It was late at night when he got home. The outside light was off and it took a few seconds to find the keyhole. The door creaked open and his hand reached knowingly into the darkness of his house, as if into a glove. Then he felt along the wall for the light switch.
 
The moment it took for the circuit to be closed and the room to burst into light was the culmination of almost sixty-five million years, perhaps even longer. Ever since the divergence of species from whales to hominids, this event had been lumbering towards its conclusion - the illumination of a room in the middle of the night. Though this might have appeared to be the end of the line, it was not, as conclusions are inconclusive and just a matter of metrology. The important word was ‘uncertainty’.
 
It was with uncertainty that he glanced at the table by the door, now that he could see it. This was where letters accrued. There was also a chessboard, set up but rarely used. He thumbed through the envelopes. Each one was a demand for money. Once he might have found ideas, and descriptions of other places. There might have been a love-letter. He would have recognized the familiar handwriting on the envelope and felt excited as he tore it open. These had been personal words. The bills before him were impersonal. It was sad that such a rich mode of communication had been reduced to a mere vehicle of obligation.
 
There was another table by a door, in another place at a different time. Along with the letters there was a newspaper. The headline glared at him. “MAN KILLED IN A CROWD WITH POISONED UMBRELLA.” It was a case of fiction peeking through reality, as a marble would reveal its shape through a thin layer of rubber. Quite a rare event. The grey zone of spies, usually running parallel, had veered off course and touched his life. That is what made the article so fascinating. Then he became aware that Mrs. B was reading over his shoulder. He turned and saw that she looked agitated and very pale.
 
“Are you all right?”
 
“I knew that man.”
 
She hurried out, leaving him to wonder what on earth she had to do with it all.
 
Mrs. B lived upstairs. Beyond that he didn’t know much about her. Their relationship was limited to occasional encounters in the shared hallway, usually near the table by the door. Still, the few conversations they had were more profound than flippant small talk and left him with the vague impression that there was something she wished to divulge but could not bring herself to. And why to him, a young man twenty years her junior?
 
She told him once that a person like him could not exist in her country. It was a brief statement dense with inference. For everything she said, there was more left unsaid. She did not say what country she came from, or what kind of person she supposed him to be.
 
He assumed she had a husband as she used the title ‘Mrs.’ which was also on the nameplate outside, but he had never seen any evidence of Mr. B. She seemed to live alone. They were probably divorced. One day, out of the blue, pre-empting a question he might never have asked, she told him that her husband had died some years before, leaving her a widow. So that explained it.
 
Except that a few months later when they met at the foot of the stairs she said that her husband had been away for a long time. She did not seem to have any recollection that she had told him her husband was dead. Not knowing what to make of it, he had no opinion. Just that there were inconsistencies in what people said to each other. Only later did he give it some thought. She had never said where Mr. B had gone, leaving space enough for speculation. Now, with his eyes and fingers on the bills before him, he realized that she had implied Mr. B was in some foreign city. Budapest? Prague? Or was it a necropolis? The Valley of the Kings perhaps.
 
The last time they had met, a drawn Mrs. B requested that should anyone come asking for her, he should say that she was not there and that he had not seen her for months.
 
A few days later he answered the door to two men in raincoats. Had he seen Mrs. B? No he had not. Not for at least three months.
 
He didn’t see her again. She disappeared as completely as if she had never been there, leaving more questions than answers, and nothing resolved. Where did she go? Did she make it? Was she abducted? Was she alive?
 
Whatever had transpired she must be dead by now, considering his own age.
 
He let the bills fall back on to the table, where he would leave them until they were no longer current and could be thrown away with impunity, at least as far as he was concerned.
 
He was alone in the house. His wife had just left him, possibly due to a lack of affection or maybe something else. The bed was empty.
 
As he sat on the sofa and unlaced his boots it occurred to him that this old trope of cause and effect might actually play out in reverse. In which case the cause of his recent journey was the act of his return five days later. This was much more interesting. Because Mrs. B had disappeared, a man had been killed. Because Mrs. B’s husband was dead, he lived in another city. Things were beginning to make sense.
 
Because he was sleeping, he went to bed.
 
