When I finally open the door, I just wave them inside, and hold out a red-and-gold-woven bag to store their timepieces. Then I show them into the waiting room, where a pendulum appears motionless at first. On the other wall, to their left, words of comfort unscroll across a cream-colored sign, so slowly you could doze off and wake to see one new word. The hand-loomed Argelan carpet absorbs all sounds once they’ve removed their shoes. On one of the chairs, a marmot named Cyrus sleeps, with rippling golden fur and blue velvety pseudopods that can extrude or disappear as needed. Most people have never seen a marmot before, let alone a full-grown one that weighs as much as a human toddler. Some of them dare to lean forward and touch Cyrus, and his contented rumble first startles and then relaxes them.
We don’t start preparing the soothing blend of coffee and the geometrically complex interlocking pastries until they arrive, and that process takes three of us a while. Most of the time, the customers’ breathing slows down little by little, and they stop jerking their heads in every direction. A few of them just get up and leave.
After the waiting room, they come into the main salon and stare at the embroidered floor cushions, low tables, wall hangings, and shelves full of books so old their crystals are fogged. They stand there, still breathing too fast and hunching forward, and try to assert themselves. And the only person facing them in that cool, persimmon-scented room is me.
I always smile and gesture for them to sit on the cushions with one palm, and then pour a little clove-scented coffee into their cup, in a thin stream. They start talking, to fill the silence, and I let them. When at last they make a silence, I whisper something, such as a line from one of Hernan’s favorite books, and they have to concentrate to hear. Eventually someone comes in, Kate or Meg, and plays soft tones on a zither.
Behind me, a pinwheel slows down at an imperceptible rate, and the music, too, slows little by little—all the tricks, aimed at putting their Timefulness to sleep, just for a while. I count my breaths, and breathe slower each time, the way I practiced. I sit languidly, ankle-skirt tucked under my feet.
And meanwhile, I study each one of them. Hernan has been training me to read people, to pay attention to all the little cues and hints about what’s really going on with them. So, in turn, I can soothe them with tiny actions. I’ve discovered a whole side to myself that I’d only glimpsed before, and I’ve found it’s easier than I expected to take control over a scene with another person, as long as I have a well-defined role and we start from a place of quiet. And I like helping these people, who keep the farmwheels spinning or the waste flowing through the reclamation plant, to believe that they can survive another turn of the shutters.
Around the time they’ve settled enough to hear me, I do something that feels like a huge exertion. I make conversation.
The Illyrian Parlour is designed to look like a coffeehouse back in Zagreb, the greatest city back on Earth at the start of the Brilliant Age. But at some point, Hernan realized that what people in Xiosphant really needed was a place to lose track of time.
* * *
The latest client has burn scars on his face that occlude one eye and create a slight inlet of baldness on one side of his head. Due to an industrial accident, perhaps, or brief exposure to direct sunlight (I think of my mother and flinch, but not visibly, so as not to upset him). “They call me Mustache Bob,” he says, “on account of my mustache.” This is a joke he’s told many times—or not quite a joke, more a deflection. His mustache is certainly impressive: dark, bushy, and tapered on the sides of his full lips.
My first instinct is to think that he just wants to be someplace where nobody will ask him about his injury, where someone can just look at him without drama. But I study him more closely: the downward eye movements, the way he clutches his multitool from work, the twinge of anxiety when I quote from a poem about the Golden Thread of obligation and care. He’s feeling guilty about something that he can’t talk about. Whatever it is, he’s afraid people will find out and destroy him—something I can identify with better than almost anyone.
So we do what Hernan calls the Indirection Dance. I don’t ask him any questions, and we just carry on a superficial chat about art, music, philosophy, all of the things nobody ever talks about in Xios phant. Back in Zagreb, at its height, fashionable people traveled all the way from the other city-states—even as far away as Khartoum, New Shanghai, and Ulaanbaatar—via slow railways that snaked far below the toxic surface. Just so they could sit in rooms like this, and talk about nothing.
