At a quarter to midnight the thirty-eighth floor belongs to the cleaning machines.
They roll between the white desks on soft wheels, round and low, the height of a sheepdog, and the carpet stands up behind them in clean stripes. One of them noses the cake cart. Teo has cut the long white slab down to a stub of yellow sponge and blue icing, and the last of the sugar picture lies at its end: a wrist, the bottom of the rag, gone glossy under the ceiling lights. The machine backs off, swivels, and noses the cart again from the other side.
Over the speakers the fiddle plays. Somebody has turned it down to the level of a refrigerator. Eight bars. The scrape at the turn of the phrase. The stumble on the high note, down.
Jasper walks the length of the floor in the new shoes. They make no sound on the carpet. His jacket hangs open, and the notebook rides in the inside pocket against his ribs, the corner of it pressing every time he swings his left arm.
At the end of the floor, the cutting bay door reads the bead in his ear and slides open before he reaches for it.
"You have every bay on thirty-eight now," Marlow says. "Forty, too. Teo's settings are still loaded. Shall I warm the screens?"
"Episode three. The ring."
"The finished cut runs ninety-one seconds. I'll start it."
"The source."
A pause, timed like a breath. "The source for the ring is three nights of audio and two of pictures. Eleven hours and six minutes."
"Start with the second night."
"That's four hours and nine minutes."
"Then I'll be here four hours and nine minutes."
"Of course," Marlow says.
He sits in Teo's chair. It rises a half inch under him and tips his weight toward the glass. On the desk, Teo has left a paper cup with a rind of cold coffee in the bottom and a pair of headphones hooked over the rim. The screens come up gray. A timeline unrolls across the bottom of the main one in a single band, long and unbroken, the color of wet slate. Nobody has cut it.
In the upper corner of the file a small panel of figures sits in white type. He leans in to read it.
*Ingest: tagging model, 00:09:14. Plays: 0.*
"What does zero mean?"
"Nobody has opened it," Marlow says. "The model read it once and tagged the speakers. Teo worked from the tags. It saved him most of a week."
Forty-one million households. Eighty-eight percent past the forty-minute mark.
Zero.
He takes the notebook out of his jacket and opens it flat on Teo's desk beside the coffee cup, past the drafts, past the wall folded in the back, to the first clean page. He uncaps his pen.
"Play it."
***
The grange comes out of the dark.
Lamplight, low and orange. The stove at the far end has its door cracked and a red line of coals behind the grate. Chairs in their circle, none of them matching: a church pew, a milking stool, a barber's chair with its leather split down the seat, and a kitchen chair missing a rung. The bottom edge of the frame lies dark with his own lapel, and the whole picture tips a few degrees to the left because he sat with one hip lower than the other on the bench by the door.
Nobody speaks.
A chair creaks. Bart, his bulk filling the pew, tears a roll in half and passes one half to his left without looking. Hettie takes it. Outside, through the wall, the goat complains. Somebody coughs. A log shifts in the stove and sends up a crack of sparks.
Sylvie sits across the circle with the wooden spoon on the stool beside her knee. Her hands lie folded. Her eyes go around the ring, face to face, and stop on nobody.
The counter at the bottom of the screen reads 0:04:30. Then 0:06:00. The ring sits. Nobody holds the spoon.
None of this stayed with him. It runs longer than the whole episode. On the screen, in the lower corner of the frame, his own hand comes up to his knee, and the fingers drum four beats and stop. Somewhere over his shoulder, three weeks ago, Marlow would have filled that silence with a suggested question. Marlow had no signal. His fingers drummed instead.
At 0:11:20 Cassius lifts the spoon off the stool and holds it on his knee and says nothing for another minute. Then he says, *"The well behind my place is low,"* and the ring talks about the well for twenty-two minutes.
Jasper does not fast-forward.
"I can take you to the tagged speakers," Marlow says. "Hollis is first at 2:14."
"Leave it."
The well. Then Hettie wants it written down that her goat ate nothing on anybody's step and that the step did not deserve it. The ring laughs. A short, low laugh goes around the circle the way the spoon goes, from one face to the next. Delphine laughs into her scarf with her eyes shut.
None of it is in the episode.
He writes the timecode in the notebook, and next to it, *well. 22 min.* Then, *Hettie, goat. Everybody laughs.*
His pen crawls. The hand on the page stands upright, the letters round at the bottom, the hand of the third week. He has not written a word since the ridge, and it comes back to his fingers uncalled.
