Excerpt

AAfter lunch, Winters asked him whether he had time for a walk down to the water. He had waited until the boy finished eating. The boy said yes, as he always did with Winters.

It was a mild afternoon in April, the sky a thin blue above the poplars, a brightness that should have held clouds and held none. The others were over at Pepper’s cage or behind the stage, where someone was dragging a ladder across the boards. No one watched them go, and the boy had long since stopped minding. He lived here, in the wagon with the crooked cupboard, among people who could do things there were no names for outside, and Winters was the only one who never acted as if those things were an accident.

On the way to the willow, Winters walked a step ahead of him, hands in his coat pockets, the coat open although the wind came off the reeds. He spoke quietly about the string of lights the boy had made the Thursday before, out in front of the kitchen wagon, just after the rain: six lights, for the length of a breath, hanging in the air, no current, no wire, nothing but whatever burned behind his eyes when he let it. “That had a taste to it,” Winters said. “Not just current. That was something.” He smiled as he said it, with creases at the corners of his eyes that matched the warmth in his voice; that was how he had convinced the boy, back at the beginning, that he was safe here. It was not an act.

“Saturday I’m doing more,” the boy said. “And longer.” This time one of them would last long enough to show somebody.

Winters nodded.

When they stepped out of the shadow of the poplars, the boy saw the moon. It hung full already, though the sun had only half set behind the darkest of the trees, a pale disc that no one had given any right to be there yet. For a second it went cold under his breastbone, in a place he had never known was there. He put the thought away like a coin he would never go looking for.

The willow by the reeds was old. It leaned heavy over the water, and its thin branches touched the Rhine like fingers too cold to pull back. The birds stopped here. The boy only noticed once the quiet had been standing around them for a while. Winters stopped and took his right hand out of his coat.

In his hand lay something black, heavy the way a tool is heavy. The boy could not tell what it was. A key, maybe. A piece of iron. Its cold showed in the way it lay in the palm without ever warming there, and in the skin around it, which had gone pale.

Winters raised it and turned his wrist, a small movement, hardly more than the flexing of a tendon. The air by the willow thinned and split open, a tear as tall as a door. The tear had no color. It had an edge, and at the edge the afternoon light drew back like skin from a wound, and behind it lay something the boy took for fog at first and then for nothing he had a word for. No air came out of the opening. The air on this side leaned in.

“Go,” said Winters. “I’ll follow.”

The boy went.

On the other side it was gray.

The gray had no source. It came from every direction at once, from above, from below, from the air between his fingers, and it shone on its own, evenly, like frosted glass with no one behind it to switch on a lamp. There was no sky, and no ground that felt like ground. He stood on something that looked like flat stone, but under his shoes there was no give, no cold, no warmth. The air did not move, and it smelled of nothing, not even of him. He drew a breath and heard it too clearly, a sound that gave him away.

He looked down at himself. He cast no shadow. His hands seemed to have a front and no back, as if someone had taken the behind from everything here and left only the before.

Far off stood shapes like buildings, tall and without a single window. Nobody had built them for a life. When he looked at them long enough, they stood a little further to the left. Between them and him, something moved. Outlines. People, or what is left of people when someone draws them and lifts the pencil before the end: heads, shoulders, hands fraying at the edges. They walked slowly, each one alone, like people following a direction after they have forgotten where it leads. None of them turned toward him. One of them glowed faintly, reddish, like a stove that has been cold for hours.

The silence pressed on his ears like water at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Winters came through behind him, and the door closed. It sounded like nothing, like the absence of a noise that should have been there. In the gray, Winters’s face looked different. It had no shadows left for the warmth to sit in, and what remained was attention, smooth and complete, like a man bent over the inside of a watch.

“Stand still,” Winters said. “It’s quick.”

The boy stood still.

Winters walked once all the way around him and came to a stop in front of him again. On the way he ran the back of his hand across the boy’s shoulder, where the cloth of the jacket lay double, and pushed the collar down two fingers’ width. Then he drew back his own coat sleeves, the right first, then the left, and turned each one up twice, the way a man does before he has to reach into water.

Winters laid a hand on his chest, in the middle, on the breastbone. The hand was warm, warmer than any the boy had ever felt, warm the way a tool is warm when a man has carried it too long in his pocket. He moved it a thumb’s width, and then again, until the heel of his hand sat where the bone left off. He did not press. He waited until something answered under his hand, and then held it completely still.

