The grinder had run for seven seconds that morning, the way it always did, and he had counted them from inside the wall.
He counted everything the house gave him. Seven seconds of grinder. Three minutes for the water. The scrape of the chair by the north window, the cup set down, the man's slippers on the hall boards, and at night the eleven stairs up to bed, the fourth one loud. He had counted those eleven stairs so many times that the number had worn a groove in him. He did not know how long he had been counting. The plaster held him the way a fist holds a coin, and a coin does not keep a calendar.
That morning the steps had come to the workroom, and the door had shut, and the man had knelt in the circle and reached. He had felt the reaching pass close by him like a hand feeling along a shelf in the dark. It went to the others first, the ones on the far ends of the man's lines, and found nothing. Then it went deeper, to something old. Then the man stood up and walked out without closing what he had opened. The front door banged. The house was empty.
He waited for the steps to come back. Waiting was the shape he had been bent into.
The light from the north window moved across the floorboards toward the circle. A fly found the room and left it. The neighbour's dog barked at the postman and stopped.
Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the wall let go of him.
The plaster did not crack. Something that had been pulled tight through him for longer than he could count went slack all at once, the way a rope goes slack when the man at the other end drops it, and he slid out of the wall and fell.
He hit the floorboards.
That was the first wrong thing. He had a weight. He lay on his side at the foot of the wall with dust settling on him and felt the boards press back against the length of him, hard and particular, every grain of the wood. He had never pressed on anything. He knew that as surely as he knew his own shape. Now the floor held him up, and he could feel it doing it.
He tried to stand and could not remember how. He got as far as his hands.
Behind him the plaster had a hollow in it the size of a man lying curled, smooth inside, like the bed a stone leaves in mud.
He went through the house on his hands and knees.
He knew it without having seen most of it. The hall boards that gave under the man's weight gave under his. The kitchen smelled of coffee gone cold in the press. The cup by the north window still had a brown ring in the bottom. He put his face close to it, and the smell went into him and stayed. The cup belonged to the one whose steps he had counted. That one would not drink from it again. He did not know how he knew. It came up from the slack place where the rope had been.
He tried to find his name.
He had one. There was a place in him shaped for it. He went looking for it and found the grinder, the kettle, the eleven stairs. Words for things were there: glass, tea, door, window, dog. So was a pass between two mountains, grey stone, a wind that came down it in the afternoons. Nothing answered when he called it.
In the front room the rug was down and the cushions were plumped. On the brass tray two glasses of tea stood poured and cold, with a skin on them, set out for someone who had not come.
He stopped at the edge of the rug.
He knew this tray. He had not seen it from inside the wall, but he knew it. A table, tea poured, and the man across from him, speaking slowly, kindly, a little amused. The man's voice asking things. What does he like. What does he want. What does he dream about. Each question set down in front of him like a glass, and the hold in him tightening until he picked it up.
He backed off the rug on his hands. He did not want to be near the glasses. He could not have said why, and his hands would not keep still on the boards.
The light in the window went orange, then grey. Somewhere along the street a car door shut and a woman laughed.
He found the front door by the cold coming under it. When he pressed against it, the wood gave like water, and he went through it. It hurt. Passing had never hurt before. It was like pulling a splinter the length of his body, and he came out on the front step shaking.
Over the fence the neighbour's dog stood up.
It did not bark at first. It looked at him with its head low and its ears forward, the whole of its body pointed at him. It could see him. Nothing else on this street could. Then it barked, high and furious, and threw itself at the fence, and a light came on in the house next door.
He went down the steps and into the dark.
The street lamps had the colour of weak tea. He walked under them, upright now, because his body had remembered standing somewhere between the step and the corner. He kept close to the hedges. Cars went by with their lights on and nobody in them looked at him.
He tried names on the dark.
He said them aloud, in the old language and in the one the man had used. Short names, long ones, names from the pass, names of the dead who had held it with him, whose faces came and went like stones under moving water. None of them was his. He said the names of the streets on the signs, and the names on the gateposts, and a name painted on the side of a van. He said "dog" and "tea" and "window", because they were the words he was surest of, and they did not help.
His body had an edge now. He had always ended like smoke, thinning into the air. Now he ended all at once, at a line, and inside the line something was being spent. He could feel it going out of him with each step, a little at a time, the way warmth leaves a stone after the sun goes. He did not know what it was. It frightened him more than the dog had.
Around midnight a fox crossed the road in front of him. It stopped in the middle to look. He looked back. The fox went on.
He sat on a low wall outside a church with a dark noticeboard and put his hands on his knees. His hands were thin. He turned them over under the lamp and did not recognise them, and that bothered him less than he expected. He had not looked at them in a long time.
The questions came back while he sat there. What does he like. What does he dream about. He pressed his palms against his eyes until the questions stopped, and they did not stop, so he got up and walked again.
The sky went from black to the colour of a bruise over the roofs. A milk float hummed past. The birds started, one and then several.
He stood at the end of a street he had never seen, with the cold coming up through his feet, and something rose in him from the slack place. It came up like water in a footprint on wet sand, without any digging. It was a name. It had been under everything else all night, waiting.
He said it to the empty street.
"Kael."
Nothing answered. The birds went on.
He waited for the name to settle on him, to be his. It would not. It stayed out in front of him, a little way off, like someone standing just beyond the reach of the lamp. It belonged to someone small. It belonged to someone he had held, once, with these hands that he did not know.
He said it again, quieter, and the hurt came with it, sharp under the edge where his body ended, and he could not find where the hurt came from.