VoxZero. Kammerton

Chapter 4. Cornr 62

And down below, where the father had been looking from his window, it was raining. That rain – unsanctioned, uninvited, gathering all evening. It had finally come down, and not by the clock, and the city, used to scheduled rain, was getting soaked, bewildered: water ran down the glass of the hanging walkways, dripped from the skybridges, drummed on the awning over the escalator, and the few passersby tipped their heads back – either to check whether it was a fault, or simply because no broadcast had ever canceled a wet face. Kee walked down through this rain – tier by tier, lower and lower, to where the city stopped being a shop window and became its seamy side. Up above, on the residential floors, everything gleamed and held its tone; but the lower you went, the shabbier and the more alive: the signs went out – Harmony-this, Optimum-that – the lighting of the canals gave way to dim lamps, the escalators labored and rattled, and the air smelled not of air-conditioned ozone but of water and rust. Those who were called the Lowers here lived close to the ground, and up above the word was dropped with a slight distaste, but Kee came down here the way you dive from a stuffy room into cool air: here you could breathe. And – it blinked. All at once, across the whole grid of streets: lamps, screens, the lighting of the canals went out for half a second and came on again, in a ripple, as if the city had blinked. A flicker. They had grown frequent in the last few weeks; up above, in the offices, that same ripple was being studied from windows right now and called calibration by some, SADI by others. Down here nobody so much as lifted a head – it blinked, so it blinked, you got used to it. Kee lost his stride for a moment, waited out the dark, walked on. Two more turns to the Cornr. Cornr 62 was always open. And it was the only thing in the city about which no one could say “since when.”

Everything else had a beginning: TUNE was switched on at such-and-such a time, the Air was launched at such-and-such, Attunement was introduced for the common good. But the Cornr simply was – a squat little joint on the corner where two emptied avenues met, with a sign that had not been changed for so long that no one remembered whether it had ever been lit. And it never closed. Never – not at night, when the city was handed over to TUNE and everyone was supposed to sleep in tune, not toward morning, not during the broadcast hours of mandatory viewing. In a city where everything ran on a schedule, the Cornr ran outside every schedule, around the clock, the way something runs that someone forgot to switch off. And a kid could come here at any hour and find the same steam, the same hum, the same someone or other over a cone. Time had no power over it, just as it had no power over its beginning. People said it was a place from before the Era. The one genuinely pre-Conflict place that had not been torn down, optimized, or renamed Harmony-something, but simply left running, as if forgotten. Who kept it, who let people in, why it was left alone – no one knew. And that was exactly why everyone drifted here.

Kee pushed the door, and warmth hit him in the face: steam, the smell of spices – different, unfamiliar, none he had smelled anywhere in the city, and not one of them nameable – the hum of live voices, evened out by no broadcast. Here it smelled of food that is cooked, not dispensed from a wall.

“You’re late,” Lok said, not lifting his head from a table heaped with napkins covered in his small handwriting. “I’ve already buried three theories without you.”

Lok was sitting in their spot, by the far wall, under the installation. He was one of those Kee called the brainy ones: a functionary’s son, from a good tower, with a clean Consent and access to places Kee was not let into. And at the same time the only one of the Uppers Kee actually liked. Lok understood that the world was arranged absurdly. Understood it cleverly, in detail, with numbers. He just understood it with his head – the way you understand a theorem – and not with that place in the chest that ached in Kee and that Kee could not explain.

“Sit. Take it, it’ll get cold.” Lok shoved a cone at him.

