On the morning of his seventh birthday the boy wakes before the city does and lies still while it catches up to him — a bus below the window, a shutter going up, a dog with an opinion, the first feet of the day on the stair street. He has a loose tooth. He works it with his tongue, saving it.
From the kitchen comes the sound of his mother beating eggs with a fork — the mixer frightens the batter, she says, and today of all days the batter must not be frightened. Lemon. There will be lemon under her nails until evening, and a fresh burn across her wrist, the old scar renewed annually.
His father stands on a chair with a nail between his lips, hanging a banner over the balcony door. The banner hangs crooked. It will hang crooked at every party this room ever holds. The nail his father chooses this morning is the nail the banner keeps.
The apartment sits three floors above the café that lends out its chairs for every wedding, funeral, and birthday on the hill, halfway up the stair street. The stair street has a hundred and twelve steps, a dry fountain at the fortieth, laundry crossing overhead like signal flags, and a transformer at the top that hums one low note the whole neighborhood has agreed not to hear. From the balcony the boy can see across to the far hill with its cranes, which have been building the same building since before he was born, and at the bottom of everything the water, which is a river or a sea depending on which way the wind is working. Behind the flat, up where the stair street gives out, there is the other hill, which nobody in this room has ever had a reason to climb. The morning smells of frying from the café, bleach from the stairwell, drains breathing after last night’s rain.
The table has been lengthened with the spare-room door laid across two trestles, under the cloth that exists only on this day. The chairs come up from the café — plastic, stacking, eleven for ten guests. A boy from the café carries them up, two at a time, and is tipped in cake. The birthday boy counts them twice.
The doorbell rings. Two notes, the second slightly ashamed of the first.
The guests come up the hundred and twelve steps and arrive breathing hard. The best friend is first, socks slipped down into his shoes, holding a plastic whistle he has already decided not to give away and will forget on the windowsill by dark. The girl with the braid goes straight for the cake in the kitchen, to eat the sugar flowers off its shoulders, and is allowed to. The neighbor brings a dish nobody asked for, heavy, still hot through the towel, that everyone will finish. The twins arrive in matching shirts and spend the afternoon denying it. The uncles take the balcony and smoke, tapping ash into a flowerpot where nothing has ever grown, and their smoke climbs past the laundry, past the transformer’s note, into the day.
Last comes the magician, hired off a card pinned up in the café. He is younger than the fathers and older than the room, and his hands are the cleanest hands the boy has ever seen. He shows them a coin — heavy, worn smooth, older than the country, he says — and makes it vanish between one word and the next.
“Where did it go?” the boy demands.
“To next year,” the magician says. “Everything goes there eventually. It’s the one address that never changes.”
Then he takes it out of the boy’s ear and gives it back to the air, and for the rest of the afternoon the ear stays cold, the way a keyhole is cold. For his second trick the magician asks whether the tooth is loose yet, and the boy, betrayed, covers his mouth.
The cake comes out wearing seven candles. The room sings his name, stretching it to fit the tune, and somewhere inside the singing the tooth comes free; he holds it in his cheek. He fills himself to the collarbones and blows, and the seven go out together, and everyone applauds. His mother relights them — for the photograph, she says — and he blows again, and this time there are eight. He decides he counted wrong. With the first slice he swallows a little blood along with the lemon, and tells no one.
They play the game with the chairs. One chair is taken away, the music plays, they orbit the table, chair legs shrieking on the tile, the music stops, and whoever is left standing carries the taken chair out to the balcony, where the smokers make room, and it sits facing the city. The neighbor’s husband loses the first round, laughing, takes his glass out with him, and salutes the cranes.
The doorbell rings.
The boy goes to answer it and has to reach down for a handle he remembers reaching up to. In the doorway stands the best friend, back from his first job in another country, with a beard nobody agreed to and a bottle too good for plastic cups, breathing hard from the hundred and twelve steps. The party takes him in without pausing, and when the boy turns back to the table his own voice has changed and his mother’s hair has gone gray in the time it took her to fetch the good plates.
“You’re grown now, or near it,” his father says, and gives him a watch, the kind you wind. “So that one thing in this house tells the time without asking anyone’s permission.” The watch is cold, then warm, and its ticking is the smallest possible galloping. Around them the party continues at its single afternoon.
Out on the balcony there are three chairs now, then five. Nobody carries them back in. The smokers have thinned; the flowerpot has been rinsed and put away. The neighbor comes alone these days, and no one says anything. What is there to say about a chair.
There is a year of the game when the music stops and he and a woman reach the same chair at the same instant, her hip hard against his hip, and he loses on purpose, and carries his chair out to the balcony with his blood loud, and her laugh follows him out and stays the whole evening. Later she comes out for the cool, the singing behind her, and the balcony holds them the way it holds the chairs. Her mouth tastes of lemon and somebody’s cigarette. His hands learn her between two verses — the notch of a hip, the damp heat under a waistband, a breast heavy in his palm through cotton — and her laugh goes quiet against his throat and stays. The empty chairs face the city. They put themselves right before the song needs her, and at the table nobody asks what the cold air has done to make two people warm. For years after that it is she who begins the song, half a beat early, every year. Some years later her chair joins the rows. He does not watch that round.