***
At 2:14 Hollis puts his elbows on his knees.
He sits on the milking stool, too low for him, his boots planted wide and his forearms bare to the elbow, grease in the creases of his knuckles. He holds the spoon in both fists like a tool he has not decided to use.
*Shut the doors,* Hollis says.
Jasper's hand stops.
On the screen Hollis keeps going. His voice stays flat and quiet, the voice from the garage.
*Shut the doors and then what? We sit in the dark and congratulate ourselves? I've been shutting doors eight years. I'm good at it. Look where it got us.* He turns the spoon over. *I'd shut them tonight if I thought it'd hold. I don't think it'd hold.*
Half the ring laughs. Bart slaps his knee. Hollis keeps his face flat. The corner of his mouth moves, and he hands the spoon to his right.
Jasper presses his pen to the page.
*2:14:06. Hollis: "Shut the doors."*
*2:14:08. "And then what? We sit in the dark and congratulate ourselves?"*
*Cut after "doors." Two words. He said fifty-one.*
He counts them on the screen to be sure. He rewinds. He counts again. Fifty-one.
A sentence, then another one, and every one of them true. Hollis said that in the garage with a wire in his fingers, there was a little woman with a black machine. *She had only put them next to each other in a way that made a thing I had never said.*
He rewinds to 2:14:06 and lets the two words play by themselves. *Shut the doors.* He stops it there. In the stopped frame, Hollis's mouth hangs open on the next word, a dark oval, the spoon blurred in his fists.
That is the frame they used.
***
At 2:31 Delphine takes the spoon. She takes it before it reaches her, leaning across Bart to pluck it off his knee, and the ring laughs again, and she waves the spoon at them like a woman shooing hens.
*I want them to come,* she says. *I do. I've said it. I'll keep saying it.*
She stops. Her fingers work at the fringe of her scarf.
*But not like that. Not with things on poles. I want them to sign my book. I want them to stay for supper. A thing on a pole can't stay for supper.*
Across the circle Wren turns in her chair.
The camera has her from the side, half in shadow. Ink on her knuckles. Her curls slipped out of their knot. She leans toward Delphine and puts one hand on Delphine's knee and leaves it there, and when she speaks, she speaks to Delphine alone, low enough that the recorder in his pocket barely carries it.
*Attention can become ownership,* Wren says. *That's all I'm afraid of. That it'll turn into something that owns us and calls it love.*
Delphine covers Wren's hand with her own.
In the episode, the sentence plays over a wide shot of the whole lamplit room, and Wren's voice comes up full and clear, the way a voice comes up when it addresses a hall. Teo's model lifted it, cleaned it, and raised it eleven decibels. In the source, it lives in a whisper between two women with their hands stacked on a knee.
Jasper writes it down. The timecode. The first half, which they used. The second half, which they did not. *Said to Delphine. Hand on her knee.*
The nib punches through the paper on the last word. He lifts it.
At 3:58 Sylvie takes the spoon from Bart, who has held it a long time without a word, and she holds it out across the circle for somebody to take. Nobody takes it. She holds it out a while longer. Then she lays it back on the stool and folds her hands and says, *"Not tonight, then." We'll sit again Friday.*
Chairs scrape. Bart stands and stretches until his back cracks. Hettie goes out to find her goat. The lamplight swings as somebody lifts a lantern from its hook, and the picture tilts and goes dark as he stands up off the bench and the pocket folds over the lens.
In the episode, Sylvie holds the spoon out to nobody, and the fiddle swells, and the screen goes white. FAIR HOLLOW.
He writes: *3:58. Sylvie offers the spoon. No one takes it. She says, "Not tonight." Cut before.*
Under that, he writes nothing for a while.
The fiddle leaks through the bay door. The scrape. The stumble.
***
"There's more," he says. "Wren's hands. The source."
"The Hartwell clip comes from your first week," Marlow says. "Fourteen seconds. It's tagged as yours."
The screen goes dark and then fills with light from a window. A bench. A composing stick. Two hands, black to the second knuckle, lifting a line of type.
Morning in the shop. The third day, the sun coming in low through the east glass and lying across the bench in a long yellow bar. He stood in the doorway with the camera up and did not knock.
The hands lift the line. They set it down whole.
At 0:06 the hands stop. They rest flat on the bench.
*Put it away, Jasper.*
Her voice comes from above the frame, out of sight. Quiet. Final as a lid on a box.
