A Sound with No Floor

The corridor was longer than it had been, but that was only because I was walking it slowly.

I had a key in my pocket. I knew this the way you know things in the morning before you are properly awake, not by checking but by a kind of trust, and I trusted it completely, the key and the door it was for and the fact that once I found the right door out of all the wrong ones the whole business would be finished and I could go home. I wanted to go home. There was something there I had left undone, and when I reached for what it was the thought slid off like a name you almost have, so I stopped reaching. It would come.

The walls were papered in small green leaves. A man knelt at the skirting board with a screwdriver, turning a screw that held nothing, that went into bare wall and met no resistance and kept turning.

"Nearly there," he said. He didn't look up. "You're doing very well."

I thanked him. It seemed rude not to.

The stairs went down. I counted them, the way I have always counted stairs, and there were thirteen, which was wrong, because there are twelve. I climbed back up and counted again. Twelve. So I had miscounted, the first time, in the dark of my attention. I have always been careless with numbers. My wife said so.

On the landing was a small red shoe, on its side.

I stepped over it. One does not pick up other people's things.

The girl was on the next flight down, further along, the way she often was, chin on her knees, watching me with the patience of someone with all afternoon and nothing in it. She wanted nothing. That was the part I could not settle. She never asked, never called, never ran the way a child runs, toward or away from. She waited. She let me pass. And then she was there again later, a little further on, as though she were taking some other route to the same place and we kept arriving together at the crossings.

"Hello," I said.

She didn't answer. But she moved her feet to let me by, and one of them was bare.

I went down past her. I did not look back. There was no reason to look back; the door was ahead and not behind, I had the key, and once I found it I could go home and finish the thing, the undone thing, whatever it was. The carpet here was damp. I stepped around the wet part without deciding to.

Far below, a long way down through the turns of the place, a woman was screaming. She had been screaming for some time. I went on looking for the door.

The next floor was a kind of waiting room.

There were chairs along the walls, the hard kind, bolted in a row, and a low table with magazines fanned out on it, and a window that gave onto nothing—not darkness, not a wall, only a flat grey that the eye slid off. A clock above the window had hands but no numbers. The hands did not move while I watched them, and then when I looked again they had moved, the way the minute hand of a clock you are not watching will move.

A woman in a cardigan sat behind a desk. She had a ledger open and she was writing in it, and she smiled at me with great kindness, the way they smile at you in the places where they are about to keep you waiting.

"You're here for the appointment," she said. "You missed the last three. We did write."

"I have a key," I said. "I'm looking for the door it fits."

"Of course you are. Take a seat. He'll call you when he's ready. There's water if you want it."

I sat. The chair was cold through my trousers. On the low table, among the magazines, there was a white paper bag folded over at the top, the kind you carry out of a chemist's, with a name printed on the label and a date and the words one in the morning and one at night and below that, do not stop taking these suddenly. The name on the label was mine. The bag was full. It had not been opened.

There was a man across from me reading a newspaper, and I could see the front of it, and the front of it was a photograph of a garden with a paddling pool in it, the small inflatable kind, blue, with a white rim. I knew that garden. I had the sense of knowing it the way you know the inside of your own mouth, without ever having looked.

"Lovely day for it," the man said from behind the paper.

"For what?"

He didn't answer. He turned a page, and the next page was the same photograph, the garden and the pool, and the page after that, when he turned it, was the same.

I got up. I left the bag where it was. I did not want the appointment; I had not wanted it the other three times either, because the appointment was for a man who was unwell, and I was not unwell, I was only tired, and the tiredness had a key in its pocket and a door to find. The woman in the cardigan watched me go and did not stop me, only made a small mark in her ledger, a tick, the sound of a pen ticking a box, and said, "We'll keep your place. We always keep your place."

There was a door at the back of the waiting room. I tried the key in it. The key did not fit, which was good, because it meant this was the wrong door and the right one was still ahead.

I have not said what I look like, because I do not know. There were no mirrors in the place. There was a moment, on one of the landings, when I passed a tall dark window at night and should have seen myself in it, and there was a shape there, man-shaped, but it did not do what I did. It stood while I moved. It had been doing this for a long time, longer than the maze, longer than I wanted to count back—standing at the edges of rooms, in the gaps of doorways, in the corner of the garden by the fence, watching, never doing what I did. I had stopped telling anyone about it. When you tell them, they write you appointments, and they put your name on a white bag, and they look at you the way my wife had started to look at me, from across a table, carefully, as though I were a window myself and she was checking what stood behind me. I decided not to think about that. I would come back to myself standing somewhere with the light changed, a different room, the kettle cold that I did not remember filling, and not know which way I had been walking.

The girl was on the stairs again.

She had something in her lap this time, cupped in both hands, the way a child holds an injured bird or a thing she has found and means to keep. I slowed. I did not mean to slow. She lifted her hands a little, an offering, and I saw it was water—just water, a small still pool of it held somehow in her palms without running through, and in the water was the grey of the sky from the window that gave onto nothing.

"I can't," I said. I don't know what I was answering.

She tipped her hands. The water fell. It made no sound and left no mark, and where it had been her palms were wet, and she looked at her wet palms and then at me, and for the first time something moved in her face that was not patience. It was close to sorrow, but children do not own sorrow yet; it was the thing sorrow is before it learns its name. Then it passed, and she was waiting again, and I went on.