The cones were the house specialty, “corner cones”: a triangular flatbread rolled at exactly that angle – sixty-two degrees, Lok had once measured it with a protractor and been happy for a week – open at the top and stuffed with something like cream or paste, thick, warm. You ate them slowly, biting from the top. You drank broth. Only broth and puréed soups, nothing solid, nothing you had to chew on; Kee had once thought that the food here was “even” too – flowing, warm, needing no teeth – but at the Cornr this somehow did not anger him the way it did up above. Because it had taste. Different tastes – not that one and only aftertaste, warm and nothing, that lay over all the food in the city however much you varied it. Here they did not sprinkle Optimum Plus. Here the broth tasted like broth, the green soup was bitter, and the hot one really burned, and differently every time. There was no naming these dishes – they had no names, not on any menu, nothing you could retell in words; they could only be tasted and known by the tongue. In a city where everything had a label, here stood something nameless and alive. Kee sometimes thought that this alone – that soup had a taste – was enough to count as a crime.

“Want some water?” Lok nodded at a bottle with a faded Balance label. “Just so you know.” He lowered his voice, leaned in, eyes shining. “One theory says the owner puts Level in it. A microdose. So everyone sits here all nice and sweet. The other says he refuses on principle, and that’s why the Cornr is the only place in the city where you drink honest water.” Lok leaned back, pleased. “And here’s the beautiful part: there’s no way to check. You’ll never know. You drink and you don’t know – whether you’re being led, or for once you’re not.”

“And what do you think?” Kee asked, after a sip.

“I don’t think,” Lok said cheerfully. “I collect. Thinking means picking a side, and you know what picking sides gets you. I just collect theories. I’ve got about forty on the Cornr. That it’s a bunker. That the owner is the last living man from before the Era, and he’s two hundred years old. That there’s a way from here into the old tunnels. That TUNE itself doesn’t know about this place – it’s got a blind spot here.” He tapped the napkins. “Nonsense, obviously. All theories are nonsense. But beautiful.”

He said it lightly, chuckling, and Kee understood why it had to be light: heavy was already out of tune, heavy was a yellow bracelet, heavy was questions. Lok held all of it like a game, like a stamp collection, at exactly the safe depth where a hobby has not yet become dissent. Conspiracy theories told with a smile are the most in-tune rebellion there is. A rebellion with nothing in it to hold against you.

“Oh, by the way.” Lok perked up, picked up a fresh napkin. “Hot off the press. My old man came home last night, talking. He goes to the Gathering, they let him in.” He said it with that special half-catch of the breath with which a son at the very door of someone else’s world catches crumbs: not admitted, but close by, eavesdropping. “Me they won’t let past the doorstep, obviously – too young, no rank. But my old man lets things slip sometimes. It’s this get-together they have up there, the Uppers. Closed. Every so often. They sell each other stuff.”

“Sell what?” Kee was chewing, listening with half an ear.

“Well, that’s the thing, nobody knows, and that’s the whole fun of it.” Lok lowered his voice, leaned in, in his element. “My old man didn’t really explain, he’s stingy with details, I didn’t get that from him. But he says it’s not just things. There’s…” he wiggled his fingers, searching, “…feelings too, I guess. Somebody’s. Recorded. Can you picture it? A whole hall sitting in gold, and somebody’s selling them, I don’t know, somebody’s crying. Or laughing. And they fight over it like I don’t know what. My old man says for one piece they paid enough to last me three lifetimes.” Lok leaned back, beaming with the wildness of the story. “Can you believe it? Spoiled rotten, all of them. They’re so bored they’re buying other people’s insides. They’re stuffed, they’ve got everything, so…” He twirled a finger at his temple. “Theory forty, call it. The sickest one: the higher up, the emptier, and the more they’ll pay for somebody else’s real thing.” He snorted. “Nonsense, obviously. But beautiful.”

Kee shrugged – the rich were far away; he had his own pain, closer to home. But something in Lok’s wild story – “buying other people’s insides,” “the higher up, the emptier” – touched the quiet sound in his chest for a second, vaguely, in passing, and was forgotten.