His fingertips went cold first. The warmth drew back out of them the way water drains out of sand when you have dug too deep, and the cold that followed was only the place where nothing was anymore. It climbed his hands, his arms, into his shoulders. Behind his eyes, where the burning usually sat when he made light, something hung on a thread, and someone was pulling it, steady and patient, so slowly that the cloth gave.

Then it grew bright between them.

Light came out of his chest. Not much at first, a glimmer under his sweater, then through the wool, a warm, deep yellow, Thursday’s light, the light of the six lamps over the wet gravel, except that this time it did not rise into the air where he sent it. It flowed toward Winters’s hand. It crept between his fingers into the palm, as if a place had been waiting there all along.

In his mouth a word came loose. He felt for it with his tongue and found only the gap where it had sat a moment ago. It was the word for his favorite food. He tried to say what he ate when he thought of his mother, and no longer knew. He still knew that there was a mother; a second later he no longer knew how her voice sounded when she called him, only that there had been one.

It went the way windows go dark along a street at night, one after another, and behind each one someone had lived. The school with its smell of linoleum went out. The stairwell where his footsteps always came back one floor too early. The summer he learned to swim went out, and all that was left was knowing that he could swim, without the water.

Then he lost the word for apple. He saw an apple in front of him, red with a breath of green and a brown fleck at the stem, in his own hand on a station platform in Cologne, on a day in autumn. Diesel hung in the air, and his coat was wet. His mother had taken the apple out of her bag and given it to him and said “Elma,” softly, like a word that belonged to the two of them and nobody else. He remembered the apple. He did not remember what it was called, or that elma had ever meant anything. The word was still in his mouth. It meant nothing now.

Then his own name fell out of him, quietly, like a button coming off a coat.

The boy wanted to take a step back. His knee would not give him the step. His fingers closed around something that was not there. His mouth came open, for the word he meant to beg with, and stayed open. His heart knocked once, hard, against Winters’s hand, looked for the reason, and couldn’t find it anymore, and after that it beat more slowly.

His breathing could no longer be heard. He was breathing, and the place would not take the sound anymore.

A heaviness settled into him, rising from his feet, as if someone were filling him with wet sand. The outlines in the distance kept walking. One of them had stopped, he thought, and turned its head his way, faceless, with the patience of something that knows there will soon be one more.

Deep under the breastbone, whatever was left came loose. It did not want to, but it had to. Something he had never thought of as a color slid out of him and into Winters’s hand, the last, densest part, so bright that for one heartbeat the gray around them had edges. The color looked at him, for one second, and then Winters closed his hand, and it was behind the fingers.

Then the willow was gone too, and then so was he.

Winters opened the door from the inside, with the same small turn, and led the boy out, one hand under his arm, like a sick man out of a waiting room. The boy walked. His feet found the ground, because feet can do that, even when nobody lives in them anymore. Behind them the air closed over the water, and the afternoon sounds came back, the birds, a motorboat far out on the Rhine, the wind in the reeds.

After three steps, Winters let go of the arm.

The boy dropped like a coat off a hook, without putting out his hands, without the small jolt a body gives when it catches itself. His shoulder hit the grass at the foot of the willow, where the meadow gave way to the damp earth of the bank, and he rolled halfway onto his back and lay there, face to the moon. His eyes were open. There was nothing in them that wanted to see the moon.

Winters knelt beside him. He smoothed the boy’s hair back from his forehead. The hand got there before he could call it back. It had done this once before, a long time ago, for someone who had not been this boy.

He straightened up. His knee cracked, quietly, with a sound as if the joint had lain in water too many times, and then his shoulder, and half a breath later his jaw, as though it had needed longer to decide whether to join in. He counted them, as always: the small noises of decay he had traded for, payable later.

He went to the forbidden wagon and did not look back.

The key turned easily, more easily than the last time, and the door swung open. Inside it was dark, and it smelled of old wood and of caramel, a smell that an hour ago had belonged to the boy and that the wagon kept now. Along the walls stood shelves, narrow, floor to nearly ceiling. On the shelves stood jars.

There were many, in rows sorted by year, with small labels Winters had written himself, a name, a date, a word. Each one glowed in its own color, an amber, a sickly green, a blue that made him think of gas, and together they lit the wagon without warming it. He knew them by the sound of their breathing and by their weight, without lifting them. The faces he did not remember. Sometimes, at night, he tried to call one up, and fell asleep trying.