The stair street gets a rail bolted up its middle, then a chair that rides the rail. The fountain at the fortieth step comes back to life one spring and runs water marked non-potable in three languages. The laundry moves indoors; the lines stay up, carrying nothing. The café changes hands and keeps its chairs; a boy still carries them up when they are wanted — a different boy every decade, the same complaint at the fortieth step. The transformer is swapped one winter for something silent, and for months the whole hill sleeps badly, missing a note nobody will admit to knowing. Across the water the city grows a second bridge, lit at night like a pulse, and deliveries stitch the evening with the sound of patient insects.
At some point the doorbell stops being a bell and becomes a voice, saying each guest’s name a half-second before they can ring. The handle goes next: the door learns to open itself, and for a year his hand keeps arriving anyway, closing on nothing. The photograph asks the room’s permission before taking itself; his aunt’s chair declines on her behalf. His aunt attends, set upon her usual seat like a patch of weather, saving her hips, she says, for a wedding she does not name.
The cake arrives one year wearing a fire that is a picture of one. The room sings; he fills himself to the collarbones; he blows. The flame does not move. It is not his. Something in him, small and exact, wants to put a fist through the picture of it. He stands over it with his lungs half empty. Afterward his mother strikes a match in the kitchen doorway, just for the smell — sulfur, then smoke, cupped in her hand like something that has escaped and come to her to be hidden.
There is a year the best friend does not come, and a year he cannot come, and a year the door says his name again.
What comes in has his walk. It brings a bottle too good for plastic cups. It is not out of breath. The family licensed him back, and the work is close, very close: the walk right, the toast right, only the laugh arriving half a second late, every time. The man catches himself listening for the lateness the way you press a bruise. He lets it stay through the song. It knows the song. The next year he asks the door not to say that name anymore. It is almost enough. He can feel himself starting to prefer it.
Somewhere in the apartment there is a plastic whistle that was never blown.
His father’s chair goes out to the balcony in a round of the game one year, and the man lets it go. His mother bakes her last cake by hand the spring her wrists give out; after that the cake is printed to her file, exact to the gram, and tastes like a photograph of lemons. Then there is the year the matchbox becomes his. It rides in his pocket through the whole party, gone soft at the corners like a knuckle, and at dusk he steps out among the empty chairs and strikes one, just for the smell, and cups it.
The doorbell rings. The doorbell rings. The doorbell rings.
The wall by the window fills with photographs, each taken from the same corner at the same angle, a century of the same table. The recent ones correct themselves overnight — a glass moved into a hand, a gaze unblurred, the room’s continuity serviced while it sleeps. Nobody bills for it. The first photograph is paper and answers to nobody. In the latest ones the children have to be told which one is him. In the first photograph he is seven, mid-blow, cheeks full. The cake wears eight candles. He has counted many times. He has stopped mentioning it.
His knees are leased now; on cold days he can hear the terms. His father’s watch turns loose on his wrist, the strap punched twice and the buckle still hunting for bone. The rain over the far hill starts at the top of the hour, as purchased, and stops at ten to, and the cranes stand in it unmoved — the same cranes, still shy of a roof.
A girl with a braid is eating the sugar flowers off the cake. It is a different braid. It is the same appetite. Somebody’s granddaughter, or great-granddaughter; the rope of it is knotted somewhere in the room’s talk. He watches her strip the cake’s shoulders bare and thinks: good.
The twins, old men now, arrive in matching shirts and deny nothing.
They still play the game, whoever is here, whoever stands willingly. The music plays, the circle shuffles, the music stops. He has been winning for years. The balcony is full now — rows of them, plastic gone chalky with the weather, one blown flat every winter and always, by morning, set upright again — all facing the city. The city has an audience.
At the last party there is one chair at the table, his, and the room is full anyway — children on the floor, presences on the sills, the door greeting all afternoon in its patient voice. The girl with the braid, taller now, produces the matchbox from somewhere with a magician’s manners and looks at him for a ruling. One candle stands on the cake. Real. For historical reasons, somebody says, or against them.
She strikes the match. Sulfur, then smoke. The room sings his name, stretching it to fit the tune — the song arriving in voices he knows, and voices half a second late, and voices from rooms he will never see — and he sits before the one small fire that is finally, again, his, and gathers what breath the plan allows him.
It is not enough. He knows it the way you know a stair is missing.
The girl leans past his shoulder — the braid touches his ear, cold, the way a keyhole is cold — and blows the candle out for him. Someone else’s breath.
The smoke stands up from the wick and leans toward the balcony.
Under the rim of his plate, when she lifts it away, there is a coin — heavy, worn smooth, older than the country — cold from wherever it has been, back from the one address that never changes.
The doorbell rings.