The Kingdom of Many Names

Long ago, in a kingdom whose borders had never been properly surveyed, there lived a King who wished to know the history of his people.

He summoned the Royal Keepers of the Past and commanded them to discover who had lived in the kingdom before the kingdom existed.

“Bring me their bones,” he said, “and tell me their names.”

The Keepers departed into the hills, the caves, and the dry beds of ancient rivers. They returned with fragments of skulls, pieces of jaws, teeth worn almost flat, and bones whose purposes even the wisest among them could not agree upon.

They laid their discoveries upon a long table in the Hall of Origins.

The King came down from his throne to examine them.

“This one,” he said, pointing to a jaw, “looks rather like ours.”

The Chief Keeper bowed.

“It may belong to one of our ancestors, Majesty.”

“And this?”

“A different shape of skull, Majesty.”

“Another ancestor?”

“Possibly.”

The King considered the matter.

“Then give them names.”

The Chief Keeper hesitated.

“Majesty, we have not yet determined whether these fragments belonged to different kinds of people, or whether they represent differences within a single kind.”

The King frowned.

“How can we remember them if they have no names?”

The Chief Keeper bowed again.

“We shall begin with the names, Majesty.”

And so the naming began.

The first bones were assigned to the People of the First Valley. The next were given to the People of the Eastern Ridge. Others belonged to the Ancient Ones, the Earlier Ones, the Almost-First, and the Those-Who-Came-Before.

Every name was entered into the Royal Book of Origins, and every entry was given a place in the great genealogical tree painted upon the walls of the hall.

The King was delighted.

At last, the history of his people had become visible.

But the Keepers continued to search, and more bones came to light.

One day, a young Keeper discovered a skull that resembled one already in the Royal Book, though its brow was heavier and its teeth somewhat different.

He carried it to the Chief Keeper.

“Shall I place it among the People of the First Valley?” he asked.

The Chief Keeper examined it carefully.

“Perhaps. But the differences are considerable.”

“Then shall I give it a new name?”

The Chief Keeper looked towards the great genealogical tree.

There was no room left beneath the branch of the First Valley people.

“Give it a new name,” he said.

The young Keeper named them the People of the Lower Valley.

A new branch was painted upon the wall.

Some years later, another skull was discovered. It resembled the People of the Lower Valley, but its jaw was narrower and its forehead higher.

The Keeper who found it brought it to the hall.

“Is this a new people?” he asked.

The Chief Keeper studied the skull.

“It differs from the People of the Lower Valley.”

“Then it must be a new people.”

“Perhaps.”

The Keeper waited.

The Chief Keeper sighed.

“Give it a name.”

And so the People of the Upper Valley came into the Royal Book.

After that, discoveries followed one another with remarkable speed. Each fragment revealed a difference. Each difference suggested a distinction. Each distinction invited a name.

The branches of the genealogical tree multiplied until they covered the walls, the ceiling, and the pillars. The Keepers began to construct a second hall, then a third, so that every named people might have a place in the history of the kingdom.

The King was pleased.

“Never,” he declared, “has our past been so richly populated.”

Yet a difficulty had begun to trouble the youngest Keepers.

The names were multiplying faster than the bones.

In some cases, a whole people was represented by a single tooth. In others, the bones assigned to one people differed among themselves almost as much as they differed from the bones assigned to another.

The young Keepers brought these observations to the Chief Keeper.

“Perhaps,” one suggested, “some of these names refer to the same people.”

The Chief Keeper regarded him sternly.

“Are you proposing that we erase names from the Royal Book?”

“I am proposing that we examine the evidence.”

“The evidence has already been examined.”

“By whom?”

“By the Keepers who gave the names.”

“But what if they were mistaken?”

The Chief Keeper stood up.

“Young man, the history of this kingdom depends upon the distinctions we have established. If you remove the distinctions, you will throw the history into confusion.”

The young Keeper returned to his desk.

He said nothing more, but he began to compare the bones.

He found that some of the supposed differences were no greater than those between the bones assigned to a single people. Other differences were real, but it was not clear whether they marked separate peoples or merely different ways of living, growing, or changing.

Most troubling of all, he found that the bones did not arrange themselves into the branches painted upon the walls.

Some crossed from one branch to another. Some seemed to belong between two names. Others could be placed almost anywhere, depending on which features the Keeper chose to consider important.

He took his findings to the Chief Keeper.

“The bones do not appear to respect our divisions,” he said.

The Chief Keeper looked at the diagrams.

“Then your diagrams are defective.”

“Perhaps. But I have examined the bones again.”

“Then examine them once more.”

The young Keeper bowed.