Bob won’t even let out a hint about his secret transgression, but meanwhile he gets excited talking about this cartoon he saw as a child, which they streamed at the Grand Cinema before shutters-up. He makes pictures with his hands while he tries to describe the story. Then, on a hunch, I mention other forms of art, specifically sculpture, and he shuts down.
Just before our session ends, I find out Bob’s sin: he needs to keep his hands busy when he’s monitoring all the big machines at work. So he’s taken to carving tiny figurines out of spare chunks of banyan wood, and he wants to give them away to people. But gifts make Xiosphanti people uncomfortable, suspicious, maybe even angry. If someone just gives you something, they’re saying that you need help, or they’re trying to insinuate themselves into your life. Like everyone always says, “Freely given, twice cursed.” Except maybe Bianca, I guess.
There’s no time left to find the right way to reassure Bob gently that he’s done no wrong, even though we pretend, in here, to have all the time in the world. So I just say in my soft voice, “If you come back, I’d like one of your carvings. I’ll keep it next to my bunk.” For a moment, he pulls away, because he doesn’t want my charity. But then he sees that the look on my face hasn’t changed, and he nods, smiling a little, then runs because he’s late for work.
When I get back to the staging area, Jeremy babbles a stream of praise for my craft, but he’s more scared than ever that he can’t handle this job. I shush him, and he waits a long time for me to speak. “Maybe the next client we can deal with together.” He’s way too grateful, almost crying, and I remember the part about him having nowhere else to go.
* * *
I can’t help studying Hernan the way he’s taught me to study other people. He sits in an armchair that looks more comfortable than it is, with big white wings and carvings of waves and boats on the arms. Cyrus the marmot is snuggled in his lap, growling with pleasure as Hernan scruffs his ears with his right hand.
Hernan is taking a huge risk—because Cyrus has rolled onto his back, exposing the gland on his belly that’ll squirt a half liter of acid if anything startles him. The acid won’t kill Hernan, but it would sting horribly, and could cause permanent damage. Still, Hernan looks contented, wearing his usual gold-threaded tunic and linen pants, just with no shoes. Except that Hernan’s left thumb is caught in a vise of his own fingers, like a fear he’s keeping at bay.
I’m perched on a big pile of cushions, ready to topple at any moment, in Hernan’s personal study, which is tiny and crammed with beauty. The dark walls are covered with little statues made with precious stones that must have come from a treasure meteor, red-and-gold watercolor paintings of the Young Father that someone risked blindness to create, strings of vivid blue feathers from some creature I’ve never seen.
I’ve worked here for ages, but I still don’t understand Hernan at all. Everything about him, and about the Illyrian Parlour, spits in the face of Xiosphanti values. Not just the way we try to loosen the reins of Timefulness around people’s necks, but also this elaborate tribute to Zagreb, one of the seven city-states that pooled their resources to build the Mothership and come to this planet.
There was a man in my apartment building, when I was little, who casually mentioned in public that he thought he had ancestors in the Calgary compartment on the Mothership, and people whispered that he was trying to set himself apart from everybody else. I heard my parents whisper sharp-edged little phrases about him, right before shutters-up. Soon after, he lost his job and had to move out, and I don’t know what happened to him after that.
“We’re all Xiosphanti now,” people always say, as if those seven cities dissolved into one people the moment we stepped onto this planet. Even Bianca would never talk about her roots when she and I whispered together after curfew.
Hernan proudly mentions his family came from Zagreb, which is an even more shocking confession, given what the history books say. He doesn’t flinch, or cavil, or act embarrassed by his own rudeness. He just comes out and says it, often right before he lectures me and the other servers about the beautiful way that everything was done in Old Zagreb at its peak.
He doesn’t talk so much about what came later.
But still, Hernan is afraid of something, or perhaps just waiting for tragedy to arrive. This place can’t last, we all know that—but he knows it more than we do.
“Do you know why your mother used to come here?” Hernan asks me, without looking up from Cyrus.
“Yes,” I say, without thinking about it.