Rounds

The old man walked at night.

Not all nights, and not for any reason a person could have been made to give. The borough held a rich supply of old men, and a certain number of them walked, doctors’ orders, or dogs, or the plain arithmetic of short sleep, and the streets received all of them alike and asked no questions, because that is what streets are for.

This one walked a circle.

Not the same streets twice running, and never at the same hour, and nothing about him invited the word patrol. He was an old man in a grey coat with a book in one pocket, moving at the pace of somebody with nowhere particular to be and every intention of getting there. But a thing that watched long enough, a cat on a wall, say, or a window with insomnia, would have found that the ground got covered. All of it. Evenly. The thick streets and the thin ones, the lit and the unlit, the ones worth walking and the ones nobody had walked on purpose in years. He did not favour. He did not linger. He covered the ground the way rain covers it, without opinion, and was gone.

The spring had the streets acting mild that week, which meant nothing. Springs made promises at night that mornings were under no obligation to keep. The air had a softness that could have been weather and could have been an ambush. The old man walked through it with his collar down, which in him may have been trust, and may have been a test.

It was a Friday, for whatever Fridays are worth at one in the morning.

He came along the north side of the circle a little after the hour, past the shuttered parade, past the launderette that kept one light burning for reasons known only to launderettes, and he was level with the mouth of the lane that ran down toward the water when a woman crossed it, lower down, forty yards off, laden.

She crossed the lane the way a needle crosses a seam, in it, and through it, and gone. She did not look up the lane. There was no reason to. The lane was empty, or as good as. It held nothing but dark and wet stone and one old man at the top of it, standing still, which at that distance and that hour is a species of empty.

The old man stood still for some time.

What the lane could have attested, had lanes been called on for such things, was that the woman carried a bag of the kind made for carrying other things than it was carrying, and that it rode her shoulder with the strap at full stretch, at the angle straps take when the freight inside is boards, not paper, boards of the old kind, made when things were made to survive their owners, and that she moved under it at the pace of somebody who had measured her strength against a night’s work and meant to spend all of the first on all of the second, and that she walked like a person who had planned her route against every eye that runs on rails or feeds on patterns, and had therefore planned it against everything in the city except the ground itself.

You cannot route around the ground. The circle was not looking for her. The circle was not looking for anything. That had always been the whole of its method. It covered, and what is covered is, sooner or later, crossed.

The old man came down the lane without hurry, at his own pace, an old man’s pace, and stopped where it gave onto the towpath, and did not take the direction the woman had taken. He took the other one, a dozen steps, to where a doorway stood back from the water in its own shadow, the kind of doorway that has stopped being a door to anywhere and kept the shape out of habit, and he stepped into it, and became, to any reasonable eye, masonry.

The water carried the lamps on its back and said nothing.

Twenty minutes, by any clock that cared, and the woman came back the other way, unladen, at a different pace, the outbound pace of a woman with a schedule, which is a different animal from the homebound pace of a woman with a bed, and passed the doorway at eleven feet, and did not see the masonry, because she was watching the things she had taught herself to watch, the corners and the cameras and the mouths of lanes, and masonry is none of these.

She went up the lane. The night took her.

The doorway kept its shape.

She came back laden. The strap at full stretch. The boards’ angle. Later she came back again, and later again, and in between the water ran and the lamps rode it and a fox went along the far bank on business of its own and gave the doorway one professional glance in passing, one tradesman to another, and got nothing, and went on.

Five crossings. Six. The intervals shortened toward the end, the way intervals do when the night is spending faster than the strength, and on the last crossing the bag rode lower and her free hand was under it from beneath, taking the freight’s weight off the strap the way you take a sleeping thing’s weight off your arm, and she was, by then, walking on method alone, each footfall placed out of the memory of how footfalls went. Anyone watching would have seen a woman carrying the last and heaviest load of a long night as though the whole city were a shelf, and she had been asked to keep it from falling. But there was no one watching. There was a doorway, and doorways see nothing. That is the first law of doorways.

After that she did not come back.

The towpath lay empty in both directions. A clock somewhere inland offered two, tentatively, as though open to correction. The water went on running along the bed it had cut for itself long before anybody now living had come to look at it, and the doorway stood empty, because at some point in the last minutes, between one lamp-shiver and the next, it had gone back to being a doorway.

The old man was at the bridge.

He had come up onto it the way he came up onto things, without arriving, and he stood at the parapet where a person stands who has stood there before, and set his books down on the stone, and kept one, and did not open it. Below him the water did what it had been doing all night and all the nights before that, patiently, without spilling, and he watched it the way men watch fires, which is to say not for information.

He stood there a long time. Longer than the cold strictly permitted, and the cold, notably, did not press the point.

“Annotation open,” said the old man, to the water.

The water declined to minute it.

He gathered his books. He came down off the bridge on the far side, and took the long way, which from that bridge is every way, and the streets received him the way they received all their old men, without questions, and covered him over, street by street, the way rain is covered over by more rain.

The circle got walked the rest of the way round. All of it. Evenly. The thick streets and the thin. It took until nearly four, which was later than usual, though there was no usual, which had always been the point of him, and nothing about the walking of it would have told a cat on a wall or a window with insomnia anything at all, except perhaps this, which is not the kind of thing cats file. The pace was the same at the end as at the beginning. Exactly the same. A man’s pace does that under one condition only, which is that he is holding it.

Somewhere across the water the library stood dark over its basements, keeping what was left of what it kept.

Nothing of the night was entered anywhere. There was nowhere to enter it. The city keeps no ledger of women carrying weight in the dark, or it would be a longer book than anyone could shelve, and the borough’s cameras had been courteously avoided, and the one walker abroad with a memory fit for the freight of it filed nothing, wrote nothing, told, for the moment, no one.

But somebody has to be the copy of record.

He had said so himself, once, in daylight, in company, in the voice he kept for the order of things. It is not a glamorous way to spend several centuries. And the copy of record does not get to choose what the record contains. That is the oldest law of records, older than doorways, older than lanes. It takes what happened.

It had taken this.