For many years he examined them, and for many years the names continued to multiply.

Eventually the Royal Book grew so large that it could no longer be carried by one person. The genealogical tree occupied every wall in every hall. Visitors came from distant kingdoms to marvel at the number of peoples who had lived before the present one.

Some visitors asked whether the distinctions were all equally certain.

The Keepers assured them that each name had been given for a reason.

Other visitors asked why the People of the First Valley and the People of the Lower Valley were not placed together, when their bones seemed so alike.

The Keepers explained that the two peoples had already been established in the Royal Book.

“And the People of the Upper Valley?” asked the visitors.

“They are different.”

“How different?”

The Keepers consulted the records.

“Their differences have been recorded.”

The visitors thanked them and departed.

Meanwhile, the King had grown old. One morning he summoned the Chief Keeper to his bedside.

“Tell me,” he said, “which of all these peoples were truly my ancestors?”

The Chief Keeper brought the Royal Book and opened it upon the bed.

“Majesty, your ancestry is recorded here.”

The King examined the pages.

He saw the names of the First Valley, the Lower Valley, the Upper Valley, the Eastern Ridge, the Ancient Ones, and hundreds of others. Their branches twisted around one another, crossed the margins, and disappeared into the bindings of the book.

“But which of them were my people?” he asked.

“All of them, Majesty, in one way or another.”

“And which were not?”

The Chief Keeper was silent.

The King turned another page.

“Were there so many kinds of us?”

The Chief Keeper looked towards the window, where the hills rose beyond the palace gardens.

“There were many differences, Majesty.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“No, Majesty.”

The King closed the book.

“Then perhaps I have asked the wrong question.”

He died before the Chief Keeper could reply.

In the years that followed, the young Keeper became Chief Keeper himself. He inherited the Royal Book, the halls of names, and the great genealogical tree that covered the walls.

One winter morning, while inspecting a newly discovered collection of bones, he found a fragment that resembled several different peoples in the Royal Book. It could be assigned to the First Valley, the Lower Valley, or the Upper Valley. With equal justification, it might be given an entirely new name.

He carried it to the great hall.

There he found the youngest Keeper standing before the genealogical tree.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“The branches, Master.”

“What about them?”

“I was wondering where the tree would end if we continued adding branches.”

The Chief Keeper followed his gaze.

There were branches upon branches, and names upon names. The oldest roots lay buried beneath the floor. The newest branches had reached the ceiling and were beginning to emerge through the roof.

“Perhaps it has no end,” he said.

“Then how shall we know when we have finished?”

The Chief Keeper looked down at the fragment in his hand.

For a long time he said nothing.

Then he carried it to the table, placed it beside the other bones, and opened the Royal Book.

He did not write a name.

Instead, he wrote a question.

What do these bones permit us to say?

The youngest Keeper watched him.

“Is that its name, Master?”

“No,” said the Chief Keeper. “It is what we must find out.”

Outside, the winter rain began to fall. Water ran down the palace walls and entered the halls through the cracks in the roof. The painted branches darkened, and some of the oldest names began to blur.

The Keepers hurried to protect the Royal Book.

But the Chief Keeper remained at the table, examining the bones.

By morning, the rain had stopped. The names were still there, though several had become difficult to read. The branches remained upon the walls, though some had faded and others had run together.

The fragment lay where the Chief Keeper had left it.

It had acquired no name during the night.

Yet it had not changed.

The Senior Common Room on The Genus of Exceptions

The fossil arrived at St Anselm's on a Wednesday morning, accompanied by a letter from a former student, three photographs, and a request for an opinion.

Professor Quillibrace placed the photographs on the table.

Mr Blottisham examined them over the top of his newspaper.

“Another ancestor?”

“Possibly,” said Quillibrace.

“Of ours?”

“That depends on what you mean by ours.”

Blottisham lowered the newspaper.

“I mean human beings, Professor. I should have thought the matter sufficiently clear.”

Miss Stray, who had been reading the accompanying letter, looked up.

“The letter doesn't say it is a human ancestor. It says the fragment has features that resemble several previously described fossils, while differing from them in certain respects.”

“Then it is a new species,” said Blottisham.

Quillibrace removed his spectacles.

“On what grounds?”

“Because it differs.”

“From what?”

“From the others.”

“In what respects?”

Blottisham looked again at the photographs.

“In respects that are plainly visible.”

Quillibrace replaced his spectacles.

“I see that we have made a promising beginning.”

Miss Stray turned the second photograph towards the light.

“The interesting thing is that the author seems uncertain whether the differences justify a new species or whether they fall within the variation of a species already known.”

