The Empty City

By the second week, Archie had stopped counting the days and started counting the rain.

It fell in the mornings as a mist and in the afternoons as a drizzle and at night as a long steady downpour that drummed on the tin roofs of Larkin Street until the whole district seemed to be singing one low note. He learned its moods. He learned which gutters flooded first, which stairwells stayed dry, which diners kept their kitchens open past two. He learned the names of the people who kept the city running: the baker, Mr. Ostrowski, who gave him a day-old roll every morning and refused payment; the nurse from St. Agnes' who always sat at the end of the counter at Lou's, reading a paperback with the cover torn off; Mrs. Pruitt, who did not smile but began, around the tenth day, leaving a pot of coffee outside his door.

The city was kind to him, in the end. That was the cruelty of it.

…

The case did not move.

He had followed every thread. The chambermaid, Dolores, who remembered a man in Room 614 humming the same four bars over and over, and could not say what song it was. The hotel register, torn at the corner. The telephone operator who swore a call had been put through to Crane at 11:40 on the night he vanished, from a booth on Fifth, and who remembered the caller's voice only as sad, like someone calling home from far away. The hat on the bed. The whiskey unfinished.

He had a sense of the shape of it, the way you sense the shape of a building you cannot see. The pieces were meant to lock together. But each time he reached for the last one, it slid away from him, as though the thing he was looking for were not a clue but a person, and the person would only appear if someone else were there to see him.

He tried everything he could think of.

He sat in Room 614 for a night and a day, in the dark, saying Crane's name aloud. He walked the corridors humming the four bars. He crossed the street to the bar opposite the hotel, a narrow place called The Last Note, and sat on the stool at the end of the counter and asked the bartender, a heavyset man with a damp cloth over his shoulder and a face like a tired bulldog, whether he'd ever known a Thomas Crane.

The bartender wiped a glass. "Don't believe I did."

"He was a guest here. Twenty years ago."

"That's a long time."

"It is."

The bartender looked at him. It was a long look, a curious one, and for a moment something moved behind the eyes, a flicker, like a fish turning in deep water. His hand stopped on the glass. His mouth opened.

Then it closed. He picked up the cloth, and said, politely, "Another rye, friend?" and turned away to the other end of the bar.

Archie sat with his hand flat against the wood. His heart was beating hard.

That was something, he thought. There was something there.

But the next night the man gave no sign at all. Nor the next. Archie sat on his stool and asked, and pushed, and told every story he could think of. He talked about Boston. He talked about Whitfield & Hale, about a maple forest in New Hampshire, about a postcard. He talked until his throat was raw. The bartender listened, and nodded, and polished glasses, and said That so? and Hell of a thing, and remained, entirely, a bartender.

…

On the sixteenth night, Archie understood.

He was sitting at the end of the bar with an untouched drink. It was past midnight. The room was nearly empty: a couple in a corner booth leaning toward each other over a candle, a lone drunk asleep on his folded arms, the nurse from St. Agnes', who had come in out of the rain with her collar up and taken a table by the window. Behind the bar the bartender was drying the same glass he had been drying for ten minutes. On the wireless, a woman was singing something low and sweet about a place she'd left behind.

The nurse laughed. Someone had said something to her. A thin dark-haired girl in an usher's uniform had come in from the theater next door and sat down across from her, and the two of them leaned together over a plate of fries and began, in low voices, to talk.

Archie watched them.

They were not important. He did not know their names. But they were together, in the plain unremarkable way that people are together, and there was something about the way the usher touched the nurse's wrist when she made a point, something about the ease of it, the unthinking trust, that struck him with a force he could not account for.

He's watching them too, he thought.

The bartender had stopped drying the glass. He was standing quite still with the cloth in his hand, and his eyes, deep and dark and stricken, were on the two women at the window table.

Of course, Archie thought. Of course.

The Dimension was not built to be solved. It was built to be shared. Every trial was a lock, and the lock was shaped like a group of people. A single key could turn it only so far. Whoever Thomas Crane was, whatever had happened to him, he would not wake up for one stranger sitting on a stool. He would wake up for a room. For a crowd. For a table full of people, all looking at him, all saying his name.

That was the design. That was why they had been sent in together.

And Archie had thrown it away.

He put his head in his hands.

…

For a long time he did not move.

The bar thinned. The drunk woke, blinked, and wandered out into the rain. The couple left. The wireless sang its last song and fell to a hiss of static. The bartender, without being asked, set a fresh glass in front of him and went away again, and Archie held it in both hands and looked into it as though it were a window.

I don't need anyone.

He had said it so many times that it had worn smooth. He had said it at nine, to a social worker, in a hallway that smelled of floor wax. He had said it at sixteen, to a teacher who offered him a place at her table at Thanksgiving. He had said it to Graham Whitfield, who stole three years of his work and called it mentorship, and to the colleagues who watched it happen and said nothing, and to the lovely quiet woman at the office, long ago, who had asked him to dinner and whom he had never called.

I don't need anyone.

It had never been true. That was the thing he saw now, sitting at the end of a bar in a city that did not exist, with the rain on the glass. It had never once been true. He had needed people so badly that he could not stand it. He had needed his parents, and they had gone. He had needed a friend, and Graham had been there with a smile and a knife. He had needed someone to stand up beside him and say, That's his work. That's Archie's, and no one had.

So he had stopped needing. He had made it a principle. He had built a life with one door and a lock on the inside, and called it independence, and been very proud of the architecture.

I'm afraid, he thought. That's all it ever was. I was afraid to need anyone, because every time I did, they left.

And now there was no one left to leave.

…

He went to the door at dawn.

It was a cold gray hour. The rain had thinned to a mist. The streetlamps were going out one by one down the length of Larkin Street, and the sky over the rooftops was the color of dishwater, and Archie stood on the curb in his borrowed trench coat and looked for the door he had come through.

It was not there.

He walked to the alley where he had woken. A wall. A drainpipe. A cat on a dustbin. He walked to the warehouse district, to the old rail yard, to the tram depot, to every place a door might be; he laid his hands on every blank brick surface and felt only wet stone. He called out. He said the names: Zoe. Venn. Jin. He shouted until his voice cracked and echoed off the empty buildings and came back to him thin and small.

Nobody came.

He knew then that he had been wrong about something far worse than the case. He had thought that, whatever else he did, he could go back and fix it. He could say I'm sorry, and Zoe would look at him with those steady dark eyes and say, I knew you would, and they would go on together. He had thought a choice was a thing you could take back.

The Dimension did not work that way. The door had closed behind him, and the others were on the other side of it, and the only road left ran forward, into a city built to be crossed by more than one.

He sat down on the curb in the thin gray light, in the rain that would not stop, and put his face in his hands.

Up in the lit window of a bakery across the street, Mr. Ostrowski looked out and saw him. He stood for a moment with a tray of rolls in his hands. Then he set it down, wiped his palms on his apron, and went to the telephone on the wall.

"Mrs. Pruitt?" he said. "It's Stan. The detective's out on the street again. Yeah. No, he's not hurt. He's just... yeah. You put the coffee on. I'll bring the bread."

The city, which could not help him solve its mystery, had decided at least to help him survive it.

It was something. It was not enough.