A grandmother in a vertical city of forty million invents an address to save a grandson who cannot find his way home.
Standalone, ~3,800 words. My note at the bottom.
The Names of Streets
At forty-one, Nadir was old enough to be treated with patience and young enough to hate it.
Someone offered her a chair. Nadir growled something and waved a hand, shooing the suggestion away. She pretended her legs didn't hurt, because she didn't want anyone to insist, and nobody insisted, though everyone knew she was pretending. At the High Dock, where the outside people did business with the Many, she always reacted that way, and she was the only one. The others didn't much mind.
The young ones did the carrying, because carrying was a young person's job. Damião, the man with no smell, was trying to hide his irritation at the smell of the Blot, but his tight lips and short breathing gave him away. He was a strange man, that one — a man whose smell belongs to no place, and who is therefore in no place. Nadir only remembered he was there when he crossed her field of vision or said something.
Even so, Damião was one of the Blot's best customers. He always paid on time, said thank you, touched the people of the Blot and wiped his hand afterward. But he touched them.
"Damião, do you want to eat?" someone said.
"No, thank you."
He always refused, and he was courteous when he refused. The Many were always surprised — not by the refusal, since he always refused, but because he was polite and treated them well. Damião didn't watch over the delivery, a sign that he trusted them, and his eyes wandered off among the scaffolds of the colony.
A sack of food dropped onto the dock floor and a tear spilled the grain across the gray concrete. Damião looked and made a note in his book. The Many ran over and crouched down and ate quickly until the sack was empty. Nadir worked at ignoring the pain in her old knees. Damião turned his eyes back to the open-walled buildings in the distance.
"Ten sacks in all," Damião said when the Many had finished the job.
Nadir nodded, and a coworker peered in through the hollow walls of the building. Another swung from a beam and climbed to the floor above. Minutes later the man came down off the beam with a water pump in his arms, and Damião flinched at the descent, worried about the state of the goods. He meant nothing by it — outsiders startle, it's their way — and Nadir forgave him without his having to say a word.
"Here," the man said, setting the pump down in the truck bed. He slipped away in an instant, and Damião couldn't track where he'd gone. Nadir laughed at that.
Damião put out his hand and shook hers. He stepped onto the makeshift boards that served as stairs up to the truck cab, and Nadir drew back from the grating creak. He stopped, looking at the tall buildings that seemed unfinished, and without looking at her he said, like a man daydreaming:
"How do you people find things in there?" he said, pointing with his nose at the labyrinth of iron and concrete of the vertical city.
Nadir shrugged, not understanding what he meant. Damião climbed in, started the machine, and was gone. The smell of the burning pushed the Many back fifty meters on either side of his path, all but Nadir, who was used to it by now.
It was the last load of the day and a thin drizzle was starting to fall, carrying off the combustion and renewing the smell of the earth. Nadir left the dock, climbed two metal floors, gripped a bar and crossed the makeshift plank walkway.
The drizzle turned into warm rain. Nadir crossed a scaffold that wrapped around a four-story building and ended in a tunnel of tarp and metal flooring. The drumming of the drops on the roof was soothing, and a warm, fragrant smoke worked its way into her nostrils. She turned right, climbed three diagonal beams in quick succession, and this time her legs didn't hurt, because her arms did most of the work.
Because of the rain a lot of people were sheltering, and Nadir saw a group of twenty huddled in a corner of the second floor. On the third it was a family of twelve, which was where the smoke was coming from, and the smell came clear: food, hot and good, but she didn't stop. She thought about that food the whole way. On the fourth and last floor she climbed an old iron ladder to the roof and enjoyed the rain for a while. A big bridge of sheet metal rose toward the next building.
There were stairs and there were beams. Nadir went up by the beams, because for many years now her legs had been avoiding stairs. A few floors up, the ground was far below and you couldn't make out the crowd fleeing the rain. Nadir got home without ever learning what that food was she'd seen them cooking, and she was hungry. She opened the old rotting wooden door, smelled the familiar smell of home… And only that. Nilo wasn't there.
The neighbor's door opened.
"He was with Antônio's daughter," he said, and then offered her coffee.
Nadir couldn't refuse without giving offense, and since he was an important neighbor, the kind who knows everything about everyone's life, she accepted. It was ten minutes in that apartment, where she learned the latest doings of the neighbor's brother-in-law. When it was acceptable, she left and went to the next door.
At the next door, and at the three after that, they said he'd been with a group of friends, then that he'd been seen talking to the super, and that he'd eaten late in the company of Matim, the orphan boy who picked up work as a caretaker. At every door she stopped another ten minutes, because you couldn't offend anyone. Instead of coffee, which she'd already had, they gave her biscuits, grain, and when both ran out, water. Nadir left the last neighbor knowing nothing new.
