Saltlung
Doctor Wend kept her rooms above a rope-walk in the Fifth, which was the worst possible place to listen to a chest and the best possible place to have a practice nobody wrote down.
The machines ran from the fifth bell to the ninth and from the tenth to the second, and in the half hour between shifts the whole street went quiet — properly quiet, the way a place is quiet when a noise stops rather than when a noise was never there — and in that half hour Wend saw the patients she did not put in the book.
Rook had been coming for four years. He had never once been in the book.
"Shirt off. Sit forward. Hands on your knees."
She was a small woman of about sixty with ink on her fingers and a habit of humming while she listened, which he had found insulting the first time and had come to find comforting, the way a man finds the sound of someone else's competence comforting.
"Breathe in. Hold it. Now out, slowly, until I say."
Rook breathed out until she said.
The horn of the stethoscope moved down his back and stopped.
"Again."
He did it again.
It moved an inch and stopped again. She had stopped humming, which he noticed, and filed, and did not react to.
"Again. Longer."
He did it longer, and at the end of it the cough came up and took him, and she waited it out with her hand flat between his shoulder blades, which was not a medical gesture and which they both ignored.
Then she straightened, and put the instrument in her apron pocket, and went to the window and stood there with her back to him, which told him everything before she said any of it.
"How long have you been bringing up rust?"
"Four months."
"Four."
"Perhaps five."
"Perhaps five." She turned round. "And you have been coming to me for four years with a cough, and I have been telling you for four years to stop walking through the drying floors, and for four years you have said—"
"That the drying floors are eleven minutes shorter."
"That the drying floors are eleven minutes shorter." Wend folded her arms. "Do you know what it is?"
"Saltlung."
"Then why in God's name did you make me listen to it."
"Because I wanted a number," Rook said, doing up his shirt. "I have a great deal of respect for numbers. I would rather have one from you than invent one myself, and I will invent one by tonight if you don't give me one, and mine will be worse, because I will make it comfortable."
Wend looked at him for a while.
Down in the street somebody laughed, and a door banged, and the half hour went on.
"Sit down properly," she said. "Not on the edge like that. You look like a man waiting to be told he can go."
He sat down properly.
"It settles in the small passages," she said. "The salt. It comes in on the air off the drying floors and it goes down into the fine branches at the bottom of the lung, and the body does what the body does, which is to wall it off, and the walling-off is the disease. It hardens. It does not soften again. There is nothing to cut out and nothing to wash away and nothing to breathe over it." She said it plainly, in order, the way a person says a thing they have said many times and have never found a better way to say. "The lung stops being a sponge and starts being a stone, one thimbleful at a time, from the bottom up."
"The number."
"A year." She did not look away. "Perhaps a little more, if you stop walking through refineries, which you will not, and stop breathing fog, which you cannot, and stop climbing ninety-one steps twice a day, which is your employment. That is not a promise. It is an average. Averages are made of people who are not you."
"A year," said Rook.
"Say the rest of it."
"There isn't any rest of it."
"There is always a rest of it," said Wend. "Everyone I say that sentence to says one more thing afterwards, without exception, in twenty-nine years. Some of them say my daughter. Some of them say the boat. One man asked me whether he would be able to go on eating cheese, and I have never forgotten him, and I hope he did." She pulled the second chair round and sat on it backwards, arms across the back. "You have been sitting in my rooms twice a year for four years and you have never once told me anything about yourself that was not below the collarbone. So. A year. What is the rest of it?"
Rook considered the question with genuine care, because it had been asked in good faith and she had earned an answer, and because he had begun, in the last four seconds, to suspect something about himself that he did not much like.
"There isn't a rest of it," he said. "That is the rest of it."
Wend's face did something complicated.
"Ah," she said.
"I have no wife. My mother is dead and my father is presumably not, and I have not seen him since I was fourteen. I have a room, and a shelf, and nineteen ledgers on the shelf." He put his hands on his knees. "There is a box on my employment record for the name of a beneficiary. It has been empty since the year twenty-two. Every quarter a clerk sends me a form asking me to fill it in, and every quarter I put it in the stove, and I have never once thought about why, until this exact minute, sitting in this chair."
"And now?"
"And now I find that I have spent nineteen years being extremely careful about other people's accounts," said Rook, "and I appear to have kept none of my own."
The machines started up below them, the long rising whine of the rope-walk coming back to work, and the half hour was over.
Wend stood.
"I am going to say one more thing and then you are going to pay me too much and I am going to let you," she said. "A year is not nothing. I have given people a fortnight. A year is enough time to do something quite large, if the person knows what it is, and almost all of them don't, and they spend it getting their affairs in order, which takes four days, and then they spend three hundred and sixty-one days waiting." She held the door. "Don't wait, Anselm."
He did not go home.
He walked instead, up out of the Fifth and over the Ash Bridge and along the high spans where the fog thinned enough to see the city, and by the time he stopped it was dark and the lamplighters had been and gone.
Corvane at night looked like something that had been dropped and had landed badly. Forty islands strung on iron. The foundries burning orange in the west. The whole of it settling a finger's width into the brine every year, so that the oldest ward was under water now and men rowed over the tops of its chimneys, and everyone said it was the brine, and nobody said anything else, because there was nothing else to say and no profit in saying it.
Above it all, on the black rock of the First Island, the assay-house held up its lamp.
The lamp never went out. That was the entire point of the lamp. It had burned for two hundred years to say one thing to the whole of the city, every night, without interruption: a promise made here is real, and it will still be real in the morning, and in eleven years, and the sea may do what it likes.
Rook stood in the middle of the span and took out the dead man's ring.
0940687.
Seven digits. Room for a million lines. Three hundred thousand souls in the city and not one in four of them bound.
He turned it over and over in his fingers, and the thought would not resolve into anything, and he put it away and took out the other paper instead.
Coyle, Maren. Outstanding: nine months, six days. Dependents: one, minor.
He read it twice.
Then he read it a third time, and the cough came, and doubled him over the rail, and went on until his eyes ran; and when it let go of him he stayed bent a while with his forehead against the cold iron, looking down at the black water.
A year, he thought.
Nine months and six days.
A year is a great deal more than nine months.
He straightened up quickly, as though somebody had spoken behind him.
It was the first time the thought came. He did not recognise it for what it was — how would he? — and he folded the paper along its crease and put it in his coat with the ring, and told himself, quite sincerely, that he had been thinking about something else.