Chapter 4 — Something Smaller

The first sentence lasted perhaps five minutes.

I had expected it to be easier. I knew where I wanted to go. I knew the room better than any room in Asgard. There had been a desk under the window, a chair with one arm worn smoother than the other, a charger looped around a glass, and a stack of papers I had meant to sort before sleeping.

I wrote: My room was on the third floor.

Then I stopped.

The third floor of what? I added the building. The building had an entrance, a lift that occasionally made a sound like an injured animal, neighbours whose names I did not know, and a street outside. The street led to other streets. I could see a bus stop from the corner. I knew which way I normally walked to buy groceries. None of that seemed impossible to write. It merely sat behind the first sentence like a queue of people who had all been told their business was urgent.

I crossed out third floor and tried again.

I was sitting at my desk at home.

That was worse. It used the word I wanted to reach as if it explained itself.

Outside my shutters, a cart passed and somebody swore at a wheel. I had learned how long the hearth took to catch and how close wheels sounded from the street. None of it helped me with the page.

I wrote the date I thought it had been. Then I wondered whether I had checked the date before leaving the apartment. I wrote the time, then remembered that I had looked at my phone only because I was late for the lesson. The phone had not crossed with me. The exact minute had gone with it.

By midday, I had two sheets filled with room, building, street, weather, and questions I had not known were questions until I put a pen to them. Every time I tried to cut something away, I found myself writing a sentence to explain why it could be cut away.

I set the pen down.

The Asgard manuscript had taken months because it had been a story. I had known where the people were going, what they wanted, what they could lose. This was supposed to be simpler. It was my room. My city. My life.

Instead I had spent half a day describing a door and wondering what stood on the other side of it.

If I kept going, I would have another work that took months. If I stopped after a few pages and nothing happened, I would not know whether I had failed because I had written too little or because I could not do this twice.

I turned the sheets face down.

The next morning, Gina knocked while I was still deciding whether face down was the same thing as throwing them away.

I opened the door with ink on two fingers and did not get out of her way fast enough.

She looked past me at the table. “You have been busy.”

“I have been avoiding being busy.” I stepped aside. “Come in.”

She entered, glanced at the pages, and chose the chair furthest from the hearth. The loose joint clicked when she sat.

“Is that Midgard?” she asked.

“Home.”

She waited for an answer.

I picked up the top page, read the first two lines, and put it down again. “I thought I should begin with the place I want to reach.”

“And now?”

“Now I think I should begin with a better idea.”

Her attention went to the stack. “How long have you been writing that?”

“Since yesterday.”

“How much of home have you written?”

“A door. Part of a building. Some weather I am no longer certain about.”

She considered this for a moment. “Does it have to be home first?”

I looked at her.

“You want to find out whether writing another thing changes anything,” she said. “Home seems large for that.”

It was irritating because I had been telling myself exactly that since noon and had not done anything with it.

“An empty room would be smaller,” I said.

“Would that help?”

“It would tell me whether another finished manuscript does anything at all.” I looked at the blank paper beyond the failed pages. “It would be a perfectly good test.”

“Then why are you looking as if you dislike it?”

Because an empty room was still several days of work if I did it properly, and because several days of work felt expensive now. I did not say either thing.

“If I am going to write a room,” I said, “I might as well write one worth having.”

Gina nodded. “You want it to be useful.”

After she left, I stood at the window for a while. A reading room would be useful. A quiet room, shelves, a table, decent light. Then there would be no reason not to give it more tables. More than one room. Somewhere to keep paper dry. Somewhere to wash ink from my hands. Somewhere I could make tea that might actually be tea.

By the time I sat down again, I had stopped calling it a room.

I wrote Library at the top of a clean sheet.

The work changed immediately.

The Asgard manuscript had been a story, worked out over months. The Library had no people, no plot, and no history I needed to account for.

It had a main hall large enough to read in without hearing every chair scrape. It had smaller rooms for people who wanted a door between themselves and other people. It had tables, chairs, shelves, a desk where someone could answer questions if there was ever someone to answer them. I wrote storage rooms, utility rooms, a staff room with a kettle, toilets, sinks, and a small place for food. I wrote clean drinking water and a refrigerator because I had spent enough time pretending cheese was a plan.

The first version had windows. I crossed them out.

Windows required something to look at. I did not want to write another street, another city, another weather report. I replaced them with broad lanterns in the ceiling, built into the roof where skylights might have been. They gave good daylight. They did not show a sky.

That sentence stayed.

I gave the building fresh air, a comfortable temperature, outlets along the walls, and ceiling lanterns that kept the rooms bright. I did not write a power station. I did not write pipes running beneath a city. The taps gave clean water. The toilets worked. The rooms stayed comfortable. That was what I needed from them.

The shelves took longer than the plumbing. At first I filled them with titles, because a library without books looked like a shop before opening. Then I read the names I had invented and felt the same trouble I had felt with the window. Who had written them? Why were they there? What else had I accidentally placed behind their covers?