In his left hand lay a jar. He had already filled it and did not know in which second the color had gone in. It was full and warm. It breathed. The yellow inside pushed against the glass, felt its way around the edges, once all the way around, and found none. He took it in both hands and tightened the seal, an eighth of a turn, which was all it would give. The warmth came through the glass into his palms, unevenly, in the rhythm of something that was not his. He held it that way until the rhythm slowed.

He carried it to the youngest shelf. There were fewer places left than the last time, but they were enough. One jar stood a little forward of the row. He pushed it back with his index finger until it sat flush, and wiped away the pale stripe it had left in the dust.

He set the jar down and tapped his middle finger against the rim. The sound was dull.

“Graduated,” he said quietly, to the shelf more than to the jar.

Then he walked along the rows, to the older shelves where the glow was duller, and stopped in front of a jar of pale green. He laid both palms against it, flat, as against a house wall that still holds the sun. Under his hands the green thinned. A quiet came into his knee, his shoulder, his jaw, a quiet that had been missing since the riverbank, and when he shifted his weight, nothing cracked. He breathed out. It was the breath of a man taking off his shoes after a long day.

He could have gone. Instead he raised his eyes to the top shelf, to the one jar that stood there alone, no neighbors, no date, its label so yellowed that the writing on it was only a shadow. It glowed in a color there was no word for outside. He seldom touched it. Today he laid two fingers against it.

Cold. A winter standing in a window frame, snow on the inside of the pane. The smell of kerosene from a lamp with a sooty chimney. A woman bent over her sewing who did not look up, though she must have heard. A hand on a chest, a large hand on a very small chest, so large it reached from one shoulder to the other, and under it something that answered, because it had to. A word falling out of a mouth. He could not have said which.

He took his fingers away before the picture ended. It had never ended. For a moment he stood there and did not know whether the picture had come from the jar or from him, and then he decided it did not matter, the way he decided it every time.

He locked the door behind him. On the youngest shelf the new jar glowed, no louder than the others, even and steady, as if it were waiting for someone to open the door.

At the foot of the willow, the boy lay in the grass.

The moon had climbed above the poplars and picked out every blade of the meadow one by one, and the same light lay on the boy’s face, on his forehead, on the open eyes that no blink came into. Dew settled in his lashes. A beetle crossed the back of his hand, stopped in the hollow between thumb and forefinger, and went on, because the hand did nothing about it. The chest under the sweater lay flat. The Rhine knocked against the bank, softly, under its own waves, and the reeds stood still.

He lay that way for a long time, as still as only something lies that everything has left.

Then his chest rose.

Once, barely, a twitch under the wool that might have been the wind, if there had been wind. Then again, deeper, with a rough, dry sound, as if a seam that had been glued shut were tearing open. His fingers moved in the grass. His eyes blinked, once, against the moon, and looked at it the way you look at a lamp whose name you don’t know.

The boy was breathing. His breath fell into rhythm with the reeds, which went on rustling without any wind.

FFia was upstairs. He couldn’t hear her, and he knew it anyway.

Feo closed the front door behind him, quietly, the way he always did now, turned the key twice, hung it on the hook beside the mirror, and kept himself from looking into it. Above the doorframe to the hall hung the blue glass eye his father had screwed there years ago; it was dusty, and it watched all the same.

From the kitchen came the smell of fried onions and the sound of a wooden spoon against the rim of a pot. His mother wasn’t singing, wasn’t humming either, but she had a sound when she cooked: the spoon scraping the rim a beat too long, the lid going on a moment too late, and today it was the same as it had been all week.

“I was down at the Rhine,” he said.

She didn’t turn around. “Food’s almost ready.” She set a mug on the shelf above the sink, slowly, with a care that had nothing to do with the mug. “Wash your hands.”

She used to turn around when he came home. He couldn’t have said when she had stopped; it had happened across many days, a little less each day, until there was nothing left of it. Now she spoke to the wall above the sink, and he answered the wall, and between them stood the steam from the pot, pretending to be the reason neither of them looked at the other.