“An understandable uncertainty,” said Quillibrace. “Fossil evidence is incomplete. Differences may reflect age, sex, individual variation, evolutionary change, or the limitations of the material available. One must be careful not to ask a fragment to answer questions it cannot answer.”

“Nevertheless,” said Blottisham, “if the fragment is sufficiently different, it deserves a name.”

“Perhaps. But a name is the conclusion of an argument, not a substitute for one.”

Blottisham folded his newspaper.

“I sometimes wonder whether you gentlemen of science have become so cautious that you would hesitate to name a horse even if it were standing on your foot.”

“Only if I suspected that the horse was standing on someone else's foot as well.”

Miss Stray smiled and returned to the letter.

“There is another question here. The author wonders whether some of the proposed distinctions between early human groups are more substantial than others.”

“Of course they are,” said Blottisham. “Some are plainly human, some plainly not.”

“And between them?” asked Miss Stray.

“Intermediate forms.”

“Intermediate between what?”

“Between the human and the non-human.”

Quillibrace leaned back.

“Mr Blottisham, you have introduced a distinction and then used it to explain the very boundary we are trying to investigate.”

“I have done nothing of the kind.”

“You have divided the evidence into human and non-human before establishing what makes the division appropriate.”

Blottisham looked affronted.

“Surely, Professor, we may recognise a human being when we see one.”

“Usually. But we are not discussing a person entering this room. We are discussing fragments of organisms separated from us by considerable stretches of evolutionary history.”

“Which makes recognition more difficult, I grant you. But it does not abolish the distinction.”

“No,” said Quillibrace. “It makes the criteria for drawing it more important.”

Miss Stray set down the letter.

“I wonder whether we are asking two different questions. One is how these organisms were related to one another. The other is how we ought to classify them.”

“Surely the second follows from the first,” said Blottisham.

“Not entirely. We can discover relationships without there being only one possible way to divide them into genera.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“A genus is not a natural boundary marked upon the bones. It is a taxonomic category applied to evolutionary relationships. The evidence constrains our decisions, but it does not always dictate a unique classification.”

“Then taxonomy is arbitrary?” asked Blottisham.

“No. That is precisely the conclusion we must avoid. The fact that a boundary requires judgement does not mean that every boundary is equally defensible.”

Miss Stray returned to the photographs.

“Humans and chimpanzees are very close evolutionary relatives. Some taxonomists have argued that their classification into separate genera should be reconsidered. Others retain the distinction. The disagreement isn't settled simply by pointing to genetic similarity, but neither can the question be dismissed merely because the established names are familiar.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Blottisham, “that we might call chimpanzees human?”

“I am suggesting that we should decide what we mean by a genus before deciding which organisms belong to it.”

Blottisham regarded her gravely.

“I should be very reluctant to belong to a genus whose membership had not been properly vetted.”

Quillibrace reached for his tea.

“An objection that might considerably reduce the number of genera in the world.”

For a moment they were silent.

Outside, a gardener was pruning the roses beneath the Common Room window. Miss Stray watched him gather the cuttings and place them in a basket.

“I wonder,” she said, “whether we would find this question quite so difficult if it concerned a different group of animals.”

“What do you mean?” asked Quillibrace.

“Suppose the fossils belonged to a lineage of deer, or horses. We might debate the evidence, compare their anatomy, reconstruct their relationships, and argue about where one genus should end and another begin. But would we feel that the classification had said something about us?”

“Not unless we happened to be deer,” said Blottisham.

“Exactly.”

Quillibrace put down his cup.

“You suspect that the taxonomic question has acquired an additional significance because the organisms under discussion include our own ancestors.”

“I wonder whether we sometimes expect the classification to preserve a distinction that the evolutionary evidence does not necessarily preserve in the same way.”

Blottisham looked from Miss Stray to the photographs.

“But there are differences. Surely you are not proposing that every organism descended from a common ancestor should be placed in the same genus?”

“Certainly not,” said Miss Stray. “The question is which differences matter for the classification, and whether we apply our criteria consistently.”

Quillibrace drew the letter towards him.

“Consider the difficulty. If we distinguish genera by degree of evolutionary divergence, we must decide how much divergence is sufficient. If we emphasise anatomical organisation, we must decide which characteristics carry the most weight. If we consider ecology or behaviour, the fossil record may tell us very little. No single criterion will necessarily resolve every case.”

“And yet,” said Miss Stray, “we seem particularly anxious to settle the cases that concern ourselves.”

Blottisham rose and walked to the window.

