, one grain, two, into the black, without a sound.

The far side of the break was black. There was nothing there; not even footsteps came back.

The five of them stood before the break, and no one spoke first.