He woke up with the balmy thought of effect and cause to sustain him. He went down to the basement. A piece of frayed rope caught his eye. It was wedged behind a book on the shelf. He pulled out the book, and there it was - his quipu. He hadn’t seen it in years. He had the feeling of entering into a dream as he held it in his hands and examined it. He ran his fingers through the multitude of coloured strings, each one bearing a series of intricate knots. He allowed his fingers to play with them. It was old but still fresh. He knew what it was, though it was so long since he had seen it that it might not have existed before now, and new memories came flooding in.
 
Such as a trip to Oaxaca. He had been staying in the Spanish colonial part of town, the place where tourists stayed. Every day was spent walking, as happens when you are a tourist with a modicum of curiosity. Every day further and further. The streets were flat-looking, small and low, but glimpses through doorways revealed court yards that seemed bigger than the buildings that encompassed them. Thick walls from the 16th Century. Lush plants on terraces, bougainvillea brimming with colour. Diego Rivera’s house, filled with a collection of strange pre-Columbian artefacts. On every corner stood oddly pubescent police officers, usually in groups of two or three, with baseball caps and blue clothes. He discovered that they were tourist police. It was an unpleasant thought that these people were there to watch foreigners. But then he learned their purpose was to protect them. Beyond the enclave of the old colonial area there was a much bigger town blighted by deep poverty. That was where he went next, and that was where he bought his quipu from an old woman in a market. It cost next to nothing.
 
The book that had obscured the quipu was a history of numbers. Unity preceded the void. Zero was invented much later than one. The void might well have been behind the bookshelf because the empty space created by the removal of the history of numbers and the quipu revealed a hinge. He imagined it being said that one hinge led to another, and he started to pull books from the shelves until he saw two more. A door. What else to do but open it?
 
It opened more easily than he had expected. He stood at the threshold and looked in. It was a large room, much bigger than the basement which was the size of what he had once believed to be the footprint of his house.
 
Beyond it he could see entrances to other rooms. The whole area was lit by natural light that filtered in through small windows. Like the basement, it was half underground.
 
What an incredible piece of luck. It was a mysterious pleasure to discover that there was more to this house - to realise that he knew much less than he had previously assumed. He stepped in, quipu in hand.
 
The decor was not particularly to his taste but the place was clean despite its air of disuse. Rooms which have not been occupied for years have a curious stillness, affecting the passage of time.
 
He trod lightly as he explored the other rooms - three in all. A kitchen, a bathroom and an empty room that looked as if it might have been an art studio or a workshop.
 
He went back to the main room and sat down on the sofa. It was upholstered in a material with a floral design, green in hue. Comfortable enough. He leant back and closed his eyes to get a sense of things.
 
Soon his thoughts returned to the quipu. Had he bought it, or had it been sold to him? There was a subtle difference, a difference of volition. That woman - she must have been a witch, a Zapotec witch, or shaman. He could see her in an old dilapidated cottage, high on an arid mountain. She has sent her assistant, a young girl, to gather the magical herbs from the countryside. She has a specific way to prepare these herbs. It is arcane. She drinks some of the liquid. Then she sits for hours singing gently, almost inaudibly. She is weaving a web of connections in another world. After that she begins the three-day journey to the marketplace in the town below. She walks with the quipu on her head.
 
So the old woman had selected him. She knew he would be there. Perhaps she had directed him. She had a purpose for this transaction. He opened his eyes and looked at the knotted rope on his knee. He had no memories of these events and everything had to be created anew. The avenues were wide open. For the sake of simplicity, and perhaps a dash of humour, he could assume that the quipu was in the bookshelf because it was in some ways a book, just not in the western sense of covers and pages and printed words. Braille was a series of bumps to be felt. There was no need for the recording of communication to be limited to the norms of one’s own culture. But he was forgetting himself, the bookshelf was there because of what it contained.
 
As far as he knew, quipus were used by South American peoples, the Incas among them, to record numbers. The coloured strands had meaning. The knots in them had meaning. The distance between the knots had meaning. It was all shrouded in mystery and had no meaning for him at all. And yet.....
 
What do you do if you desire meaning and there is none to be had? You make it.
 
This quipu he held was a novel. It might involve numbers, but numbers and letters were linked, both being cultural inventions and not inherent. He had started reading it once before but had put it down. Now he would try again, using a different approach – with touch as well as vision.
 