He washed his hands in the bathroom, and the water was too warm. The door of the mirror cabinet stood half open, the way he had left it in February, and since then the mirrored face of it had looked at the tiles. Nobody had pushed it shut, and nobody had asked why it stood open. He turned the water colder, dried off, left the door exactly where it was, and went into the living room.

His father sat on the sofa, the tablet on his knee with nothing readable open on it, and on the television the news ran with the sound off. On the side table lay a screwdriver, and it had lain there for days. His father never left screwdrivers lying around. He wasn’t reading and wasn’t watching; he was only making sure something in the room kept moving.

“Hey,” said Feo.

“Hey,” said his father, without looking up.

Since February, the house had had a different way of breathing. Doors were closed more softly when he was in the room, and conversations found their end a sentence earlier than they needed to. His mother set the glass of water down before he was thirsty and took it away before he had emptied it, as if even a half-finished glass were a question nobody wanted to ask. Nobody raised their voice in this house anymore, and he missed that. They handled him like something that breaks or burns.

He went to his room along the left-hand wall, where the boards didn’t creak, and drew the door shut so slowly it made no sound. On his bed lay the sweater he had lent Fia two years ago, when she was sixteen and came home soaked from a summer rain. Washed, folded into a sharp square, no note. She had waited until he was out. Once she would have flung the thing into his room and yelled something after it, an insult that wasn’t one, and that evening one of them would have handed the other the remote without a word.

He sat down at the desk and pulled open the drawer where his student ID lay. In February something had happened in the corridor outside the staff room, something he remembered only in pictures and not in one connected sentence: a classmate standing with her back against the wall, looking at him as if an animal stood in front of her, and the animal was him; a teacher holding the door open with the flat of his hand, not looking through it; a voice, his own, saying words he would never have wanted to say. After that, three weeks in a clinic, then a diagnosis that was wrong, then pills that were supposed to make a different boy out of him and did nothing instead. Since then, nobody had asked him to go back.

What he didn’t have in pictures was the moment in between, a gap in which he had done or said or shown something he would never find again, however deep he dug. He had been the one who closed that place off, from the inside; he just no longer knew when. When he came too close to it, his hand held on to the edge of the drawer until the wood pressed into his fingertips.

He slid the drawer shut.

“Set the table,” his mother called from the kitchen, and he set the table.

Over dinner his mother mentioned, in passing, that Liz had called today and wasn’t coming until Pentecost. “She’s buried in her term paper, she says.”

Fia came down when the soup was already half in the bowls, sat between her mother and her father and not next to Feo, and ate, fast, without looking up. After a minute she put her spoon down.

“Mom, we’ve got a bio test with Wegener on Friday. Can you go over cellular respiration with me later? I still don’t get the mitochondria thing.”

Her mother hesitated, less than a second. “Sure. We’ll look at it after dinner. Liz called today. She’s not coming till Pentecost.”

Fia nodded as if she were hearing it for the first time. His father worked through the bowl, spoonful by spoonful, at even intervals. The sentence lay on the table for the second time that evening, between the soup and the bread basket, and everyone ate around it.

Feo put his spoon down.

“She already said that, Mom.”

It wasn’t loud. But he hadn’t said a word at this table in days, and now he’d picked this. His mother looked up, straight at him, for the first time that evening, and something opened in her face and closed again at once.

“Oh,” she said. “Right. So you know.”

“Did you have to say that?” Fia said it into her bowl, low and sharp.

“What? It’s true.”

“Eat,” said his father. It was his first word at dinner, and it was meant for no one.

Feo speared a potato from the side dish. The fork was warm. Then it was hot, so fast that he only noticed when the metal bit into his fingers, and he dropped it. It struck the rim of the bowl, bounced onto the table and came to rest beside the bread basket, and the soup in front of him steamed again as if it had just come off the stove.

His mother drew her hand off the table. Only a hand’s width, into her lap. Her eyes went past the fork to him.

All he could see was the hand, that one hand’s width it had moved to get away from him before his mother had even decided to move it. Something behind his eyes pulled tight, hot and narrow, and then he was already on his feet.

“Feo,” said his father.

“I’m not hungry.”

His chair scraped across the tiles. Fia looked at his empty hand beside the bowl and then at his face, and as he left the kitchen he heard her chair go back too.

He was already at the coat rack, a hand on his jacket, when she appeared behind him in the kitchen doorway.

“Where are you going?”

“The Rhine.”