I crossed out every title. The shelves held blank bound books instead: small ones, large ones, and plain volumes with unmarked spines. In the storage rooms, I added clean sheets, ink, quills, knives, thread, awls, boards, and leather for covers. They were supplies, not somebody else’s work.

The city outside my rented room kept moving while I wrote. I went out for food, ink, and more paper when I misjudged how much I would ruin by deciding a sentence was wrong after the ink had dried. I learned which stair in the nearby passage was faster than walking around the block and which vendor saved yesterday’s flatbread for the end of the day.

Gina appeared twice that I expected and once that I did not.

The first time, she found me carrying a bundle of paper badly enough that a corner had begun to drag in the street.

“You are losing it,” she said.

“I have noticed.”

She took the end I could not reach without dropping the rest and led me through a courtyard between two houses. I would not have recognized it as a route. It looked like a place where people stored buckets and argued over laundry.

“This is quicker,” she said.

“Than what?”

“Than the street with the carts.”

That was all the explanation she gave.

Another day, she arrived while I was trying to decide whether a building meant for long work needed a place to eat.

“It is a library,” she said, reading the word at the top of the page.

“Yes.”

“Why does it need a kitchen?”

“Small kitchen.”

“Why?”

“Because people get hungry in libraries.”

She looked at the room around us, at the cheese on my table, then back at the page. “That is true.”

I did not ask what she thought a library was supposed to contain. I was not sure I wanted another list.

The third visit came late in the week. She stood in the doorway while I sewed a gathering of pages together and watched me miss the same hole twice.

“You have been doing that for a long time,” she said.

“I keep missing the same hole.”

“Then stop missing it.”

“I will add that to the plan.”

She did not laugh, but she stayed long enough to drink the herbal infusion I had made. She had brought no message and asked for no explanation. When she left, the room seemed too quiet for several minutes.

By the seventh day, the manuscript had a cover, a spine that was not entirely straight, and a last page waiting for the mark.

I read it once from the beginning. The main hall. The rooms. The shelves. The water. The food. The light. I checked every interior door twice. I checked the ceiling lanterns. I checked the sinks, which was a sentence I had never expected to take seriously in a manuscript.

Then I reached the end and understood that I had done it again.

If it worked, I would enter the Library. I had written no way to return.

I sat back from the table and looked at the final page.

The Asgard story had included a way home because my mentor had asked the question before I finished it. This time nobody had. I had been so occupied with getting somewhere smaller than Earth that I had forgotten the part after getting there.

The correction took the rest of the afternoon.

At the centre of the main hall, I wrote, there stood a pedestal beneath armoured glass. Under the glass lay a book called the way back.

The sentence gave me a name for what I needed, if not an explanation.

The glass opened with the access code 1234.

I went back through the manuscript from the beginning after that, because I no longer trusted any sentence that said it was finished. Nothing else jumped out. I had described rooms and the doors between them. I had not described any route out of the building.

At last I put the page flat beneath my hand.

My mark went in the lower margin. The shape came without effort now. I had practised it too often to think about each turn. When it was done, the manuscript looked exactly as it had a moment before: thread, paper, ink, a cover slightly too stiff at the corners.

I got up from the chair.

For a moment I stood beside the table with one hand on its edge. The pages lay open near the middle. There was nothing ceremonial about touching them. I did it because that was what I had done on Earth.

The room went away.

I was standing on polished floorboards beneath a high pale ceiling.

The first thing I did was not look around. I put both feet more firmly under me and waited for the delayed part of falling.

The delayed fall never came.

The hall was larger than my rented room and quieter than it had any right to be. Tables stood in long rows beneath the ceiling lanterns. Their light had the clear, even quality of a good morning, though I could not see a sun through the glass above. Shelves rose along the walls and across the far end of the room, full of blank books with unmarked spines. A desk stood near the entrance to one of the smaller rooms. Beyond it, a corridor led toward doors marked by their use: work rooms, storage, staff.

It had the plain, settled order of a library: tables, shelves, light, and space enough to work without hearing every chair scrape.

I walked to the nearest table and put both hands on it. Solid. I pulled out a chair and sat for a moment, then stood again because I had not come here to admire furniture.

The taps in the washroom produced cold clear water. The toilets worked. The ceiling lanterns kept the same clear daylight over the hall and the smaller rooms. In the kitchenette, a refrigerator hummed beside a counter with a kettle, cups, tea, and food that looked harmless enough to eat. There were outlets along the wall near the work tables, exactly where I had described them. I had nothing to plug into them.

I found the smaller rooms, the storage room, the staff room, and the work rooms. Every door I tried led to another room. There were no windows at eye level and no view beyond a wall. I walked the main hall twice before remembering that I had crossed out the windows and never given the Library an exterior door.

The pedestal stood at the centre of the hall. The armoured glass around it made the book beneath look both important and faintly ridiculous. Four small number wheels sat in the base.

I set them to 1, 2, 3, 4.

The glass released with a small click.