“I cannot help feeling that there is something peculiar about this whole discussion. We are being asked to consider whether human beings should be classified alongside chimpanzees, when the human lineage has produced language, mathematics, architecture, music, philosophy—”

“And taxonomy,” said Quillibrace.

“Precisely! Taxonomy itself demonstrates the distinction.”

“Does it?” asked Miss Stray.

Blottisham turned.

“Surely the ability to classify our own ancestors must count for something.”

“It certainly counts as something we can do,” she replied. “But does the fact that we can describe a distinction establish that nature must contain the distinction in the form we have chosen?”

Blottisham opened his mouth, then closed it.

Quillibrace picked up the photographs again.

“There is a further complication. The fossil might represent a genuinely distinct population, perhaps even a distinct species, without that conclusion telling us anything decisive about its genus. Species and genera are different levels of classification. We cannot simply multiply species and assume that each requires a new genus.”

“Though one might occasionally be tempted,” said Miss Stray.

“Indeed. Especially if the proposed genus attracts attention.”

Blottisham turned from the window.

“Are you suggesting that scientists invent species for the sake of prestige?”

“No,” said Quillibrace. “I am suggesting that scientific institutions create incentives, and that incentives can influence which questions receive attention, which hypotheses are pursued, and which claims are made. That does not establish that any particular classification is wrong. It does mean that the circumstances in which classifications are proposed deserve scrutiny.”

“Then we must classify the classifiers,” said Blottisham.

“An undertaking that would keep us occupied for some time.”

“And who would classify them?”

Quillibrace looked at Miss Stray.

She shook her head.

“I think we might need a different approach.”

Blottisham returned to his chair and studied the photographs once more.

“Very well. Let us suppose that the fossil is sufficiently different to justify a new species. What then?”

“We describe the differences,” said Quillibrace. “We assess the evidence. We compare it with existing material. We explain why the distinction is warranted, and acknowledge what remains uncertain.”

“And if it is not sufficiently different?”

“Then we refrain from proposing a new species.”

“And if we cannot decide?”

“Then we say so.”

Blottisham appeared disappointed.

“It seems a very unsatisfactory conclusion.”

“Only if you believe that every question must produce a new name,” said Miss Stray.

He considered this for a moment.

“But if we do not name the thing, how shall we know what it is?”

Miss Stray looked at the photographs.

“Perhaps we must first discover what we know about it. The name can follow.”

Quillibrace gathered the papers into a neat pile. On the top sheet he wrote: Taxonomic position uncertain; further evidence required.

Blottisham read the words.

“Surely we can do better than that.”

“We may be able to,” said Quillibrace. “When we have more evidence.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, the fossil remains what it was before it arrived.”

Blottisham frowned.

“Which is?”

“A fragment of an organism whose history we are trying to understand.”

Miss Stray looked again at the small, incomplete shape in the photograph.

“Perhaps that is enough for today.”

The gardener outside had finished pruning. He carried the basket away, leaving the rosebush smaller than it had been, but still recognisably a rosebush.

Blottisham watched him go.

“I should hate to think,” he said, “that someone might one day examine my remains and fail to recognise my genus.”

Quillibrace put on his spectacles.

“That, Mr Blottisham, would depend on the remains.”

Miss Stray gathered the photographs and returned them to their envelope.

“And on the questions the examiner thought to ask.”

Blottisham looked at her.

“I trust you are not suggesting that I might be classified incorrectly.”

“Not at all,” said Miss Stray. “I am suggesting that you might be classified differently by different people.”

Blottisham seemed to find this even more disturbing.

“Then I shall make my wishes known in advance.”

Quillibrace reopened his notebook.

“Under which genus?”

Blottisham stood up.

“I shall leave that matter to posterity.”

He went to the door, paused, and turned back.

“Though I should prefer posterity to exercise a little judgement.”

The door closed behind him.

Quillibrace regarded the envelope on the table.

“An entirely reasonable request,” he said.

Miss Stray smiled.

“Yes. But I wonder whether posterity will know whose judgement he meant.”

Neither of them attempted to answer the question.

The Kingdom of Approved Names

In the Kingdom of Approved Names, nothing was permitted to exist until it had been properly named.

This was not because the King disliked unnamed things. He had never met one, and therefore had no opinion of them. The rule had been established by his great-grandmother, who had once mislaid a pair of spectacles and spent three days searching for something she could not officially acknowledge she had lost.

On the fourth day, her chief adviser suggested that the spectacles be entered into the Royal Register of Missing Objects.

“But they have a name already,” she objected. “They are spectacles.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty. But they do not yet have a name as missing spectacles.”