“You were just there.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she mimicked. She leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms. “Great. And we get to sit here again and listen for the front door.”

“Nobody’s making you.”

“Nobody’s making us.” She laughed, short, through her nose. “You think nobody noticed the Liz thing? Twice, Feo. In five minutes. And you had to rub her nose in it in front of everyone. She doesn’t sleep anymore. She sits in the kitchen at night, at three, in the dark, staring at the clock on the stove. I hear her when I come down. And Dad …” She broke off and came back at it louder. “Everybody in this house walks on tiptoe. Because of you. And you go to the Rhine.”

“Did I ask anybody to?”

“You don’t have to ask. You don’t have to do anything. You shut your door, and we get to guess what’s wrong with you.”

“So don’t guess!”

It came out louder than he meant, and it felt good. He slapped his palm against the wall beside the coat rack, and the jackets swung on their hooks.

“Nobody told you to creep around. You do that yourselves. All of you! And you stand there playing the sensible one, when you haven’t said a word to me in months. Go upstairs. Go learn your cellular respiration. Wouldn’t want you to miss that.”

Her face twitched as if he’d hit her. “You’ve turned into such an asshole.”

“Then I’m an asshole!”

“You know what the worst part is?” Her voice went higher and shook, and she kept going anyway. “You used to be …” She swallowed it. “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

“Then stop trying!” He took two steps toward her, and he didn’t know what for. “Stop wanting to know! You don’t actually want to know, none of you want to …”

Something tore loose behind his eyes. It didn’t hurt. It was a jolt, like a drawer jumping its runners, and behind it everything opened wide, as if someone had thrown open a window in his head that he hadn’t touched.

Fia wasn’t looking at him anymore.

Her eyes went past his shoulder, into the hall, and stuck there. The blood drained out of her face from the forehead down, until her lips were the same color as her skin. She backed away, one step, into the kitchen, and her hand shot sideways and found the doorframe, took hold of it, once, quickly, as if she had to check it was still there.

Feo knew that movement.

He spun around. The hall was empty. The jackets hung still, the key on its hook, the mirror beside it, and in the mirror there was only him, too pale, his mouth open. Above the doorframe, the blue glass eye. Nothing that didn’t belong there. Behind his forehead the window swung shut again, slowly, and left a dull pressure, like reading too long in bad light.

When he turned back to her, the anger had drained out of him like water from a sink, from one second to the next, and all that was left was his breathing, much too loud, and a heat in his face that was a different kind now. In the kitchen behind her, not a spoon moved. It was so quiet he knew they had been listening, both of them, and had stayed in their chairs.

“Fia,” he said. “I didn’t …”

She let go of the doorframe. Then she walked past him to the stairs, pressed so close to the wall that her sleeve brushed the wallpaper and she didn’t brush him. On the bottom step she stopped. She didn’t turn around.

“Your rear light’s broken,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

He heard every stair, then her door upstairs, which she shut behind her, carefully, until the lock clicked home.

He stood in the hall. He could have gone up, or back into the kitchen, to the table, the cold soup, the silence. He took his jacket off the hook without looking in the mirror, and he was outside before he could change his mind.

Outside it had grown cooler, and the air smelled of damp asphalt. He got his bike out of the shed. The rear light was missing a piece of plastic he had never replaced; he smacked it once with the heel of his hand, too hard, and it stayed dark.

He pulled his hood up and rode east along Rochusstraße, faster than he needed to. The traffic noise of the A565 lay in a layer over everything, even, a sound that came back only when you thought about it. On Lengsdorfer Straße a pickup with Hamburg plates stood in front of a corner house, and a man was carrying boxes into the yard, Kitchen, Bath, Books, without looking over. Across the street a gray dog stopped and tilted its head, as if it were hearing something Feo couldn’t hear. It didn’t growl and it didn’t bark. Animals kept their distance from him, but they weren’t ashamed of it, and with a dog he knew where he stood.

Through Endenich, through Poppelsdorf, where the streetlights turned yellower and the hedges lower. He pedaled until his thighs burned, and as long as they burned he couldn’t hear Fia’s voice. On Heussallee the air smelled of wet grass and of the river beyond the park. At the light before the B9 he got off the bike.

Red, and no car. He waited for the green anyway. Since February he hadn’t given anyone a reason to look at him, not even an empty street. Tonight it took both hands clamped on the handlebars.