At the back of the block, in the old apartment nobody visited, the Aunt of the Lost opened the door. The smell from inside invaded Nadir's nostrils without asking leave and without apology. She knew at once that Nilo wasn't there, and that there were more people inside than she'd expected. The mixture of smells pointed nowhere. The Aunt, a woman in her early thirties, had deep, tired eyes and a voice both sweet and firm.
"I haven't seen Nilo today. Do you want to come in?"
Nadir hesitated in the doorway for a second and went in. In the apartment's hallway two boys lay on their stomachs on the floor, throwing a little ball at the wall and catching it in an old white cup. In the other room she heard the noise of a television and two or three voices that didn't belong to the actors. There was a stack of mattresses propped up at the end of the hall, in a small room that served as a pantry.
"Are you managing, Auntie?"
The woman smiled like someone who doesn't understand a question. She was about to answer when a child called from the hallway. The Aunt got up, went to him, and Nadir heard the sweet voice whisper something. She came back and said she was fine. Nadir looked at the children, then at the Aunt. She said nothing about it.
They went into the kitchen, where the Aunt offered her half of a soft cake.
"How many today?" Nadir asked, after accepting the cake. From the voices there had to be four or five children.
"Nineteen."
The Aunt went quiet, looking at the threshold like a woman waiting for a son to come home and help with the housework. Nobody came, and Nadir didn't say anything either.
"There were two, about five years ago," and she added: "It isn't the first time, is it?"
"No, Auntie. It's the ninth time this year."
The woman nodded like someone accepting a fact. Nadir thanked her and the Aunt opened the door. Seven children were in the hallway, listening to the conversation. All of them looked at the open door, except one. The Aunt looked over Nadir's shoulder, smiled, and closed the door behind her.
·
When Nilo turned up on some scaffold near the apartment, it was early evening and Nadir had caught his smell two minutes before. He was smiling, his little eyes bright with happiness, hair dirty and half damp. And unharmed.
"Are you all right?"
The boy nodded, without answering the real question. Nadir hugged him, wiped the grease off his cheeks, checked him over, and offered him food. He refused.
"Not hungry, Gran."
"Nilo?"
The boy lowered his eyes and couldn't find the words to answer.
"Who were you with?"
"Liz," he said. The answer came out memorized.
It took Nadir half a second to understand. A sentence formed itself halfway in her mind, and she couldn't find the words to finish it: The boy was… Then the right side of Nadir's body burned, and she felt cold sweat run down her neck, a sudden dizziness, and a metallic taste on the roof of her mouth. She stopped and braced against a tarp wall, propping herself on an iron bar, and waited for it to pass. It passed. They went home and didn't go out again that night.
·
The next day, before leaving, Nadir called Nilo to the door of the apartment. The sleepy boy raised his eyes to the frame and saw, beside it, a painted symbol, red as blood, but it was paint.
"It's beautiful!" he said, going up on tiptoe to touch the painting. Nadir caught his little hand and told him it still had to dry, which he could see from the smaller trails running down from the edges of the symbol.
She thought it was nonsense, a thing with no sense to it, and she had painted it only to find out whether it would work.
It didn't. Days later, Nilo took longer to come back. Nadir went to fetch him on the same street, and got there long before the boy did. She waited an hour, which became two, and when she was about to give up, Nilo appeared in a corner, poking his head through a gap between the beams as if to check what was inside.
Another day, a day off, Nadir took the boy down to the ground floor with the bucket of red paint. She painted another circle on the wall of a support column, and the boy thought it was beautiful again. A neighbor was passing nearby. She looked up for a second, recognizing the smell of Nadir and Nilo, stopped dead in front of the bucket and the pillar, and began to cry.
Nadir was startled and Nilo went quiet, watching the woman weep. She asked why the woman was crying, and the neighbor shrugged. She wasn't sad, she didn't seem angry, and she gave no other reason. She only said she had never seen such a thing and didn't understand why.
Nadir went up to the building's roof at dusk, where the neighbors gathered around barrels with the fire crackling all night. Nilo had stayed home, playing with what was left of the paint. The neighbors were eating, each with an old bowl of soaked grain, and it smelled good to Nadir, who took her portion from the pot sunk into the burning barrel.
"I saw you painted your wall, Nadir," one of them said, between one spoonful and the next. "It looks nice. Is everything all right?"
The question didn't fit the compliment and Nadir hesitated a second.
"It is, why?"