My knees were wet. I had knelt at some point. I could not remember kneeling.

The woman caught me on the long floor.

There is always, in these places, a long floor—a corridor that does not turn, that runs straight ahead until the walls seem to meet, and you walk it and walk it and the meeting place never comes nearer. I was on the long floor when I heard her behind me, not screaming now, which was worse. Her bare feet on the boards. Quick, then quicker.

"You," she said. "You. You. Don't you walk away from me. Don't you dare. Not this time, not again, not you—"

I walked faster. I did not turn around. I knew her voice the way I had known the garden, from the inside, from before. My hand had found the wall and was following it along, the way you do in the dark, though the floor was not dark.

"Turn around," she said. "Look at me. Look at what you—"

Her hand closed on my shoulder and spun me, and she was not mad after all, or not only mad. Her face was wet. Her face was my face's old companion; I had woken beside that face for years, I understood that suddenly, the way the cheek understands a pillow. She held my collar in both fists and shook me and her teeth were bared and what came out of her was not words anymore but the sound under words, and then in the middle of it, mid-breath, something in her changed. The fury went out of her hands. Her grip loosened. She looked past me, down the long floor, to where the stairs would be, where the girl would be, and her whole face lifted toward it.

"Is she—" she said. "Did you find—is she there, is she down there, did you bring her—"

And then she remembered. I watched her remember. The lifted thing in her face held for a moment, the way breath holds, and then went out of it, and what was left looked at me. She let go of my collar as though it had burned her.

"You don't even know," she whispered. "You're down here looking for a door. You don't even know what you did."

"I have a key," I said. It was all I had. "I'm going to go home and finish the—"

"There's nothing to finish." She was not screaming. I wished she would scream. "You finished it. You finished it in the garden, in the afternoon, while I was at the shops for twenty minutes, twenty minutes, and the hose was still running when I came back. She was crying. That's all. She was three and she was crying because the water was cold and you wanted it quiet, you'd been saying for weeks you wanted it quiet, you wanted the noise to stop, and I begged you—" Her voice broke and re-set, flat now, reciting. "I begged you to take the tablets. I hid them and gave them to you one at a time so you couldn't— I called them and they sent the appointments and you tore them up. I told them I was frightened. I said it out loud, to a doctor, I said I am frightened of what he might do, and they wrote it down and gave us another appointment, and you slept through it, you slept, you were always sleeping, and the one afternoon I left you alone with her—"

She stopped. There was nothing after that worth saying and we both knew it.

I went down the stairs. I left her on the long floor. I did not look back, the way I had not looked back at the girl, the way I had not looked back at any of it.

The stairs went down a long way after that. I stopped counting them. Numbers had never been my friend.

The doors thinned out. The leaf-paper gave way to bare plaster and the plaster to brick and the brick to a kind of earthen wall, packed and damp, and the carpet was gone and the boards were gone and underfoot was concrete, cool, with a drain in the middle of it, the round iron kind, and the wet ran toward the drain in a thin bright thread and did not reach it.

There was one door left. It was a low door, painted blue once, blue with a white rim where the paint had worn, and I knew before I tried that the key would fit, because there were no more wrong doors left to protect me.

The key fit. The key turned, the way the screw had turned, smoothly, meeting nothing.

The door opened onto the garden.

It was afternoon. It is always afternoon there, the long gold afternoon that does not end, the kind you remember from being small, when the day had no edges. The grass needed cutting. The hose lay across it, and the hose was running, a soft endless silver out of the mouth of it darkening the grass, and the paddling pool was in the middle of the lawn, blue, with a white rim, the one from the newspaper, the one I had known from the inside.

The girl was already there. Of course she was. She had taken the other route, the way she always did, and we had arrived together at the last crossing. She was kneeling at the edge of the pool with her sleeves wet to the shoulder, and she looked up at me, and she was not a spectre and not a question, she was only my daughter, she had only ever been my daughter, three years old, with one shoe. And she was crying. The water was cold; that was all it had ever been, the water was cold and she wanted out and she was crying, on and on, a sound with no floor under it, the sound that had been in the house for weeks, that was in my teeth, that did not stop when I shut the doors or ran the taps or lay down in the dark with my hands over my ears. I wanted it quiet. That was the whole of it. There was no more to me than that, in the gold afternoon: a man who wanted it quiet.

There was no door home. There had never been a door home. The key had only ever been for this. I had carried it down through every floor to arrive here and do the thing again, because a man cannot both remember it and go on, and so I would not remember. I would do it, and lose it, and start back up the stairs to look for the way out.

I crossed the grass. The hose ran silver behind me. She did not move away; she never moved away, she only waited, she had always only waited.

I knelt at the edge of the pool, beside her, in the wet.

The water was very still and then it was not still. It is not a large thing to do, to a child of three. It does not take long and it does not take strength. The afternoon held its gold the whole time, and the screw somewhere turned in its bare wall meeting nothing, and far above me a woman came home from the shops and began, twenty minutes too late, to scream.

When it was quiet I stood up. My knees were wet. I could not remember kneeling. There was a small red shoe on the grass, on its side, and I stepped over it, because one does not pick up other people's things, and I went to find the stairs, because I had a key in my pocket, and somewhere ahead there was a door, and once I found it I could go home and finish the thing I had left undone, whatever it was.