I left the book where it was. There was a chair at a nearby table, so I dragged it close enough to sit beside the pedestal without leaning over it like a thief. The chair scraped softly across the floor.

The way back was thinner than the Asgard manuscript and bound in dark cloth. I opened it while seated. The first page held the same plain weight as every other page I had touched that week.

I put my thumb against the paper.

Gina

The first time Gina saw the Midgard man, he was already on the stones of the square.

He was on one knee outside the castle, studying the stones. His clothes were wrong for Asgard but not for travel. His hands were empty. He looked as if he had been asked a simple question in a language he almost understood.

People had gone around him. They had errands. So did Gina. She was carrying a message for Frigg, and the shortest way to her rooms did not pass through a stranger sitting on the ground.

She stopped anyway.

“Are you hurt?” Gina asked.

He looked up at the castle before he looked at her.

He said he came from Midgard. That was possible. He said he had been in a room there a moment earlier. That was less easy to place. Then he said he had written about Asgard, which was the point at which Gina decided he needed food before he needed anyone else’s opinion.

He told her about Ragnarök after that.

Gina could not decide what to make of him in the square. She did not need to. He was lost, he had no one else with him, and he did not know the city. Those facts were sufficient for the morning.

Later, after Gina had taken her original message where it belonged and René had a room, she spoke to Frigg.

Her rooms were busy. Someone was waiting with folded cloth in both hands. A servant crossed behind Gina with a tray and changed direction to avoid her. Frigg was listening to an older woman describe a dispute over a marriage gift. Gina waited until the woman had finished.

“There is a Midgard man in the city,” Gina said when Frigg looked at her. “I found him in the castle square this morning. He says he had been writing about Asgard before he arrived.”

Frigg set down the cup she had been holding. “Did anyone see him come in?”

“Not that I found. I did not.”

“Is he armed?”

“No. He has a wallet, strange coins, and too much paper.”

“What does he want?”

“To go home.” Gina hesitated. “He also says Ragnarök is close. He says the story he wrote gave it less than a month.”

Frigg was quiet long enough that the sounds of the room returned around them.

“Does he know when?”

“No.”

“Does he offer a reason to trust him?”

“Only that he knows things he should not. And that he is afraid his warning may be right.”

Frigg looked toward the open doorway, not at anything in particular. “Where is he staying?”

Gina told her.

“Let me know if the situation changes,” she said.

Frigg had other people waiting. Gina went back to her messages.

Over the next week, Gina saw René when his errands crossed hers.

He paid for his room. He bought food. He bought more paper, which appeared to be his preferred answer to almost everything. Once he stopped her in a passage because he wanted to know whether there was a shorter way to the binder’s supplier. She gave him one. Another time she found him standing outside a shop with an ink stain across the side of his hand, comparing two bundles of paper.

“The heavier one,” Gina said.

“Why?”

“It will survive the walk home.”

He bought the heavier one.

He spoke less about Midgard after the first day. When he did, it was usually because a detail in the room he was writing had made him remember something. Mostly he spoke about the Library.

At first Gina thought he meant a place where books were kept. Then he asked whether a building needed more than one room where people could sit quietly.

“How many people?” Gina asked.

“I do not know yet.”

“Then make more than one.”

Another time he asked whether people would need food in a place intended for reading. Gina told him yes. He wrote for several minutes after that, his pen moving faster than it had while he was talking.

He asked strange questions. He did not ask Gina for money, permission, guards, or a place in Frigg’s rooms. He wrote in his rented room and occasionally forgot that he was holding a cup until it went cold.

There was no reason for her to stand over him.

On the seventh day, Gina went up to his room because she had been sent past the house and had not seen him for two days. She meant to ask whether he had eaten properly.

His door was closed.

She knocked.

“René?”

No answer.

She knocked again, louder. Still nothing.

The latch turned when she tried it. The door had not been locked.

The room was empty.

His coat hung where it had been before. The coin purse sat near the hearth. The new manuscript lay open on the table, finished by the look of the mark in its lower margin. A chair stood pushed back from the table.

Gina pulled the door closed behind her and went downstairs.

The woman who rented the rooms was carrying a basin from the back of the house. Gina waited until she put it down.

“Have you seen the Midgard man leave?” Gina asked.

She thought about it. “Not today.”

“Would he have passed you if he used the stair?”

“Unless he climbed out of a window.”

“Did he?”

The landlady gave Gina a look. “Not that I saw.”

The window was too small for a sensible exit, and the drop below it was not impossible but would have made a great deal of noise. Gina went back upstairs with the landlady behind her.

They were halfway along the hall when something hit the floor inside René’s room.

The sound was hard enough to make the landlady swear.

Gina opened the door.

René lay on the floor beside the table, one hand on the boards as if he had been trying to catch them. His coat was still on its hook. The manuscript was still open where Gina had seen it. Nothing stood between him and the door.

Then Gina asked, “Where were you?”

He blinked at the ceiling once, then turned his head toward her.

“The library.”