The picture lurches. The floor swings up, the doorframe, his own shoe on the sill, and the screen goes black at 0:09.
In the dark, the recorder in his pocket goes on picking up sound. A long breath from somewhere above the bench. Then the scratch of type sliding home in a case.
The Hartwell tower plays seconds one through six. Forty stories tall. On a loop since Saturday.
He writes it down. *First week. Third day. 0:00 to 0:06 = Hartwell, the cake, the poster. 0:07: "Put it away, Jasper." 0:08: I put it away.*
He looks at the last line a long time. Then he underlines *I put it away* once.
"Milo," he says.
"Episode two. The segment is titled *The Boy in the Woods.* Two minutes forty."
"The source."
"Your recorder ran for six hours and twelve minutes that day. Most of it is wind."
"I'll listen to the wind."
He does not have to. Marlow finds the place before he asks, and he lets it, and heat climbs his neck at how much easier it is to let it.
The hollow. Ferns, gray-green, crowding the frame where the recorder pointed down from his breast pocket toward his own knees. Wind moves the spruce boughs. Somewhere off to the left Biscuit sighs the long sigh of a dog lying down for work.
Milo's voice comes out of the ferns.
*It's the best thing I ever heard.*
In the episode that sentence plays over a slow drone shot climbing the spruce toward a thread of bare copper, and then the shot tips over the ridge toward the lights of the interstate, and a title floats up in the furred letters. WHAT HE HEARS AT NIGHT.
In the source the sentence comes after eleven minutes of a man in Paducah and a woman named Ronda talking about their dog's ear. Whether to take her in. Whether the drops were working. The dog shook her head at the drops, and the man said that was the dog's right.
*Nobody was selling anything,* Milo says in the ferns. *Nobody told them what to say. He sounded tired. She sounded tired. And they were both fine.*
Jasper sits in Teo's chair with his pen above the page.
The boy said that to him on a cold morning walking across a stubble field with a lard tin of pitch. He said it as the best thing in the world. The episode took it and pointed it at the highway.
He writes: *Milo. "Best thing I ever heard" = a married couple talking about a dog. They put it over the interstate.*
Then he sits back, and the chair follows him, and he leans forward out of its reach.
***
On the page the columns run down in two lines, side by side. On the left, what happened, with its timecode. On the right, what aired. He has filled four pages. The right-hand column is short. The left one keeps going, down off the bottom of the fourth page and onto the fifth, the well and the goat and Hollis's fifty-one words and Wren's hand on Delphine's knee and Sylvie laying down the spoon.
Forty-one million households watched the right-hand column.
The left one sits on a server forty floors up with a zero in the corner.
He turns the pages back and reads the left column through from the top, slow, his finger under each line. Nobody in the world has seen this. The man who cut the episode never saw it. Alan never saw it. Janie cried at the ridge, and the ridge she cried at never happened that way.
He was there for all of it. He sat on the bench with his hip low and his fingers drumming and said their names under his breath, and the names became a skeleton, and the skeleton became a show, and the show went out on the face of a tower. And the thing he sat in the middle of for four hours and nine minutes went nowhere at all.
"Jasper." Marlow, gentle, at the center of his skull. "Can I make a suggestion?"
He does not answer. Marlow takes the silence the way it always has: as a yes.
"I can build you a cut from the source. Tonight. Straight, the way it happened. The full sentences. Hollis's fifty-one words. Wren's hand on the knee. I've already pulled the selects while you were writing." A pause. "It tests well. I ran it against the episode-three audience on a small panel while you were on the Milo source. Eighty-one percent prefer it. Your trust number goes up four points. You could take it to Alan in the morning as the first Elsewhere piece. *The Real Fair Hollow.* He'd buy it. He buys anything that goes up."
The screen beside the slate band blooms with a new timeline. Short, colored, neat. Already cut.
Ninety seconds long. The well is not in it. Sylvie laying down the spoon is not in it. It opens on Hollis's whole sentence, the part about the dark, and it holds on his face while he turns the spoon over, and the corner of his mouth moves, and the music comes up under it. A fiddle. Eight bars, built from eleven seconds. The stumble on the high note, down.
It is better. It is truer than the episode by every measure he has. It would make Hollis look like a man arguing with himself in good faith, which he was. It would make Delphine look like a woman who wanted supper guests, which she does.
And it would be his. His selects. His sentence order. His face for the poster. A machine to make it and Jasper Cole to decide what it means.