On green he pushed the bike across and locked it to a post at the edge of the park. The lock clicked twice, and he didn’t check it.

Beyond that began the Rheinaue. The ground turned softer under his shoes, the grass taller, the smell of the water stronger. The old willow stood at the bank, as always, a crown of thin branches that trembled in the half-light as if the branches themselves were cold. Feo walked over to it, stopped at the edge of the water, where the mud began, and looked in.

His reflection was right today.

He ran the test, as he had every day for months now, and today he ran it twice. He had set it himself, without ever having decided what the answer was supposed to mean if it came back wrong one day.

He raised his left hand to his cheek, and in the water the reflection raised its left hand to its cheek. He turned his head to the right, and the reflection turned its head to the right, all of it in the lag that water has, and nothing more. He breathed out.

On some days the reflection wasn’t right. Then he saw himself from the side although he was looking straight ahead, or the reflection blinked half a second after he did, or it was younger, or it smiled briefly before he did, as if it had already had the thought he was still about to have.

He had never worked out what he would do if the reflection one day stood still while he walked away.

On some days he wished the image would be wrong once and for all, so that the hoping could finally stop.

Then he saw it.

Above the wall of reeds beyond the willow, not far, a stone’s throw maybe, the air gleamed. Faint, a layer over that piece of bank that didn’t match the rest of the air, the way you can look through an almost clean pane and still know it’s there. At the same time a quiet pressure lay in his head, a weight behind the eyes, the way it did every time he saw something not everyone could see.

It was a shimmer.

He had no name for it, only the pressure in his head that came with it. He had seen it twice before, both times over the same piece of bank, and both times he had told himself he was tired, that it was haze over the water. This time he didn’t believe it.

Each time he had turned away and ridden home, the shimmer at his back the whole way, still there, waiting for him, patient, not watching him go.

Home. He saw the hall, the jackets swinging, Fia’s fingers on the doorframe. He heard the lock upstairs click home.

He didn’t turn away. Today he crossed over.

He took the wooden footbridge north of the willow, short and narrow, with no railing on one side; below it the water stood shallow in the reeds.

On the bridge he stopped and took out his phone. He went down the names and stopped at Fia. The last thread was from January and came to two words from him and a thumbs-up from her. He typed sorry, looked at it for a while, and deleted it again, one letter at a time. Then he switched the phone off and put it in the inside pocket, where he wouldn’t feel it while he walked.

Past the bridge the reeds grew denser and the grass taller, and above the reeds the poplar branches moved in a direction no wind was coming from. He followed the thin trail he knew, the one that was supposed to be here and was so faint he had to find it new every time.

Past the second poplar, the view opened.

On the stretch of meadow between the reeds and the railway embankment stood a tent. The canvas was black, with broad lettering from which the silver had almost completely flaked away: CIRCKOOL, he read, or something close to it, because one letter had faded so far that he had to fill it in without seeing it. Around it, in a ragged half circle, stood wagons, old and dark, their wheels grown into the ground. On the tips of the masts that held the tent sat ravens. He counted them; there were nine, and they did not move.

Nine ravens that didn’t take off. Birds took off when a person approached; he had never seen an exception to that. These sat as if they had grown into the mast tips the way the wagon wheels had grown into the ground, and they looked at him, every single one, with the calm attention of something that had more time than he did. The pressure behind his eyes grew stronger.

From the direction of the largest wagon came a sweet smell, so faint that by the second breath he had to go looking for it: something that had once been caramel, or the memory of it.

He went closer.

The entrance tent stood open. One of the two curtains had been thrown back and tied to one of the poles with a cord, so that anyone who wanted to could walk through.

It was an open door, he thought, and nobody tied a curtain to a pole without meaning it.

The thought should have turned him around, and on any other night it would have. Only it looked as if somebody here had been counting on him. Nobody had done that in a long while.

He stood a moment. From the tent he heard nothing, only the Rhine at his back and one of the nine ravens beating its wings once, a short, dry sound that stopped as quickly as it had started. In its left wing was a single white flight feather, bright as a chalk stroke. When the raven folded the wing again, all that was left of it was a thin pale edge.

The wind came off the Rhine behind him and smelled of water and wet grass. The caramel smell reached him anyway, out of the tent, against the wind. Under the tied-back curtain the ground was dry, and one step back, where Feo stood, the grass was wet.

