The unit travels in a gray case with two good wheels and one that has opinions, and the man who wheels it is called the handler, and between them they are the best band in the city, one of them made of music and the other of lifting.
The case weighs what a drowned man weighs. The handler knows the city by its ramps.
Mornings are weddings. The arcade under the glass roof takes the unit at nine, while the shops are still yawning their shutters, and the handler sets it down where the light falls through the girders in long paid stripes, and opens the case, and steps back, and puts in his ears the little wax stoppers that are the whole of his professional training. The unit reads the room. It reads wrists, mostly, the pulse in them, the sugar, the sleep, and whatever else a wrist confesses, and then it plays the first dance, and the couple move as if they had practiced, though they have not practiced, no one practices anymore, the unit carries the practice for everyone. It has never once been danced to badly. People move correctly to it. That is, in certain quarters, the complaint.
The handler hears none of this. He watches the shoes.
Noon is the school hall, the little concert for the little ones, and the unit plays the songs the syllabus licenses and the children move like weather with nowhere to be, and one boy at the back refuses, arms folded, a small government of one, and the unit, reading him, lowers everything half a step and slows, and the boy’s foot begins, treasonously, to count, and the handler watches the foot and thinks, as he thinks every time, there it is, and does not know what he means by it. It is not his department. His department is ramps.
His aunt believes the boats should use the far pier and not this one, and says so whenever the subject of boats arises, and has never been on one. Afternoon is a wake in the fish market. This is new business. The stalls fold back, the ice is swept into the gutters where it lies shining like a spent argument, and the mourners stand in the smell of the day’s last mackerel with their hats in their hands. The unit reads the room a long time. Longer than a room has ever taken. The wrists in this room want opposite things, some want the dead man marched out with brass, some want him whispered, one wrist, an old woman’s, wants nothing at all anymore and reads almost as blank as the ice. The unit plays four minutes of a thing so quiet the gulls outside can be heard bidding on the sweepings, and the mourners afterward will not agree on whether it was music or the unit resting, and the invoice, later, will list it as one selection, performed, and the widow will pay it without complaint and keep the receipt-stub in her coat for reasons the coat never learns.
Evening is the Tank, the off-night, the drained cistern half-full of the young, and here the unit is a guest in a room that plays itself, and the two systems regard each other like dogs of different sizes, and then the room, magnanimous, goes quiet and lets the unit take the columns. The handler stands at the bar with his stoppers in, drinking the cheap hour at the expensive hour, a professional discount, and around him the young are moved in the specific way the unit moves the young — toward each other. The city has never invoiced for that. There is a note in a counting house somewhere that says the matter is under review.
And once, only once tonight, between the licensed selections, the unit plays the slow one, the tune with six steps down in it, that is on no license and in no catalogue and answers to no title, and the young stop trying to be moving and are simply moved, and the reader in the corner files the four minutes under anomaly, recurring, and the handler, who cannot hear it, feels it anyway, through the floor, through the bones of his feet, six steps down, and his feet learn it the way the boy’s foot learned its treason, without permission.
The last booking is at dawn and it is the quiet one. The square by the exchange. There is a crowd there that the night has left behind, the way a tide leaves things, and the crowd is not dancing and has not come to dance, and the unit is set down at the edge of it, on the paving, without a stage, and it reads the square a long time, all those wrists wanting one thing with several names, and then it plays. What it plays has a tempo just under a heartbeat at rest. The crowd does not disperse. The crowd walks. It walks the way water finds a drain, calmly, all at once, in the direction the tempo leans — one man against it, arms folded, a small government, the unit lowering nothing, the square parting round him as water takes a stone, then he is walking, in step — and in twenty minutes the square is empty and swept-feeling, and the invoice for this is not itemized like the wedding, it is one line, and the line says: crowd, moved.
The handler packs the case. Two good wheels and one that has opinions. He takes the stoppers out, and the city comes back into his ears, gulls and shutters and the funicular starting its first climb up a hill the case has never been allowed on, weight limits, he has carried that weight up the stair street on his back more times than the stairs have steps.
He wheels the unit home through the emptied square, humming. Six steps down. He has never heard it. His feet have.