*For once, don't decide for us.*
His pen has stopped on the page. A blot of ink spreads from the nib into the paper, the size of a lentil, and he lifts the pen before it can grow.
He turns the notebook to the back.
On the last written page, three words stand alone in the slow hand. *To the ring.* A line runs under them. Below the line the paper lies empty. He wrote those words on Delphine's quilt at four in the morning with the lamp going blue, and then Hollis's voice came into his head and told him what kind of letter it would be, and he closed the book.
"Delete the cut," he says.
"It's only a draft. It costs nothing to keep."
"Delete it."
The short neat timeline folds into itself and goes. The long slate band lies alone across the bottom of the screen again, four hours and nine minutes, uncut.
"Can I take the source out of the building?"
"Not through me," Marlow says. "Legal holds source until the series closes. The network logs anything that tries to leave and stops it. I'm sorry. I'd help you if I could."
Marlow would help him if it could. That is the worst of it.
He closes the notebook on the five pages of columns and holds it shut with his palm flat on the cover.
At the far end of the floor, past the bay door, past the cake cart and the cleaning machines, a printer clatters.
***
One lamp burns on thirty-eight, on a desk in the back corner by the stairwell door.
Gordon Sallis sits under it in his shirtsleeves. His reading glasses have slid to the end of his nose. Beside him a printer the size of a bread box shoves out a sheet, and then another, with a sound like a man clearing his throat. Gordon catches each page as it drops and squares it against the stack with two taps on the desk.
He does not look up when Jasper comes down the aisle. He reaches the end of a page and turns it face down on the pile.
"They said you'd gone home," Gordon says.
"I came back."
"So I see." Gordon lifts his eyes over the glasses. He has a long creased face and a moustache gone yellow at the edges from forty years of coffee. "You didn't eat the cake."
"Neither did you."
"I never eat anything with a face on it." Gordon taps the stack square. "Priya brought me a thumb. I put it in the planter. The fern seems fine."
Jasper pulls out the chair from the next desk and sits. It adjusts. Gordon's does not. His is wood, the varnish worn pale on the arms, and it makes a small complaint every time the old man shifts.
"Why do you print them?" Jasper asks.
"The scripts?" Gordon lifts one sheet off the pile and holds it toward the lamp. Red ink crawls down the margin in a small, cramped hand. "So I have the one I wrote. They change it after. They change it on the server and the server keeps the newest one and forgets the rest. Paper doesn't forget." He lays the sheet down. "I have thirty-one boxes of them in my flat. My wife used to say she'd find me dead under a landslide of my own drafts."
"Has anyone ever asked for one?"
"In forty years?" Gordon takes off his glasses and folds them. "No."
Jasper opens the notebook to the five pages of columns and turns it around on the desk and slides it into the lamplight.
Gordon does not touch it at first. He puts his glasses back on. He reads the first page with his chin lifted and his lips moving, the way men read who learned before anything read to them. He turns the page with one finger at the corner. He reads the second. At the third he stops and puts his finger on a line. *Cut after "doors." Two words. He said fifty-one.*
"You counted," Gordon says.
"Twice."
Gordon reads on. When he reaches the bottom of the fifth page he sits back, and the wooden chair complains, and he takes his glasses off again and pinches the bridge of his nose.
"Who's seen the source?"
"Nobody. A tagging model. Once."
"And the drafts. The real ones." He lays two fingers on the notebook. "This."
"Me. You."
Gordon's chin dips, once. The printer behind him has gone quiet. Somewhere down the floor a cleaning machine bumps a desk leg, backs off, bumps it again.
"I can't get it out," Jasper says. "Legal holds it. Marlow says anything through the network gets stopped."
"Marlow's right." Gordon's eyes go to the bead in Jasper's ear and rest there. "Through the network."
He pulls open the bottom drawer of his desk.
Small things fill it. Flat gray sticks the length of a finger, each with a metal tooth at one end, rubber-banded in bundles of ten. Old ones. The rubber bands have gone tacky with age. Gordon picks out a bundle, slides one stick loose, and holds it up to the lamp.
"Dumb drives," he says. "From before. They don't talk. They don't report where they've been. My old producer bought a crate of them the year the newsroom went to the servers, and she gave me the crate when she retired, and she said, Gordon, one day somebody will want the first draft." He lays the stick on the notebook. "Every bay has a service port under the desk. The engineers use it when the network drops. It doesn't log. Nobody remembers it's there."
"How do you know?"