The café lived around them. At the next table three girls were playing Limit: egging each other on, arguing, laughing. And glancing at the bracelets, to see whose Consent would creep closest to yellow. Whoever pushed it to the very brink and did not tip over into yellow won – was brave, had “almost gone out of tune but held on.” Playing with fire at the length of a match. One of them, the most reckless, to her friends’ squeals unclasped her bracelet and took it off entirely – for ten seconds, fifteen, as long as her nerve held – a bare wrist, no tone, no watching, forbidden nakedness; then hurriedly snapped it back on, because a bracelet taken off is no longer a game, it is a violation; they come for a bare wrist. The girls squealed with horror and delight. At the far table two boys were clumsily getting acquainted with two others, and all their flirting went through the bracelets: they knocked wrists, passed contacts, music, a small payment for a cone – “my treat”; the bracelet was wallet, link, and leash, all at once, and they flirted through the leash without noticing the leash. Kee watched it all and loved it – with that mournful love you feel for what you sense is about to be taken away. Ordinary. Alive. Playing with the edge, not knowing the edge was real.

The crowd at the Cornr was all sorts, and that was another of its oddities. Mostly kids – here they carried themselves a little more freely than anywhere else, voices louder, laughter meaner, bracelets yellower, and no one told them off. But not only kids. At the counter hunched an old man, of a kind the optimized city seemed to have run out of – drinking his broth in silence, an hour, two. A laborer from the Lowers would wander in, warming his hands on a glass. And sometimes – Kee had noticed long ago – people came down from above, too. The kind you could tell: an expensive suit, a spotless bracelet, the straight bearing of a person from the high floors. They came in as if by accident, sidling, hiding their faces, as if they had wandered in by mistake. Took a cone, drank the broth hurriedly, in a corner, and vanished just as quietly, and there was something thievish about them, greedy, as if they came here not to eat but to snatch a mouthful of something that up there, in their glass cleanliness, was nowhere to be had. Kee did not know what. He only noted it: they were drawn down here, like him. And why, neither they nor he could have said.

Behind the counter there was only one man – not young, unremarkable, one of those faces that never stick in the memory: he wiped glasses, ladled broth, spread that thick cream on the flatbreads, rolled them into cones at their angle, and slid them across the counter. All in silence, without the friendliness of the Air, without “have a good day, in tune.” No one knew his name, or where he was from, or whether he owned the place or was a stray like the rest. He was simply part of the Cornr, the way the steam and the hum were part of it – and, it seemed, had always been. Kee nodded to him; he nodded back. That was all their acquaintance rested on, for years.

Above his and Lok’s table stretched the installation – dusty glass plates, wire, something else, no one looked into it. But when the light from outside fell slantwise, at a certain angle – maybe that very one, the corner’s – shadows moved across the wall. Silhouettes. They moved, flowed, as if someone lived in the dusty glass and walked there. The kids had long since gotten used to it and did not look up. But Kee did – and the quiet sound in his chest, the one on the left, answered, briefly, vaguely, the way it answered the truth. He did not know what it was or what it was for. No one knew. The shadows moved along the wall and faded when the sun shifted, and it was just a dusty piece of junk again.

And not far from their table, under a glass dome, stood the thing Kee always looked at longer than he should have. The kids called it “the antique” – because to them it was antique, ancient, incomprehensible: a black disc on a black box, a thin curved arm with a needle at its tip, all under dusty glass, like a relic, like a bone in a museum. No one knew what it was. That is, they knew the word – record player – but not what for: that the disc was meant to turn, that the needle was meant to touch it, that from this a sound was born, alive, warm, crackling, not evened out by anything. It stood under its dome and was silent. Had been silent, perhaps, for a hundred years. A machine made to sound, that had forgotten how to sound, left under glass in a corner, and a whole room of kids ate their cones without a glance at it, not knowing that this dead thing had once done exactly what all of them lacked and could not name.

He and Lok ate – now in silence, now tossing words back and forth about anything, about nothing; the evening flowed, the hum around them flowed, the broth warmed their hands. And then, in one of the pauses, Kee got up – not knowing why himself, the way he always got up – went over to the glass dome and stood over it.