The Queen considered this distinction so admirable that she ordered a Department of Approved Names to be established at once. Within a year, the department had grown to include the Offices of Named Objects, Named Persons, Named Places, Named Events, and Named Absences. The latter was particularly busy, since an absence could not be recognised until the thing absent had been properly identified.

The spectacles were eventually found on the Queen's head. The department recorded this as the Successful Recovery of Previously Missing Spectacles, and the Queen was so pleased with the result that she made the naming rule part of the constitution.

From that day forward, every thing in the kingdom was required to possess an authorised name.

The system worked admirably, provided that nothing unexpected happened.

When a farmer discovered a new kind of beetle, he submitted it to the Department of Insects, which gave it a name and entered it in the register. When a child invented a game, the Department of Recreational Activities supplied a name for the game, a separate name for the activity of playing it, and a third for the state of having played it but no longer doing so.

When a man began to feel sad without knowing why, the Department of Emotional Conditions assigned him a provisional classification pending the submission of further evidence. The man was grateful. Having been named, his sadness seemed considerably more respectable.

The kingdom had no shortage of names. Every year, the Royal Academy of Nomenclature published a new edition of the Approved List, which grew so rapidly that the printers were obliged to employ a second printing press solely for the corrections to the first.

The Academy took great pride in its completeness.

“We have named everything,” declared its President at the annual ceremony.

“Everything that exists?” asked a young clerk.

“Everything that exists.”

“And everything that does not exist?”

“Those matters are dealt with by the Office of Non-Existence.”

“But if something does not exist, why does it need an office?”

The President regarded the clerk with the patient expression of a man who has devoted his life to answering questions that ought never to have been asked.

“Because,” he said, “we must be able to distinguish what does not exist from what has not yet been approved to exist.”

The clerk apologised and was transferred to the Office of Non-Existence, where he was kept very busy.

There was, however, one difficulty that the kingdom had not been able to resolve.

Things kept turning up without names.

They appeared in gardens, under beds, in the corners of rooms, and occasionally in the middle of important meetings. Most were harmless. Some disappeared before the authorities could investigate them. Others were reported by people who, upon being questioned, could no longer remember what they had seen.

The department classified these reports as Unverified Incidents of Possible Unauthorised Existence.

A committee was appointed.

The committee recommended the creation of a new category, Unclassified Objects, which was immediately approved. Unfortunately, the moment the category came into force, the department received a report of something that could not be classified as an object.

A second committee was appointed.

Its recommendation was that the term object be expanded to include anything that might conceivably be an object, even if it was not one.

This was accepted unanimously, except by one member who wished to know whether the new definition included the possibility of being an object.

He was appointed chair of a third committee.

It was at about this time that a child named Elian found something in a field.

The field lay beyond the eastern road, where the last houses of the kingdom gave way to hedges, ditches, and a stretch of land that nobody had thought worth naming. The maps showed it as an Unregistered Area Pending Survey, although the farmers who worked nearby called it simply the far field.

Elian had gone there to look for a lost button. The button had belonged to a coat that had been passed down through several generations, and Elian's mother had explained that losing it would be a regrettable event requiring a formal report.

The button was never found.

Instead, Elian discovered a small thing lying in the grass.

At first it looked like a stone. It was grey, roughly oval, and cool to the touch. But when Elian picked it up, it seemed to have a soft place in the middle, as though something inside it were listening.

“A stone,” Elian said.

The thing became a seed.

Elian nearly dropped it.

“A seed, then.”

It became a small bird, though not one Elian had ever seen before. It had no feathers, and its eyes were the colour of the sky just before rain.

“A bird.”

It became a key.

Elian turned it over in the palm of one hand. The key had no teeth and no obvious purpose, but it was undoubtedly a key.

“A key to what?”

It became a question mark.

Elian laughed.

The question mark became a tiny wooden door.

Elian placed the door on the grass. It stood upright by itself, no taller than a finger. There was a brass handle on one side and a letterbox on the other.

Elian bent down and peered through the letterbox.

On the other side was the field, extending to the horizon.

Elian stood up again.

“What are you?”

The door vanished.

In its place lay a small grey stone.

Elian took the stone home.

The Department of Approved Names received the report three days later. It came from Elian's schoolteacher, who had been informed by Elian's mother that the child had brought home an object of uncertain identity. The teacher, being a conscientious woman, had filled in the appropriate form.

The form asked for the name of the object.

She had written: Unknown.

The form was returned.

Unknown was not an approved name, the accompanying note explained. The correct term was Object of Undetermined Classification, unless the object was known to have no classification, in which case it should be entered as Object of Classificational Absence.

The teacher completed a second form.

This time the report was accepted, and a junior inspector was dispatched to the child's home.