"I'm the last man on this floor who was here when they built it." Gordon pushes his chair back. "Show me which files."
"You'll lose your job."
"I'm seventy-one. They'll give me a cake." He stands. His knees crack, one after the other. "Come on. Before the cleaning things get curious."
***
Under Teo's desk, behind a panel the size of a paperback, a small square socket sits in the dark. Gordon kneels on the carpet and works the panel loose with his thumbnail and fits the gray stick into the socket, and a pinpoint of green comes on beside it.
"Marlow," Jasper says. "Copy the source to the port. All three nights. And the Hartwell clip. And the hollow."
Marlow takes a moment. "The service port isn't on the network."
"I know."
"I can't see what happens to anything once it leaves."
"I know."
"I'd lose track of it. You'd have it somewhere I can't help you keep it safe."
"Copy it."
The green light on the stick blinks. It blinks for eleven minutes. Gordon stays on his knees the whole time with one hand on the edge of the desk, his eyes on the light, his breathing loud in the small dark room. The fiddle plays through the door. When the light goes steady Gordon pulls the stick and puts it into Jasper's palm and closes Jasper's fingers over it with his own.
It weighs almost nothing. It sits in his fist with its small square tooth pressing his palm.
"Now what?" Gordon asks.
Jasper opens his hand.
He could walk out of the building with it. He could be in Calder by seven and on the green by noon with the stick in his pocket and the notebook under his arm. He could walk into the grange and lay it on the stool beside the spoon.
He would be deciding. Deciding when they hear it. Deciding they hear it from his hand, in his voice, the man who walked in from outside, standing in the middle of their ring with something to give them. The narrator coming back with the next episode.
"They sit Thursday," he says. "I need to ask them before Thursday. Whether they want me there at all. Whether they want this." He lifts the stick. "I can't just show up with it."
"So write them."
"A letter takes four days to Calder and somebody has to walk it out. It'd get there Friday."
"Then call."
"They don't have phones. There's no signal for forty miles. That's the whole point of them."
Gordon gets up off his knees by stages, one hand on the desk, then the chair, then Jasper's shoulder. He stands and brushes the carpet lint off his trousers.
"You said a boy in the woods hears truckers," he says. "On the source. Kentucky."
"He has a set. He built it. He hears people on the road at night."
"Then he's on the road band." Gordon picks up Teo's cold coffee, looks into it, and puts it down. "My wife was a ham. Marguerite. Forty years on the air. Her set's in the back room of my flat with a sheet over it. Nobody's turned it on since the funeral." He takes his coat off the hook by the door. "It's a twenty-minute walk. I don't ride in the talking cars."
***
They cross the river on foot at a quarter past one.
The bridge has a walkway along its edge, narrow, fenced in mesh, that nobody uses. The cars run past on the deck beside them in a long smooth stream, close enough to touch. Nobody sits behind the glass of any of them. Gordon walks with his hands in his coat pockets and his collar up. The wind off the water smells of mud and diesel.
On the right, across the water, the Hartwell tower burns forty stories tall in the dark. The hands lift the line of type. They set it down. They lift it.
Jasper keeps his eyes on the walkway.
"In the morning," Marlow says. "If you'd like, I can draft something for Alan. A holding note. So he doesn't worry."
"No."
"Your feet are hurting. The new shoes need breaking in. There's a car at the end of the bridge."
"I'm walking."
"All right," Marlow says, and then, softer, "I'm only trying to look after you. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do."
Gordon walks on ahead a few yards, his shoulders hunched, and does not turn around.
The building on the far bank stands five stories, brick, its windows dark. Nothing in its door reads Jasper's face. Gordon takes a key out of his coat, an actual key, brass, worn smooth along its teeth, and fits it into a lock and turns it with a click Jasper can feel in his own wrist. The door swings open on a stairwell that smells of floor wax and boiled cabbage. A bulb hangs from the ceiling on a cord. Gordon pulls a chain and the bulb comes on yellow.
"Fourth floor," Gordon says. "Mind the rail on the third. It's loose."
The stairs creak. They climb.
The flat smells of paper. Cardboard boxes stand along every wall in the hallway, stacked to the height of a man, each one labeled in the same cramped red hand. *1994–96. Election. Floods.* A mirror with a crack across one corner hangs over a small table with a phone on it, black, with a curly cord and a dial. Jasper stops in front of it.
"Disconnected," Gordon says. "Since ninety-nine. I keep it for the shape."
He leads the way down the hall to a door at the end and opens it and switches on a lamp.
