Chương 48: The Wheel

He got one more page. The Crofts had written down how they taught a boy to sit, and nothing else in the book said one word about sitting. None of it was the wheel. Then the quiet tore, the way it had torn on the chair scrape, and he came out with his thumb holding the page and the book already shutting. The door hinge went, and Croft's mother leaned in.

"Are you taking cake home? You're taking cake home." She did not look at the shelves once, and Abe said yes to the cake. He walked down the hill with a slice of it in a tin and everything he had read going over and over so he would not drop any of it. Then he sat at the kitchen table until two in the morning and wrote it all out. It came to three pages in his own handwriting. The screen page in the back of his father's book had been copied out the same way, and so had the one Abe had just read.

The day after Christmas started well, and the good part of it was over by ten after nine. Abe sat down on the cold concrete with his own three pages on his knee. He read the part about sitting. Then he sat, and nothing happened, so he read it again and sat again, and nothing happened again. The page told him to let his attention rest without holding on to it. It told him the sit goes down through itself. It told him he would know he had it when the sitting stopped being work.

Abe sat there most of the morning and every minute of it was work. All three pages had the same fault. Every line described what it was like once you could already do it, and not one line said what to do. He took it into the still, where he had as many hours as he wanted. The hours turned out to be worth nothing. He did the same wrong thing over and over in a stopped yard until his back ached, and then he came out and looked at his screen, and the bar hadn't moved.

He did it again on Saturday, in worse weather, and got the same result. Croft messaged him twice that weekend. Once to ask whether Abe liked fruitcake, because his mother wanted to know. Once with a photograph of the garden under frost and nothing written underneath it. Abe looked at both for a while. Then he put the phone face down on the table. He'd read five pages of that family's private book with his hands at his sides and his heart going, and Croft was sending him pictures of the grass.

He didn't answer either message that day. He wasn't proud of that, and he didn't answer them anyway. By Saturday evening he had worked out what was wrong, and it wasn't the book's fault. Croft had taught him the ferryman by running it slowly, twice, so Abe could see where the back foot went. Tench had taught him the settle by putting two hundred people on a floor and walking between them. Everything Abe had ever properly learned, somebody had done in front of him first. He could read the word.

He couldn't find the thing the word pointed at. So he needed a person who had it, and he only knew one. Sunday the twenty-eighth of December was bright and hard and cold enough to sting. The hall on Fenner Street had its door propped with a fire extinguisher, the way it always did when somebody was expected. Abe went up at half past one, early on purpose. Marek was putting mats out one at a time, walking back for each one instead of carrying two. He had a list on the wall for that afternoon.

"You're not on here," he said, without turning around.

"I know. Can I ask you something?" Marek straightened up with a mat still under his arm. He was a wide man going gray and he had a way of giving you his whole attention that was slightly alarming, and he did not give it now.

"Ask."

"Before you work. You sit down first." Abe found he had to make himself say it.

"Every time. What are you doing when you do that?" Marek put the mat down and went to get another one.

"Sitting down."

"Yes. But what are you doing?"

"Nothing." He squared it off with his foot.

"You sit until sitting is the only thing you're doing."

"How long did that take you?"

"Four years, near enough."

"And then?"

"And then about four more, and then it stopped." He shook the next mat out flat.

"Got easy. Twenty-odd years now. I sit, I'm quiet, I get up, I work. It does what I need and it hasn't moved since I was thirty." Abe stopped taking notes in his head.

"Why not?" And there it was, the whole attention, all at once. Abe stood there under it and watched him decide.

"You only get better at it while it's hard. I ran out of hard." Marek picked up the last mat.

"My mother sat, so I sat. She learned off a woman who put her in a cold room in February with the door standing open and left her in it." He set the mat down and stood on the corner to flatten it.

"She thought that was cruelty and never did it to me. She wasn't wrong. It was."

"So there isn't anything else."

"There's whatever you can think up on your own." He was already walking away.

"I never thought up much. Twenty minutes, and then I've got the Danforth boy. Don't stand where I can see you." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. He went to the mat by the wall bars and sat down on it, and that was the end of the conversation. Piers Danforth was at the far end of the floor with his jacket off, working through a set. He saw Abe on the way out and finished the set before he came over, which took long enough to notice.

"Dolan."

"Danforth."

"He's booked through until five." Danforth pushed his hair off his forehead.

"All afternoon, I mean. There's no gap in it."

"I know. I'm not staying." Neither of them said anything else for a moment, and neither of them said anything at all about the hours, or about the block Danforth's father had bought through to Easter, or about the autumn Abe had trained on this floor for nothing because a rich boy couldn't be bothered with his third hour.

"Right," said Danforth.

"Well. Merry Christmas and all that." He went back to the far end and picked the set up where he'd left it. He was perfectly pleasant about all of it. He always was. The list was on the wall by the window at eye height, and Abe read it going past because he could not help it. Three slots, two to five, in Marek's square capitals. The same name written three times. Abe got quiet on the step of the shut laundromat two doors along, with his hands at his sides and his back against the glass.

It took about fifty seconds, the same as always, and it was harder than it should have been because his heart wouldn't sit down. Then the world stopped, all of it, between one step and the next. Fenner Street held still around him. A bus sat in the middle of it with its indicator lit and not blinking, and the sleet hung in the air the whole way up the street, thousands of it, close enough to put his hand between. Abe walked past all of it, up the stairs, and through the propped door.