The inspector was a narrow man named Mr Pell, whose entire career had been devoted to ensuring that things were called by their proper names. He carried a leather case containing the Approved List, a magnifying glass, and a small brass bell, which he rang whenever he encountered something that required immediate classification.

He placed the stone on the kitchen table.

“Stone,” he said.

It became a seed.

“Seed,” he said.

It became a key.

“Key,” he said.

It became a small bird.

Mr Pell rang his bell.

“Please do not interfere,” he told the bird. “This is an official examination.”

The bird became a question mark.

Mr Pell stared at it.

Then he opened his case and consulted the Approved List.

“Question,” he said cautiously.

The question mark became a stone.

Mr Pell shut the book.

“I see,” he said.

He did not, in fact, see. But he had learned that it was often advisable to say so when one wished to maintain authority.

He took the stone to the Department.

By the following morning, it had been examined by seven specialists, entered into four provisional categories, and rejected by the Royal Academy on the grounds that it did not possess the necessary stability of identity to qualify as a single thing.

The Department therefore classified it as a Collection of Successive Objects.

The collection promptly became a small wooden door.

This was regarded as an administrative outrage.

A special meeting was convened, and the President of the Academy himself attended. He was a large gentleman with a magnificent beard, which had been officially classified as Facial Hair of Distinguished Length.

“Let us proceed methodically,” he announced. “What is the thing now?”

“A door,” said Mr Pell.

“Excellent. We have a category for doors. What is it a door to?”

“No one knows.”

“Then it is a door without a destination.”

The President consulted the Approved List.

“Door Without a Destination is not an approved category. We shall have to create one.”

A clerk began writing.

“But suppose,” suggested a young woman from the Department of Possible Objects, “that it is not a door at all, but merely something that resembles a door?”

“Then it is a Door-Like Object.”

“And if it resembles a door only when we call it a door?”

The President frowned.

“Then it is a Door-Like Object Under Conditions of Verbal Designation.”

The clerk wrote faster.

“And if it becomes something else when we call it that?”

The President removed his spectacles.

“Madam, we cannot permit the existence of things that change their identity merely because we have described them correctly.”

“But perhaps we haven't described them correctly.”

There was a silence.

The President looked around the room. Every person present had been trained from childhood to regard a correct name as the end of an inquiry. The suggestion that a name might be correct without being final was almost indecent.

At last the President spoke.

“The difficulty, clearly, is that we have not yet found the appropriate category.”

A committee was established to find it.

For several weeks, the committee worked without interruption. It proposed Indeterminate Thing, Variable Object, Object of Unstable Designation, and Entity Whose Classification Is Affected by the Act of Classification.

Each category was tested.

Each failed.

The thing became whatever the committee's latest name required it to become, and then something else besides. When classified as an Indeterminate Thing, it became a determinate one. When classified as a Variable Object, it remained perfectly still. When described as an Entity Whose Classification Was Affected by the Act of Classification, it became a small brass bell.

This last development caused considerable excitement.

The President rang it, and the bell made a sound like a distant door closing.

“Remarkable,” he said. “It has produced an acoustic event.”

The bell became a question mark.

The committee was dissolved.

Meanwhile, Elian had begun visiting the Department every afternoon. The child sat quietly in the waiting room while the officials pursued their investigations. Nobody had forbidden these visits, since the appropriate regulation concerning children accompanying unidentified objects had not yet been drafted.

Elian noticed that the thing behaved differently when nobody was trying to name it.

Sometimes it was a stone. Sometimes it was a seed. Once, when Elian was thinking about the lost button, it became a button—not the same button, but one that fitted the empty place on the old coat. When Elian reached for it, the button became a small bird and flew to the windowsill.

Elian did not ask what it was.

Instead, the child watched it, and the bird watched back.

On another occasion, the thing lay on the table while Elian drew pictures in a notebook. The drawings were not intended to represent the thing. Elian drew a house, a river, a tree, and a person standing on a hill. When the child finished, the thing had become a tiny house.

Elian placed the house beside the drawing.

For a moment, the two seemed to belong together.

Then the house became a tree.

Elian looked at the drawing of the tree.

“That makes sense,” the child said.

The thing became a river.

Elian smiled.

At the Department, however, the situation had become intolerable. The Royal Academy had received a letter from the King demanding an explanation for the continued existence of an object that had not been properly named. The letter concluded with the instruction that the matter be settled once and for all.

The President assembled the committee for one final meeting.

“We have approached the problem from every conceivable direction,” he declared. “It is time to adopt a more comprehensive approach.”