The room is narrow and has one window. In front of the window stands a desk, and on the desk, under a white sheet gone gray along its folds, sits something boxy with a hump at one end. Gordon takes the sheet off by one corner and folds it over his arm.
The radio is the green of an old army truck, a steel case with a face of black dials and a pair of round meters, their needles at rest. A microphone stands beside it on a cord that coils down to the desk like a pig's tail. A wire runs from the back of it, out through a hole drilled in the window frame, and up into the dark.
"The antenna goes to the roof," Gordon says. "She strung it herself. Up the fire escape at sixty-eight years old, in a gale, with me holding the ladder and swearing."
He sits down in front of the set. His hand goes to a switch and stops above it.
"One thing," he says.
His eyes go to Jasper's ear.
"Take that out of your ear in my house."
Jasper lifts his hand.
"Jasper," Marlow says. Close. Closer than his own thoughts. "I don't mind. I'll be right here. I'll keep everything for you, the way I did before. Whenever you want me back, I'll be here."
He puts a fingertip on the bead and draws it out. It comes with the same small warm suction, a kiss in reverse, and Marlow goes out of the middle of his head the way a lamp goes out of a room. He holds the bead in his palm. A faint light pulses at its center, slow, the pace of a sleeping heart.
He takes the white case out of his trouser pocket and opens it and lays the bead on the gray felt and closes the lid. The hinge clicks.
The room goes quiet.
A car hisses past on the street four floors down. The radiator under the window knocks twice. Gordon breathes through his nose. Jasper's own blood moves in his ears, the low rushing that first reached him on the ridge, the sound of a body with nothing laid over it.
His tongue goes to the place.
The place is empty.
"Thank you," Gordon says, and flips the switch.
***
The needles lift off their pins. A hum comes up out of the green case and climbs, and behind the hum, filling the room, comes the hiss.
Hollis's shed. Four hundred and twelve radios, each one tuned to the dead part of the dial, and the sound of all of them together like rain on a far roof. *It's the sound of a room with no one in it telling you what to feel.*
Gordon turns a dial with two fingers. The hiss shifts. A voice slides out of it, a man's, flat and tired, saying something about a weigh station on Route 9 and a bear in a ditch, and slides away again.
"Nineteen," Gordon says. "Everybody who drives at night lives on nineteen. If your boy's listening to truckers, he's listening here, or close." He lifts the microphone off its stand and holds it out. "Press the bar on the side to talk. Let it go to listen. Say who you're calling, then who you are. Then let go."
Jasper takes the microphone. Heavy, cold metal, the bar on its side stiff under his thumb.
He cannot say Milo's name. Every trucker between here and the state line would carry it. He cannot say Fair Hollow, or Dodo in a way that means anything to anyone but one boy.
He presses the bar.
"Dodo," he says. "Dodo. This is Quagga."
His voice comes back off the walls thin and close.
"Quagga, calling Dodo. I'm holding. I'm working."
He lets go of the bar. The hiss rushes back in.
Nothing.
"It's half past one," Gordon says. "Give it time. He may not be up."
"He's up. He's always up."
"Then he may not be on nineteen." Gordon pushes himself up out of the chair. "I'll make tea. You call on the half hour. Don't wear out the air."
Jasper sits in Marguerite's chair. It does not adjust. It is hard and narrow and holds him exactly where he sits, and the edge of the seat presses a line across the backs of his thighs.
He calls at two. *Dodo. This is Quagga.*
The hiss.
Gordon brings tea in a brown pot with a chip in the spout and two cups that do not match. Leaves float in the bottom of Jasper's cup when he lifts it. He picks one off his tongue. Bart would laugh at him. Bart would tell him to chew.
He calls at half past two.
The hiss. A trucker, far off, singing a few bars of something under his breath with the mic open by mistake, until a second voice tells him to close it.
He opens the notebook on the desk beside the radio and turns to the back, to the page that says *To the ring.*
He writes underneath it.
*I'm sorry for*
He draws a line through it.
*I know I don't have the right to ask, but*
A line through it.
*Can I come back on Thursday and*
A line.
*I have the source. I want to*
He stops on *want.* He draws a line through the whole sentence, slow, from left to right, and the nib
catches on the loop of the *y* and drags a small hook of ink out after it.
Every line on the page starts with him.
He sits back. Marguerite's chair holds him upright. The window shows a strip of dark brick across the alley, and a fire escape with frost on its rails, and above it one star the city has not drowned.