Danforth was at the far end with one heel off the floor. Marek was sitting on the mat by the wall bars. Abe went and stood eighteen inches away from him and looked at him for as long as he liked. He wasn't doing anything. That was the first thing. He sat cross-legged with his hands turned up on his knees. His back was straight without being stiff about it and his chin was very slightly down. His eyes were shut.

There was nothing on his face, and the nothing wasn't the same as the nothing on a sleeping person's face, though Abe couldn't have said how. Abe went around him slowly and looked at the rest. The weight sat behind him rather than under him. The shoulders were down and the elbows were soft. One thumb rested on the inside of the other hand, and thirty years had put that thumb exactly there. He looked at Marek's mouth.

He looked at the line between his eyebrows, and at the pulse in his neck, which wasn't moving, because nothing was moving. He'd done this once before, in a school corridor in October, to a boy's bitten thumbnail. It had been the most wonderful thing in the world. He did not feel anything like that now. This was a man in his own hour, in his own hall, with the door propped for his next student.

Abe had walked in on him with a power nobody in the building could see him using, and he was standing close enough to count the gray in the man's beard. Don't stand where I can see you, Marek had said, and had meant it as a joke about a lesson. Abe made himself finish. He went around him twice and put every part of it somewhere he could find it again. And going around him the second time he understood what he was actually looking at, and it went through him cold. The man was comfortable.

Whatever this had cost him at twenty-five, it was costing him nothing now. He had a beautiful back and quiet hands and a face with no weather on it, and he had been doing exactly this, unchanged, since before Abe was born. Abe had come to steal a method, but there was no method in the room. There was a man who had run out of hard. Then he went out, down the stairs and along the sidewalk to the step of the shut laundromat, and only then did he let the world in. A pigeon landed. The bus moved off.

A man's cigarette smoked. Abe sat down on the step with his jaw aching from clenching it, and waited for that to stop. He had Marek's sit all evening in his own yard, and it was no good, and it took him hours to work out why. He could copy every bit of it. Hands, back, chin, thumb, elbows, the weight sitting behind him. He built the man out of parts in the cold with the drain smelling the way it always smelled. He sat there in a perfect copy of Marek and got absolutely nowhere.

He had copied a man who had not moved on that mat in twenty years. He thought about a cold room in February with the door standing open. There used to be fifty ways to make an hour on a mat unbearable and they were all gone, and the Crofts had written theirs down and put them in boxes nobody had opened since about the war. Abe had stood four feet from those boxes with his hands at his sides and read a different shelf. He sat in the yard being angry about that for a while.

Then he saw it, and got up so fast the pages went off his knee into the wet. Abe sat down again at about half past nine, got quiet, and went through, and the yard went silent around him. Every person who had ever tried to learn this had done it in a world. They had a candle, or a bell, or their own breathing, or the sound of a road outside, and the whole art was holding on to one of those while the rest of it pulled at you.

Every one of those things was something to hold on to, and every one of them made the sitting easier. Marek had said what easy was worth. Abe sat down in a place that had none of them. No sound. No draft. No cold, after a minute, because the cold was not going anywhere either. Nothing moved and nothing pushed and nothing pulled. There was not one thing in the entire stopped world to put his attention on, so the only thing left to do was hold his attention still and hold it on nothing.

It came apart in about nine seconds. The still went with it. Abe sat in a loud yard with the drain running and looked at that for a while. He got quiet again. Fifty seconds. Went back in, sat down, held it, lost it. It was the most boring thing a human being can do, exactly as advertised, and it was also harder than any work he had done that autumn carrying sacks up a bank in the dark. He lost count somewhere after the fortieth time.

Every one of them cost him fifty seconds of the real world and however long he could stand on the other side of it, and the second number was the one that kept getting bigger. Then something shifted underneath the boredom that he had no word for, and it was gone before he could look at it. The screen came up somewhere in there and he nearly missed it. Meditation · Novice Lv 4 (0 / 800) Abe stared at it in a dark yard with his legs gone dead under him.

Three months of getting quiet four and five times a night, every night, and it had moved two levels. One evening on wet concrete had moved it one more, and the evening was not finished. He got up and walked around the yard twice to get the feeling back in his feet. Then he sat down and went straight back in. After that he stopped reading them as they came. Meditation · Novice Lv 5 (0 / 1250) Meditation · Novice Lv 7 (0 / 2450) Every one was harder to get than the one before it.

Every one came anyway, because there was no bottom to how hard he could make this. Nothing had ever been able to make it this hard, and nothing had ever been this empty. He came out for the fifty seconds and went back in. Then out, and back in. The drain ran and the sleet came on and stopped again, and he noticed neither. Somewhere after three in the morning the screen that came up was not a level.

Meditation · Novice → Apprentice Mind 4 → 5 Abe put both hands flat on the wet concrete and waited, and did not breathe, and the second screen came. EVOLUTION · Meditation Choose one. This choice is permanent. THE EMPTY ROOM · Common You do not need anything to hold on to. THE HELD BREATH · Common One thing at a time, and nothing takes it off you. THE TURNING WHEEL · Fine Rest without sleeping. Work without stopping. Your day is longer than their day. Two of the three he had never seen anywhere in his life.

The third one he had read four days ago, in a dead man's handwriting, on a page in a room he had no business standing in. So the screen made a new list for whoever opened it. Nothing had said the wheel would be on his. He read it four times, the same as he had read it on Christmas Day with an aunt's hand halfway into a jar behind him. Abe took the Turning-Wheel Trance. Meditation → TURNING-WHEEL TRANCE Turning-Wheel Trance · Apprentice Lv 1 (0 / 200)