Kee looked at the silent record player, and the Kammerton in him ached. Quietly. At this whole joint, where the living pretended to be ordinary, where the real stood under glass, forgotten, where children played with the edge, not knowing the edge.

On the front panel of the box, under the dusty glass, there had once been a name – the name of whoever had made it. Now only scratches were left: someone had scraped the letters off, long ago, carefully, leaving only the shadow of the embossing, the ghost of a word. Kee squinted. Some of the letters could still be guessed, if you ran your eye across at the right angle – a fragment, a beginning, something that began with a V, something about voice; beyond that it was rubbed to nothing. As if the name had been erased on purpose – not by time but by a hand, the way you erase what must not remain. Kee himself did not know why this scratched at him harder than the silent record player itself. It just ached a little louder when he looked at the rubbed-out place. As if something were hiding there, under the scratches.

“You’ve zoned out again,” Lok said. “On your hurdy-gurdy. Listen, there’s a theory it plays at night, when nobody’s here. By itself.” He snorted. “Nonsense, obviously. But beautiful, right? By the way, nobody knows who made it. Somebody scraped the name off. Another theory: they scraped it off so nobody would find out who knew how to make a sound like that.” Lok tapped his temple. “I’ve got forty of them, I told you.”

“Beautiful,” Kee said, not taking his eyes off the rubbed-out place. He finished the Balance, never learning whether he was being led just then or not. Stood up.

“I’m going to Lila’s,” he said.

Lok made a face – without malice, from habit:

“To your out-of-tune artist. You’ll get in trouble with her one day, Kee.” He said it lightly, like everything, but something real flashed in his eyes – a worry, but a worry of the head, the kind he understood things with, without feeling them. “She walks right on the edge. Not our toy one. The real one.”

“I know,” Kee said.

“Go on, then.” Lok was already unfolding a new napkin. “If anything happens – I’m here. I’m always here.” And, without lifting his head, quieter, almost serious, once in the whole evening not a game: “Look after her. They don’t make them like that anymore. Like my hurdy-gurdy.”

Kee nodded and went to the door. At the threshold he looked back: Lok stayed sitting over his napkins, alone, under the silent hurdy-gurdy, in no hurry – he did not want to hurry. Kee knew why. Lok had a longer and harder way home than anyone here: not down, like the rest, but up – to the eighty-first, to a good tall tower with a clean bracelet and clean corridors. And the higher you climb, the longer the road stretches and the less you want to start it. All the Lowers would scatter to their floors within half an hour. But Lok would ride up for a long time, elevator after elevator, higher and higher, into his proper life, and it sometimes seemed to Kee that this was why Lok sat at the Cornr until the last, until morning – because down here was easier for him than home – only he, unlike those thievish people from the elite, would never in his life have admitted it, and would have turned it into a joke and theory forty-one.

Kee pushed the door, and the rain took him back.

He walked to Lila’s through the wet, blinking city, thinned out by the night, and the closer he came, the louder it rang in his chest. Because the road to her was the only road all day on which he did not have to hide himself. The rain was letting up. Ahead, under the overpass, a light was already glowing.

Lila was drawing on a wall you were allowed to draw on – and this was the first thing Kee had loved in her, and understood too late: she always came right up to the permitted to draw the forbidden.

The wall was sanctioned, under the overpass, one of those set aside for “free self-expression in consent”; you were supposed to draw the approved on it – soft patterns, green spirals. Lila was running charcoal over the approved, and from under the spirals a sign was surfacing – a check mark over the ring of the Consent, its sharp barb piercing it straight through. She drew without hiding, in the light of the one living lamp, and her fingers were black to the second knuckle. Her red curls were pinned up in a hurry, any old way, several strands had come loose; on her pale face a scatter of freckles, and green eyes, quick, in which something was always living and arguing. Kee came out of the dark, saw first those black fingers, then all of her, and the Kammerton in him – the one that had ached all evening at the Cornr over the silent hurdy-gurdy – stopped aching and rang.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, without turning, and her voice warmed.