He stepped through before he had given himself permission, and looked inside.

BBehind the first curtain lay a narrow passage with a kerosene lamp hanging from a hook, unlit. Behind the second curtain, something moved.

Out of the movement came a hand. Then an arm. And then a whole man stepped through.

He was tall and lean, dressed in black, with short gray hair that he wore with the unconcern of a man to whom it had merely happened. His face had lines in it, but not distributed the way his movements would have suggested. Feo looked twice.

His own sight went to work as usual, unasked: it saw the layer over things, the thin slippage between what something was and what it showed. With people, that layer was usually no more than half a shadow, a tiredness, a sentence being held back. With this man it lay deeper and steadier, as if he had learned to wear it like a piece of clothing. Feo had never seen anyone flicker so little.

“It’s open,” the man said.

Feo stood between the curtains, one hand on the cloth, with no memory of having reached out. His weight was on his back foot, and the heel had already left the floor. He noticed it only by the way the man looked at him.

The man did nothing about it. He walked two steps farther into the passage, away from Feo, until there was more room between them than before, and stood side-on, so that the way out stayed clear. Only then did he go on, and his voice had dropped.

“My name is Dorian Winters. I am the ringmaster here.” Winters didn’t smile. He looked at Feo and weighed nothing. “Your name, you can tell me if you want to tell it. Or not. Either is fine.”

Feo opened his mouth to say something and didn’t know what.

At home, the right answer to most questions was to say nothing. That this man offered him silence as if it were worth as much as a name unsettled something he had thought sorted long ago.

“But I do know,” said Winters, taking half a step back so that the curtain behind him opened a gap, “that you are not standing here by accident.”

Feo swallowed.

“I was just …” he began, and got no further. He could have said he’d been out walking and had seen the tent from the bank and was about to leave. He said none of it.

Winters waited. When nothing more came, he took the half sentence as an answer and turned back toward the gap.

“Shall I show you the grounds?”

Outside, it had gotten darker than Feo had expected. Above the poplars stood one last strip of daylight, narrow as the spine of a book, and below it blackness, in which the wagons looked as though they had grown out of the ground. A string of lights hung between two of the wagons, half of it dead, and the rest of the bulbs were flickering, Feo thought, until he looked harder. They weren’t. A shadow was passing between them and him, slowly, with no cause.

“The grounds do that sometimes,” Winters said, without looking over. “You get used to it.”

Feo did not get used to it.

Behind his eyes lay the weight again, the same weight he had felt on the bank when he saw the shimmer. Here it was stronger, here it was everywhere, an even pressure, as if he were standing in a place that was only pretending to be a meadow by the Rhine.

They walked along the rim of the half circle. The wagons were old and unalike, some freshly painted, some not. From one of them came music, soft, a song in a language Feo didn’t recognize; from another came a laugh that stopped quickly. In one lit window somebody took a step back, just far enough that Feo saw only the movement and not the person. From another wagon came nothing at all, and that was the wagon Winters stopped in front of.

“This one is empty,” he said. “It was lived in for a while. Not anymore.”

The wagon was one of the smaller ones, dark green, with a door whose paint had once been white. Above the door hung a narrow, yellowed lamp, and on the steps lay a doormat of woven straw that looked as if it hadn’t been used in days.

Days, Feo thought, not weeks. He couldn’t have said where the certainty came from. Whoever had lived here hadn’t been gone long, and the wagon hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be empty. The door looked as if it had last been closed from the inside not long ago, and Feo had the senseless thought that it would be rude to look in. Like reaching into a stranger’s bed.

“You can look inside if you want,” Winters said. “Nothing is required of you today.”

He walked three steps on and placed himself so that he could no longer see the door. It was not a large movement, and for a moment it made the wagon Feo’s wagon. Feo didn’t look inside. He moved half a step closer to the steps and stopped there, and that was more than he had intended.

He looked over at Winters and held the look a moment too long. He pulled his left sleeve down over his hand and said:

“Who lived there?”

Winters’s answer came without delay and without a single evasive gesture.

“Someone who is no longer here.”

“When?”

“A while ago.”

Feo waited a second. Nothing more came. He left the question where it was; it was bigger than he wanted to open up today.