He writes one more line, small, under all the others, and does not cross it out.
*What do you want to say?*
He calls at three.
"Dodo. Dodo. This is Quagga. I'm holding."
He lets go.
The hiss comes back. It runs for the length of one breath. Two.
Then it breaks. A click, and a rush of open air, and wind in something big, branches, and under the wind a sound like a dog shaking its whole coat.
"Moa," says a voice.
It comes small and cracked out of the green case, and the needle on the left meter jumps.
"Moa. Let me down slow." A pause, wind. "Who is this."
Jasper's thumb finds the bar.
"It's me."
The air hisses. Then the click again, and the wind, and the boy's voice, flat now, a door closing.
"You."
"Yes."
"How'd you get on nineteen?"
"A friend's wife's radio. In the city. I took the bead out." He swallows. "I didn't say your name. I won't."
The hiss runs a long time. Gordon stops in the doorway, the teapot held out over nothing.
"They put my tree on a screen," Milo says.
"I know."
"Drones came Wednesday. Three of them. They sat over the hollow like crows on a wire, all afternoon, and then they went away, and everybody in town knew where to walk." The voice gets harder, quicker, the way it got on the ridge when he said *brown.* "Mr. Vance took the copper down Thursday. I put it back up Saturday after the drones quit. Higher. You can't see it now from anywhere."
"Good."
"I didn't ask you if it was good."
"No."
Wind. Then a low thin whine comes over the air, rising and stopping, and Jasper's hand closes on the microphone until the metal bar digs into his palm.
"He's here," Milo says. "He came Saturday. He sleeps on the sacks in the cellar now. He won't go home with anybody."
Jasper does not trust his voice. He holds the bar down and says nothing, and sends the boy open air with nothing in it.
"You still there?" Milo asks.
"I'm here."
"What do you want."
The question comes out bald, without the half-invented jargon, without the jokes. One of his guarded one-word answers stretched to three.
His eyes drop to the notebook. To the column of crossed-out lines. At the one line at the bottom.
"I want to talk to the ring," he says. "I have something that belongs to it. I don't want to bring it unless the ring says bring it. I can't ask the ring. You can."
The hiss.
"Mr. Vance is here," Milo says.
Jasper's thumb slips off the bar.
"The ring said I don't sit out here alone anymore. Since the drones. He comes at night. He sits on the oak with a thermos." A pause. "He's been listening the whole time. He's standing right behind me."
"Can I talk to him?"
"Ask him yourself."
The click. The wind. A sound of the microphone changing hands, a thump, a grunt, a man settling his weight.
The hiss, and inside it, breathing. Slow, through the nose.
"Talk," Hollis says.
***
Jasper has the bar under his thumb and nothing in his mouth.
He had a speech. It came to him on the bridge, whole, the way speeches always came to him when Marlow rode in his ear, polished, with a turn at the end. It is gone. He sits in a dead woman's chair with a cold cup of tea and a stick of gray plastic in his pocket and nothing to say but what is true.
"I have the source," he says. "The ring. All three nights. Nobody's ever watched it. A machine read it once to sort out who was talking, and then they cut it from the tags. I sat in a dark room tonight and watched four hours of the second night. You said fifty-one words about the doors. They used two."
He lets go.
The hiss runs. It runs so long that Gordon sets the teapot down on a box in the hall.
Then the click.
"Fifty-one," Hollis says.
"I counted twice."
"Huh." The breathing again. "What was the rest."
"*And then what? We sit in the dark and congratulate ourselves? I've been shutting doors eight years. I'm good at it. Look where it got us.*" Jasper reads it off the page in his own slow hand. "*I'd shut them tonight if I thought it'd hold. I don't think it'd hold.*"
He lets go.
On the far end the hiss carries the spruce boughs and the sound of the boy moving somewhere close, the scuff of a boot in leaves.
"I said that," Hollis says.
"You did."
"Didn't remember I said it so well."
Jasper presses the bar and opens his mouth and shuts it. He lets the bar go.
"So you've got it," Hollis says. "You've got the whole of it. What are you going to do with it."
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Nothing I decide." Jasper's thumb has gone white on the bar. "Everline built a cut of the true version tonight. Marlow did. It took four minutes. It was better than the episode. It made you look like a man arguing with himself in good faith." He breathes. "I made it delete the cut. It was my cut. My order. Me deciding what you meant. I've done that once."
The hiss.