The flower on the railing had been removed, so there was no way for him to know that things were not going to go according to plan. He took a last sip of coffee and returned the cup to the saucer. Then, glancing at his watch, he got up, pulled his coat from the chair-back and made for the door. Just outside he stopped momentarily to put on his coat, and used the time to scan the street for anything untoward. He let his eyes wander without settling on any one thing. Nothing to distract his attention. The coast was clear. Coat now buttoned, he stepped into the pedestrian slipstream.
 
This was to be a standard drop, if anything could be considered standard in this business. In fact he would be receiving. He’d done it a hundred times. As he rounded the corner by the department store he would accidentally bump into a woman coming the other way. He would pause barely long enough to apologize and be on his way. The woman he was to collide with was Beatrice. This was not the first time they had done this. In another world he would have asked her out to dinner.
 
When he reached the corner there was no sign of Beatrice. He slowed to look in a shop window, then kept going. Still nothing, just the normal crowd one would expect at this time on an overcast day. People leaving work, shop girls, businessmen with umbrellas. All of them blissfully unaware of the game being played out in their midst. He could feel himself tense up. Something had gone wrong. But wait.... there she was, hair covered in a blue silk scarf. Coming towards him. His heart leapt. But no, it wasn’t her. He felt a sudden stabbing pain in his calf. Then a rush of nausea and dizziness. His legs buckled. He was falling.....
 
Philip had called and said that unfortunately he had to cancel their dinner plans. That meant that the drop was off. It left her feeling nervous. It also left her in possession of sensitive material for longer than she had wanted. Why had they aborted? She telephoned the restaurant and cancelled the reservation she had made, as cover, for the benefit of those listening and watching.
 
It was nerve-wracking working for both sides. Bad enough working for one. Two caused more than twice the trouble. Sometimes she took pride in her situation. She felt a heightened sense of reality and power. The civilians around her floated by like flat characters from a dream. But she also felt like an insect scurrying to avoid being crushed. Spy-craft was a side effect of humanity, it perverted the fundamental aspects of life. How could there be love if there was no trust? How could friendship grow in a bed of suspicion, a bed fraught with twisting and nefarious motives? Work could not be distinguished from leisure, work that was ultimately pointless and only able to exist on the illusion of its own importance. Yet that illusion had concrete effects on the life around it. Her life was entirely corrupted.
 
That was what she liked about the boy downstairs. He was too naive to be corruptible. She was amused and irritated by his way of life -- a kind of teenage rebellion that lashed out at the state that supported him. He was probably collecting money every week for doing nothing. She had lived in this country long enough to understand its workings but couldn’t quite shake her own upbringing, feeling a residual disapproval. He simply would not have been allowed to exist. He would have been tailored in a way that was deemed fitting to his abilities and to the benefit of the state. He would have become an engineer, a factory worker, a party official perhaps. And if not, then re-indoctrination or worse. But she also felt a fondness for him for the very same reasons. His innocence was refreshing. She could see him standing quizzically in his tight trousers and ridiculously pointed shoes, leather jacket, no shirt, baby-faced. His lack of awareness was a strength. It protected him from the kind of strictures that bound her. She half-imagined inviting him upstairs. But she would never do that. She did not want to tarnish him.
 
She thought ruefully about her own husband, her part-time husband who would materialize whenever the need arose for her to be married. It wasn’t always the same man. She had been married once, for real, but that was a long time ago.
 
She didn’t have much time. She needed help. But where to turn? The people who had killed Harry would be coming for her next. She had learned about it from reading the young man’s paper. It was as if the ground had suddenly caved in beneath her. Why did she learn it from a newspaper and not from a phone call or message? She was being isolated. The drop may have been aborted to set her up. That meant time was short. She could tell the boy was concerned, she could see it in his eyes. The less he knew the better......
 
He put down the quipu and stretched his legs. He rather liked this book. He would read more. But he felt the desire for some Lapsang Souchong. He always found the combination of rough smokiness and refined black leaves to be conducive to thought. He would return.
 
But he never did.
 
When he went back down to the basement with his mug of tea, he found that the spacious extra rooms, along with his quipu and the rest of the story, were no longer there.
 
 

© Tom Newton 2018