He proposed a category called The Totality of All Possible Things, Including Those Not Yet Conceived, Those Incapable of Being Conceived, and Those Which May Arise as a Consequence of This Classification.

The committee was impressed.

The category was approved unanimously.

The President placed the thing on the table.

“Totality of All Possible Things,” he said.

The thing became a small wooden door.

The President repeated the name.

The door became a seed.

He repeated it again.

The seed became a bird.

The President raised his voice.

“THE TOTALITY OF ALL POSSIBLE THINGS!”

The bird became a stone.

The President sat down.

Nobody spoke.

At last, the young woman from the Department of Possible Objects approached the table. She looked at the stone for a long time.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we should ask the child.”

The President was scandalised.

“The child?”

“The child seems to have spent more time with the thing than any of us.”

“Children are not qualified to make classifications.”

“Then perhaps we should ask what the child has observed.”

The President considered this. It was not the same thing, and therefore might be permissible.

Elian was summoned.

The child entered the chamber and stood beside the table.

“What is it?” asked the President.

Elian looked at the stone.

“I don't know.”

“Then what do you call it?”

Elian thought for a moment.

“Sometimes I call it a stone. Sometimes I call it a bird. Sometimes I don't call it anything.”

The President leaned forward.

“But which is its proper name?”

“I don't know that it has one.”

The President looked almost ill.

“Everything has a proper name.”

“Does it?”

“Of course. Otherwise, how could we know what anything is?”

Elian looked at the table, at the books, at the forms, at the rows of officials waiting to be told what to think.

“How do you know the name is proper?”

The President opened his mouth, then closed it again.

The young woman from the Department of Possible Objects smiled faintly.

The President recovered himself.

“We know because the name is approved.”

“Who approves it?”

“The Academy.”

“And how does the Academy know?”

The President turned to the committee.

The committee turned to the Approved List.

The Approved List contained no answer.

The President stood abruptly.

“This inquiry is concluded. The child has demonstrated a regrettable confusion between the naming of things and the nature of things.”

He ordered that the object be given a permanent name and placed in the Royal Museum, where it could be observed under controlled conditions.

The name selected was The Unclassifiable Object.

A certificate was prepared, signed, stamped, and entered in the register. The object was placed in a glass case beneath a brass plaque bearing its name in gold lettering.

For three days, everything proceeded as planned.

On the fourth day, the museum curator reported that the case contained nothing.

The President hurried to the museum.

“Where is it?”

“In the case, sir.”

“There is nothing in the case!”

“Precisely, sir. That is what it appears to be.”

The President examined the certificate.

The Unclassifiable Object.

The name was correct. The certificate was genuine. The seal was intact.

He looked into the case again.

There was nothing there.

He consulted the Approved List. It offered no guidance concerning the absence of an object whose existence had been established but whose identity could not be determined.

The President ordered the case to be classified as an Empty Display Case.

This was done immediately.

The next morning, the curator reported that the case was no longer empty.

Inside it stood a tiny wooden door.

The President refused to visit the museum again.

The Department issued a statement explaining that the matter had been resolved to the highest administrative standards, and that the continued reports of anomalous appearances were attributable to public misunderstanding. The Royal Academy announced that the category of Unclassifiable Object had been withdrawn, pending further investigation.

A new committee was appointed to investigate the withdrawal.

The King was satisfied.

The child, meanwhile, had returned to the field.

The grass was wet from the morning rain. The hedges moved in the wind, and somewhere beyond the far boundary a bird was calling.

Elian sat beneath a tree and waited.

After a while, something appeared in the grass.

It might have been a stone. It might have been a seed. It might have been something that had never been either.

Elian picked it up.

For a moment, it was a small wooden door, with a brass handle and a letterbox. The child turned it over in the palm of one hand.

“Hello,” Elian said.

The thing became a bird.

It settled on the child's knee.

Elian watched it for a while, then looked up at the sky. There were clouds moving above the field, and the sunlight shifted as they passed.

The bird flew away.

Elian did not try to decide what it had been.

That afternoon, the Department of Approved Names received a report of an unidentified object in the eastern field. The report was duly entered into the register as an Unverified Incident of Possible Unauthorised Existence.

The clerk who received it hesitated before filing it.

For a moment, he considered leaving the report unnamed.

Then he remembered the regulations and assigned it the next available number.

The report was approved.

The field remained where it was.

The Station That Connects Different Scales of Existence [revised version]

The station stood at the end of a railway line that had been closed for thirty years.

I found it while walking through a country I thought I knew. The tracks emerged from a cutting, crossed a field, and disappeared beneath the station platform. There were no signals, no timetable, and no sign of a town nearby. Yet a clock hung above the entrance, and a lamp burned behind the ticket window.