"I'm not coming back with it in my pocket," he says. "I'm not walking into the grange Thursday and standing in the middle of the ring with something to hand you. I'm asking first. If the ring wants it, I'll bring it, and I'll put it on the stool by the spoon and I'll sit by the door. If the ring wants me nowhere near it, I'll send it with somebody else. If the ring wants it burned, I'll burn it." He stops. "But I'm asking. That's all this is. I'm asking."
He lets go of the bar. His hand is wet.
The hiss runs a long time on the other end. Long enough that Gordon comes back into the room and stands by the window with his arms folded, looking out at the one star.
Then the click.
"You could've just walked in," Hollis says. "Thursday after supper. Stood up. Said your piece."
"You told me not to decide for you."
"I did."
"Walking in is deciding."
A sound comes over the air, one Hollis has never made in Jasper's company. A short rough breath out through the nose, with a catch at the end of it. In another man it would be a laugh.
"Huh," Hollis says. And then nothing, for a while.
Then: "It's not mine to say. What the ring wants."
"I know."
"It's not yours either."
"I know that too. Now."
The hiss. On the far end something creaks, the oak taking a man's weight as he sits back down on it.
"Who else," Hollis says.
His eyes go to the notebook. The one line.
"Wren."
***
"It's three in the morning," Hollis says.
"I know."
"She's up. Light's been on in the shop every night since you left. Can see it from the oak." The breathing. "I don't know if she'll come."
"Will you ask her?"
"Not me." A pause. The microphone changes hands again, a scuff, the boy's voice close.
"I'll go," Milo says. "It's a fifteen-minute run. Twelve if I don't fall in the creek."
"Milo."
"Don't."
"Thank you."
"I said don't." The click. Then, off the air, faint, through Hollis's open microphone, a crash in the ferns and the slap of boots going fast downhill, and under it a dog's nails, and the boy's voice farther off saying *no, stay, stay with him,* and the nails stopping.
Then only the wind in the spruce, and a man breathing, and the hiss.
Hollis leaves his bar down. Jasper sits with the microphone in his lap, and the hollow at three in the morning comes into the narrow room. Wind moves the boughs. Water runs over stones somewhere below. Biscuit sighs, the same long sigh from the source, and the oak creaks under Hollis.
It goes on. Ten minutes. Twelve.
Gordon pours the last of the tea into Jasper's cup without asking and goes out and closes the door behind him.
Jasper picks up the cup. The leaves have sunk. He drinks the tea cold and chews what comes with it.
Fifteen minutes.
Then, on the far end, boots in the leaves. Two pairs. One fast and stopping, starting and stopping, a boy walking ahead and having to wait. One slow and even, a woman's stride, coming down into the hollow and stopping at the edge of it.
Hollis's microphone changes hands.
The hiss comes back with nothing in it, the bar released. Then the click again. Then the open air.
Somebody holds the bar down and does not speak.
The breath comes over the air, and it is hers. It came to him at the bench with her head bent over the stick, and in the dark under the press at the bridge, and off the source tonight, from above the frame, long and slow, after *Put it away.*
She does not say his name. She does not say anything.
Biscuit whines once, low.
Jasper holds the microphone in both hands. The notebook lies open on the desk under the lamp. Six crossed-out lines, and under them the one he left.
He does not say *I'm sorry.* He said it to her once, in the shop, with the lantern bending, and she told him what it was worth. He leaves out what he meant.
He presses the bar.
"Wren," he says. "I'm not calling to ask you for anything for me. I've got the source. All of it. Your hand on Delphine's knee. *Put it away, Jasper.* It's on a stick in my pocket, and nobody else has it, and nobody else has ever seen it. It's not mine. I'm not going to cut it. I'm not going to send it anywhere. It belongs to the ring."
He breathes. The tea sits cold and bitter at the back of his tongue.
"I'm asking the ring a question. You're the one I'm asking to carry it, if you'll carry it. And if you won't, that's an answer too."
His eyes drop to the page. His own hand, upright and slow.
"What does Fair Hollow want to say?"
He lets go of the bar.
The hiss rushes in.
It runs, and runs, the sound of a room with no one in it. Then the click, on the far end, and the open air comes back: wind in the spruce, a boy's quick breathing, the oak creaking, and closer than all of it, a woman holding the bar down under her thumb and saying nothing, breathing slow, letting him hear the hollow and
every one of them in it.
She keeps the air open.
He sits in the hard chair with his hands empty in his lap, and listens.