They drained the cistern the year the boats came off the boat-hill, and what was left underneath was a room the size of a cathedral lying down. Forty columns holding up a hill. Stone that has held water for a thousand years does not forget the job; it sweats, it drips somewhere always, it keeps the dark at water temperature. Somebody strung lights between the columns, put a bar where the deep end was, and called it the Tank.
The market’s awnings are downhill from the door. You smell fish on the way in and the salt stays on you all night, like an opinion.
At the door they strap the night to your wrist. A gray band, blank as a promise. It goes bright when you owe and dark when you’re done owing, and there are boys who can read a wrist across the whole floor the way old men read weather. Drinks go by the clock: the hour between nine and ten is the cheap hour, and the young arrive at nine like accountants, drink fast and level, and then hold their glasses through the expensive hours like arguments they are not finished with.
He came at nine. He was twenty-two and his band went bright on the second round and he stopped, which is what twenty-two means in this city.
At the door the boy ahead of him is refused. His band reads something in his blood the barman would have served anyway, and the door will not open, and he swears at it with real hatred and goes home, and in the morning he is alive, and nobody is billed for that.
Nobody plays the music in the Tank. The room does. The columns are wired through their bones, and the bass comes up out of the stone the way the water used to come up, from below, from everywhere, patient. You dance in a drowned room ten years dry, and the room plays what it wants, and what it wants gets later as the night does. The Tank is ten years old and feels like three centuries from now. That is the thing it sells, and the city tolerates it, in the manner of a family with one loud cousin in it. It brings in the young, and the young bring their wrists.
She came down from the far hill with rain in her hair that nobody down here had paid for. Scheduled rain, somebody’s contract, and she’d walked through it on the way to the funicular like a girl robbing a garden. He saw the rain first and her second and got the order wrong for the rest of his life.
They drank the cheap hour’s last round standing up. The shots at the Tank are named for weather: a purchased rain, a shortfall, a long delay. The barman pours the shortfall short. It is the joke, and it gets one laugh.
The floor took them the way the water used to take the boats: without asking, all at once. The bass came up the columns and through the soles and put everyone’s heart on the same clock. She danced with her eyes shut. He danced like a man trying to remember the steps to something that has none. The room got them close and then got them closer, and the stone sweated, and the salt on everyone’s skin was the market’s and their own, and her mouth by his ear said something the bass took away, twice, and the third time it was just his name for the night, which was: you.
The cloakroom crush at one o’clock is a tide. Bodies in, coats out, everyone’s wrists over everyone’s heads. They came out of it laughing, with each other’s bands.
They found out at the bar. His wrist had gone dark; it refused nothing. Hers had gone bright, and it was his bright, his owing. They looked at the two little lights a long moment and neither of them said anything about it.
A girl beside them is telling anyone within reach that her cousin has got the early airport bus, a good job with the shifts he likes. She says it twice.
Trade back, he said.
Spend me, she said.
He said the city doesn’t have a field for that. She said the city can file it under drinks.
So he wore her money and she wore his lack of it, and they bought the expensive hours with the wrong arms, and every glass was a small theft from no one, or a gift, the machine couldn’t say and neither could they, and that not-saying was the drunkest thing in the room.
Behind the third column there are stairs that used to go down to the water and now go down to the dark. The old water stairs, worn round, wet by tradition. They took them. The stone was a hundred years of cold and they were twenty minutes of hot, and the drip somewhere kept its own slow count, and her hands knew the way and his learned it, and the bass upstairs went on without them, patient as the water it was standing in for. Her shoulders took the stone’s cold; his knees took the step’s grit. Salt on her throat under his mouth; her hands certain at his belt, his asking at her hips, answered. What they said down there had no prices on it. What they did down there has no field either, anywhere, and the city has never managed to invent one, and it is not for lack of trying.
They came up salted and serious and starving, at the hour when the Tank turns its lights the color of almost-morning.
Once a night, the room picks a wrist. The round is on the house. The fine print lives on the band: the free round is paid for with the night — the room’s recording of your night, whole, licensed to the house, to keep, to show. The wall above the bar plays the bought nights all week. It is the best wall in the city and the queue never gets shorter.
The room picked his wrist. The light came down like weather. Applause from strangers, a free glass sliding, the barman’s nod — and the wrist was hers, on him, dark all night with his bright riding her arm, and somewhere in the house’s ledgers a purchase was made from a party the machine could not name. Two nights on one band. The reader filed what it could: one night, retained; ownership unclear; value certain.
They did not explain. There was no window for explaining and no field for it and anyway the glass was free.
At the gate, at dawn, they traded wrists back the way you hand back a borrowed coat, warmer than it was. The gate read them out one at a time and got everything wrong in a way that balanced, and let them go. Outside, the market was setting up under the awnings, wet fish on dry ice, and the morning was gray and unmetered and theirs. The night was the house’s now. They had the morning, which is not for sale yet.
The wall had it the next week. Two people on the old water stairs, in the almost-dark, the camera loving them and unable to name them, a night with no owner playing to a full bar. One night that week they were inside for it, shoulders against the bar, watching themselves happen in the almost-dark — her shoulders taking the stone’s cold a second time, his mouth at her throat in front of a full room — and strangers talking at the screen said you, you, which had been his name for the night, good now in any mouth. Under her coat his thumb found her waistband and stayed, the second spending, cheaper and worse. The wall had their night and the bar had their bodies and nobody made the match. They stood in the queue outside and heard the bass start up out of the stone.
On the wall, somebody’s night was starting again. They paid to get in.