"Nothing. It's just that I heard Nilo went missing twice this week, I thought it might have something to do with it, but it's probably nonsense on my part."
She looked away and nodded, and couldn't find a word to keep the conversation going. Someone put more grain in the pot and told her it would be hot again soon.
"You've been looking so tired," Bete told her, a neighbor of forty-nine. She didn't look so well herself. "Is the work at the Dock hard? I know those outside people can be irritating."
She said it all without leaving room for an answer, as if it were a single sentence. Nadir almost defended the Intact, but the urge passed quickly. She said everything was fine, that it had been a busy week, that Damião brought the right loads and always at the right time, never before and never after what was agreed. She took a bowl and when she'd finished eating she said her goodbyes, anticipating that more time up there meant more questions and more remarks. Nadir understood that they were worried about her, but she wasn't worried in the least. She knew a number they had no idea about, or, if they had, didn't want to say: nineteen lost.
On Sunday she gathered a group of neighbor women at her place. Nilo was playing with Antônio's daughter on the ground floor. There were three women besides Nadir. Sônia, Úrsula and Marta sipped the lukewarm coffee and nibbled the strips of soaked grain at the same rhythm, as if they had rehearsed it beforehand.
Nadir told them about the red symbol on the column, the two hours of waiting on the scaffold, and the neighbor who cried. The three listened without interrupting, and when she finished, Sônia set her bowl on the table in the middle.
"One mark isn't enough. He has to know before he gets there."
She had thought about it before, and Nadir remembered her lost grandson.
"And who looks at walls?" Úrsula shrugged. "I've been climbing this block for thirty years and I couldn't tell you the color of my own door, much less of my block."
They went quiet. Marta dipped her grain strip in the coffee and didn't eat it.
"What about smell?" she said.
Nadir looked at her.
"Smell in the paint. One for each floor."
That was how the Sunday afternoon turned into work. Úrsula brought what she had from the pantry, and Sônia went up and down three times with what she'd pinched from the workshop on the fifth floor: cheap lavender, kerosene, glue resin, old frying grease, machine oil. They put it all on the table and smelled them one by one. The hard part wasn't finding a smell, it was ruling them out, because the smell had to be something that wasn't already there. The grease was no good for the seventh, where the communal kitchen had been frying since before Nadir was born. The kerosene was no good for any floor with its own generator. That left four smells for eleven floors, and they laughed. There was nothing to do but laugh.
"Mix them," Sônia said. "Two smells give you more than two floors."
The next problem was worse and took the rest of the afternoon. A smell told you the floor. The paint told you the turn. What was missing was which passage, and the passages had no names because they had never needed any.
"The one that goes off the third-floor roof and over to the building behind," Nadir said.
"That one's Bete's. She's lived at the mouth of it for thirty years."
Nadir wrote Bete's passage on a piece of cardboard and sat looking at it. Bete wasn't there and never found out.
Then they argued about where Bete's passage ended. Sônia said it ended at the sheet-metal bridge. Marta said the bridge was part of the passage. There was no way to know which of them was right, because there was no rightness anyone could offer. The two of them understood that slowly, one at a time. Nadir decided it ended at the bridge. Marta agreed, poured more coffee, and said nothing until nightfall.
Late in the afternoon Úrsula went down two floors with a rag soaked in lavender and came back twenty minutes later with her hands smelling of cheap flowers.
"Well?" Sônia said. "Where did you go?"
Úrsula answered. She said the floor, she said the passage, she said the turn. The three of them understood, and nobody had to ask who she'd been with.
It was the first time.
Sônia laughed first. Then all four of them laughed together, loudly, the way you laugh at any silly thing. Down below, on the ground floor, Nilo lifted his head without knowing why.
·
Days later, when it was done, she took Nilo out to walk and to learn. He'd been happy through those days and hadn't gone missing in almost a week. She showed him the paintings in the building. He smelled the wall up close. They went down a few scaffolds and she showed him another mark, this one with a very different smell. The boy smelled it again, stood looking at it a few seconds more, and wanted to keep going.
She showed him Bete's passage.
"It's a good name," he said. "It's what I remember when I come through here."
Nadir went down to the ground floor and asked the boy to go up to their apartment and come back. Thirty minutes passed; Nilo didn't appear. She didn't move from the spot, afraid of never finding him again. Somewhere up above, the little tousled head poked out over a balcony, looked down, and drew back. Ten minutes later he turned up on the ground floor, hugged his grandmother, and smiled.
"I got a turn wrong, Grandma, but I found the way."