“Good, you came. Sit down, don’t hover.”

He sat on the concrete ledge and nodded at her hand – at the little black stick in her fingers that she was running along the wall.

“What are you even drawing with?” Kee really did not understand. In the city above no one drew anything by hand: if you wanted a picture, it flowed on its own, across the wall, across the screen, ready-made. But this black stub left a real mark, rough, alive, and blackened your fingers, and Kee had never seen anything you could draw a line with like that. “Where did you get it?”

Lila smirked, not taking her eyes off the wall.

“Charcoal,” she said. And after a pause added, quieter, mysteriously, as if testing whether he would understand: “There are places the city hasn’t reached. Where there’s still something left to leave a mark with. You have to know how to get down there.” She drew one more black line. “Find it one day and you’ll understand.”

She finished the barb, stepped back.

“Why kammerton?” Kee asked, nodding at the wall. He had carried the word in himself for a long time – it was what he called the thing that ached and rang in his chest on the left – and what it meant he had never once asked. “What is it, anyway – a kammerton?”

“This sign is the kammerton,” she said, looking at the drawing. “Nobody’s seen any other. My father said: a kammerton is a compass. When everything lies, when even your own head lies, because they’ve tuned it – there’s one place they can’t reach. They reach everything – memory, face, voice. Not this.” She pressed a black finger to her chest on the left, to the heart, held it there. “No entry for them here. It’s quiet here, and in that silence you can hear what’s true.” She leaned over, pressed the same finger to Kee’s chest, and left a black dot.

“It’s loud in you. You’re like an open string – touch you and you hum.”

“Where is he now,” Kee asked. “Your father.”

Lila shrugged, and the shoulder jerked harder than “I don’t know” needed.

“Where everyone is. Gone into consent.” She took out earphones, two on a single cord, and plugged them into that same black carrier Kee had carried with him all day, across the whole city, in his pocket. One earphone she put in her own ear, the other she held out to him. “Here. Quietly, though. It’s not allowed.” And she snorted at how that sounded – not allowed – as if the word itself were funny.

Music hit his ear – not from the Air, not evened out; a guitar, angry, ragged, a voice off-key, more beautiful than all the even things Kee had ever heard. That music, the living one. You could not be in tune to it. They sat shoulder to shoulder, sharing one string, and Kee for the first time that evening – in all these days – did not hold his face, because beside him was a person you could take your face off with.

“Hear it?” Lila said quietly. “That’s what they took. Never mind freedom. This. So no one would hum. The even don’t hum.” She turned to him, and her green eyes burned with that living, stubborn light no one else in the city had. “I won’t stop, Kee. Let them take me. Better to ring once than spend a whole life silent and in tune.”

Kee wanted to say – that’s stupid, that’s how they’ll take you, you have to be quieter, like everyone – and did not, because that would have been his father talking, and he was sitting here precisely in order not to be his father.

The lamp above them blinked.

Just blinked – went out for half a second and came on, the way everything in the city had been blinking that evening, in a ripple. Kee would not have noticed. But the Consent on his wrist flickered that same second, green tore into scarlet. And in the dark above the overpass a cold blue dot woke. A second one. Drones. They came down without a sound, an even white light poured from under them, lay on the wall, on the surfaced kammerton, and a calm female voice – the same one as in the bracelet, in the advertisements, everywhere – said without expression:

“Unsanctioned expression. Specimen out of tune. Degree: red. Remain where you are. This is for your own good.”

“Run,” Lila said. Not to herself. To him. She was already up, calmly, as if she had been waiting for this for years. “You can’t let them see you. You’re loud. They won’t repair you, they’ll wipe you. Run, idiot.”