“My wagon,” said Winters, tipping his chin toward the reeds, “is the one at the edge. You can’t see it from here, and not from farther away either. My business.” He looked at Feo again, and the look had gone mild. “There are three ways back to the city. Tonight I’ll show you the shortest one.”

But he didn’t show it right away.

“Come with me,” he said. “Tea.”

The kitchen wagon was warmer than the air outside, and that was almost too much, because it wasn’t cold out. The ceiling was low, dark wooden beams holding a smell of decades of cooking, steeped in so long it no longer belonged to any one dish. On the table stood a candle in a glass, and beside it two mugs. Winters poured from an old pot, and it smelled of black tea, the kind Feo had drunk once as a kid at his uncle’s in Cologne, in a living room that was bigger in his memory than it had probably been.

The warmth in the wagon settled on him like a hand he hadn’t seen coming. At home the house held its temperature, the same day and night, and you forgot there was one.

He pushed his hood back. He had kept it up since Duisdorf, in the entrance tent as well, and why he took it down now, he didn’t know. Winters didn’t look over. He only moved the second mug a little nearer the edge of the table, to where a hand could reach it without stretching.

Winters sat down, not across from him and not beside him, at an angle in between. It was a way of sitting that left every way out open without looking like caution.

“There was an incident in February, at a school in Duisdorf,” Winters said calmly. He held his mug in both hands without drinking. “In the corridor outside the staff room. A boy, seventeen, eleventh grade. It was the midmorning break. There was an altercation, and twenty other students saw something they did not want to see. Afterward, nobody could explain what exactly it had been.”

Feo didn’t drink. He held the mug and felt the warmth in his palms. His fingers were trembling slightly. He had told no one what happened in February, and this man was telling it to him, calmly, as if it were yesterday’s weather.

“After that you had a short stay in a clinic,” Winters said. “With a diagnosis that was wrong and a medication that didn’t help.”

A second passed in which only the candle flame moved.

“I have been waiting for you ever since.”

Feo set the mug down. He meant to do it carefully and did it too hard, and tea slopped over his fingers, hot; he barely noticed.

“How do you know that?” It came out louder than he wanted, and the candle flame leaned sideways for a moment. “Who told you? Who are you?”

Winters let a pause form that looked like thinking.

“Someone who has been doing this for quite a while.” He raised his mug and drank, without any of his attention leaving Feo. “The door is open. In both directions. If you leave, I will not come after you, not tonight and not in the morning either. If you stay, you stay under rules you won’t learn from me. You’ll learn them from the others.”

It was more sentences than Feo had heard from an adult in months without a demand inside them, and he found himself looking for the wall you put your back against.

“I know people like you,” Winters said. “I know what it costs.” He looked at the candle for a moment. “But when someone who loves you is afraid of you …” He looked at the candle again. “That’s a different price.”

The sentence sat too precisely, as if Winters had said it before, to someone else, a long time ago.

Something in Feo’s chest shifted and found no room. He saw Fia’s hand on the doorframe, only a few hours ago, and the way she had walked past him, pressed against the wall.

At home, nobody said the word fear, and nobody said the word love.

He reached for the mug again and looked at the wood of the table. He asked what he took for a harmless question, one that would buy him time for the bigger one he didn’t want to ask:

“How old are you?”

Winters smiled, barely, for one second, and it was not an act.

“Older than I look. Younger than the contracts say.”

Feo laughed, and it surprised him: a single short sound that came out of his throat before he had decided he wanted to laugh. It was the first time in weeks. He tried to catch it back and found he couldn’t.

It almost hurt, like a muscle gone too long unused.

Winters acted as if he hadn’t noticed.

They went back outside. The half circle lay quieter than before, as if the grounds had noticed that somebody new was here and were waiting to see what to make of it. Winters led Feo back to the small dark green wagon, opened the door without going in, and stepped aside.

“You can sleep here. There are blankets on the bed. If you can’t sleep, you can go. If you go, nobody will ask tomorrow whether you were here. If you stay, nobody will ask tomorrow where you came from.” He hesitated. “Unless you want somebody to ask.”

Feo looked for the catch. He found none.

He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak, because his voice had gone thin.

Winters turned away. In front of the kitchen wagon, three wagons off, he turned around once more.

“I don’t know who you are,” he said. “You will tell me when you want to.”

Feo looked at him, longer than is usual between two people who have only just met. Then he broke the look, with effort, and went into the wagon.