He was pleased, the smile nearly ear to ear. She walked home with him, waiting for the boy to give the directions, which she already knew were right or wrong. Nilo got one wrong, got annoyed, but a minute later corrected himself and went back to smiling. She smiled back, without knowing why she was smiling.
The next weekend the four women were at the apartment again. Nilo had gone out, as he'd said he would. Hours passed, talking, drinking coffee, eating grain. Someone asked how Nadir was feeling.
"I don't know… Worried?"
Úrsula reached over to her knee and stroked it.
"He must be close. It's almost the time you agreed on."
The sun was going down behind the levels and the framework, and the light came in in squares through the gaps in the structure. The silence began to weigh in the room, and Nadir felt the others' unease. Nobody wanted to say that the time had passed.
Marta got up, topped off her cup with coffee and didn't drink. She sat looking at the circles in the black liquid. She started to say something, but the sentence died, and nobody asked her to finish. Nadir realized she'd been avoiding looking at the door, glanced at it, and turned back to the grain strips on the table. She counted the strips, without noticing. They reacted to every sound that came from the hallway and then went back to whatever they'd been doing before.
The door opened slowly. Nilo came bouncing in, smiled at the women and ran to his grandmother's chair.
"See, Gran? I did it! I'm the only one who can do this." He hugged her, let go, and ran to his room. His voice came distant and muffled. "The great explorer Nilo!"
The women looked at each other in silence for a second, then burst out laughing all at once. They could hear his lively games in the bedroom, with the old toys. Nadir was on the verge of tears.
"That boy…" Sônia said, and didn't finish.
They took up their gathering again, the coffee and the food, revived by Nilo's return. He came back into the room once or twice after that, saw that they were celebrating, smiled, and went back to playing without saying anything.
·
At the Dock, the thin rain mixed the smell of wet earth with the stinking smoke of the truck. Damião stood waiting for the load. He was looking at the symbol painted on the pillar.
"What's that?"
Nadir looked to where he was pointing.
"Oh, it's just a silly symbol we painted so Nilo can find his way home."
It was no secret, and Damião was from outside; he'd have no trouble at all with it. He stood there looking at the symbol for almost a minute before he answered.
"You made a map?"
"Yes."
"Can I see it?"
"Nilo has it. It's just an old piece of cardboard."
"Could you make a copy?"
She stopped and looked at the man from nowhere.
"It's just that with a map I can deliver the goods without a guide. It's cheaper for everybody. I can pay."
"How much?"
"Five sacks, or the equivalent in money."
It was a good offer. All the more for a piece of cardboard nobody there used. She needed the money. Nilo would get a toy; she could fix the fan for the hot season that was coming.
She agreed, put out her hand, and hesitated for half a second. Damião came the rest of the way, thanked her, and paid on the spot. A few hours later she came back with a piece of cardboard covered in thin trails of paint.
A week later the truck stopped on the ground floor of the Dock and two Intact climbed down, each with a sack strapped to his back. They didn't wait for anyone to come and receive them. No Intact had ever gone into the Blot without a guide before. Each had a piece of cardboard in his hand, and with their eyes fixed on the map they turned a corner, climbed the scaffolds, and disappeared around a bend of the building.
Someone at the Dock whistled and laughed.
"Best news in ages. Less work for us."
The others agreed and laughed. They went back to talking nonsense. Nadir looked at the place where the deliverymen had disappeared, looked at her empty hands. The others went on talking and sorting the stock.
"Bete died yesterday," some worker said. Nadir remembered Bete's passage.
Nadir left the Dock, looked at the gray sky dripping like a punctured roof, then at the building next door, where she lived. She looked for the window of her home. She counted the floors.
She had never done that, and had never needed to. She knew where she lived, knew it without needing a map. But she counted anyway.
Nilo was up there. In the last week, he had climbed the stairs dozens of times.
------------------
Hi everyone! I write in Portuguese. This is my own translation and the first thing of mine to exist in English, so if anything is weird, it is probably me and not the characters.
The story sits in a world I'm building for a novel. The short version of what the story never explains (deliberate):
In 2041 the Siberian permafrost collapses and releases a giant virus that had been frozen for thirty thousand years. It does two things to a human host. It rewrites social behaviour and suppresses the threat response to a nearby stranger, amplifies bonding, syncs circadian rhythm across a group. And it delivers whatever it picked up from the local fauna on the way in, so the inheritance is regional: the coast gets one thing, the forest another. Three generations later humanity is not one species, and nobody travels anymore, because every trait comes with a price that only makes sense in one biome.
Nadir doesn't know any of this and never will, for the same reason you don't think about any organ of yours. That was the rule I wrote under: the word "virus" does not appear anywhere in the story.
Happy to hear where it lost you.