I went inside.

The clerk was an old woman with a pencil tucked behind her ear.

“Where does the train go?” I asked.

“Where would you like to go?”

I named the nearest town.

She shook her head. “We don't go there.”

“Then where?”

She looked at me for a moment, as though deciding whether I had asked a sensible question.

“There's a train to the room in which you first understood that you were alone.”

I stared at her.

“And another?”

“The house where you learned to be afraid. The country that lies within a wall. The place where the world ends, if you prefer.”

“I'll take the first.”

She wrote something on a ticket and pushed it beneath the glass.

The train arrived without a sound. It had one carriage, with windows that reflected the platform even after the platform had vanished behind us.

The journey lasted perhaps a minute.

When the doors opened, I was standing in my grandmother's parlour.

I knew the room immediately: the green carpet, the dark furniture, the little brass clock on the mantelpiece. My grandmother had been dead for years, and the house had been demolished. Yet the room was complete down to the crack in the plaster above the fireplace.

I sat in her chair.

For a while, nothing happened. Then I remembered the afternoon when I had been sent there after an argument with my parents. I had sat in this chair, listening to the adults talk in the next room, and understood that whatever troubled me belonged to me alone.

The memory had always seemed small. Here it filled the room.

I got up and opened the door.

Beyond it was the station platform.

The clerk was waiting.

“You've been quick,” she said.

“I want to go somewhere else.”

“Of course.”

She examined her ledger.

“The country within the wall?”

I agreed.

The train took me to a landscape enclosed by a wall so high that I could not see over it. Beyond the wall lay fields, a river, and distant hills. There was no sky, only a pale light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I walked until I reached a village. Its houses stood close together, and in the village square a fountain played into a stone basin.

I leaned over the water.

The fountain reflected the station.

Not a picture of it, but the station itself: the platform, the ticket window, the lamp burning above the entrance. A train was approaching, and in its window I saw a small figure looking out.

I stepped back.

A man standing beside the fountain watched me.

“Is there a way out?” I asked.

He glanced towards the wall.

“Out of what?”

“This place.”

He considered the question.

“You can leave the village. You can cross the fields. You can follow the river. But where would you go?”

“Beyond the wall.”

He smiled faintly. “Then you would have to find out what the wall is inside.”

I returned to the station.

The clerk listened while I described the fountain.

“Yes,” she said. “That happens.”

“What is this place?”

“A station.”

“But it connects things that can't possibly contain one another.”

“Does it?”

She closed the ledger.

“You seem to think that a room must be smaller than a house, and a house smaller than a country. That is usually convenient. It isn't always how things are connected.”

I asked her for a ticket to the place where the world ended.

She gave me one without another word.

The train carried me into darkness. When the doors opened, I found myself in a room with a red door. Beyond its window lay a garden, and beyond the garden a great, grey expanse that I took to be the sea.

I opened the door.

The garden was empty. The sea did not move. I walked towards it until I could see that the grey surface was not water but stone, stretching away without a horizon.

Then I noticed the railway tracks.

They ran through the garden and disappeared beneath the stone.

I turned back. The red door stood open, but beyond it I could no longer see the room. I saw the station platform, far away, and the clerk standing beside the ticket window.

Between us lay a distance that could not be measured in steps.

I called to her.

She raised one hand, as though she had heard me.

Then the garden changed. The trees became small, the red door receded, and the station grew until it occupied the whole horizon. I understood that I was looking at the place from which I had departed, but I could not tell whether I had become smaller or it had become larger.

I ran towards it.

The garden returned to its former size. The red door stood before me, and beyond it the room waited, unchanged.

I went back through the door.

At the station, I found the clerk polishing a cup.

“I want to go home,” I said.

She looked up.

“Which home?”

I almost answered, but stopped. I thought of my present house, the house of my childhood, my grandmother's parlour, the room in which I had first understood that I was alone. Each was a place I could name. None seemed quite sufficient.

“Is there a train that will take me back to where I began?”

She put down the cup.

“There is a train that will take you back to where you began your journey.”

“Isn't that the same thing?”

“Not necessarily.”

She pointed towards a staircase at the end of the platform.

“There's another way.”

The steps descended beneath the station. At the bottom lay a chamber, and in the chamber a pool of still water.

I approached it.

The water reflected the platform above, but the reflection did not behave as a reflection should. A train arrived, its windows full of light. The clerk came out of the ticket office and stood beside the tracks. A traveller stepped down from the carriage and walked towards the staircase.

The traveller was me.

I watched my reflected self descend the steps, approach the pool, and kneel beside it.

I turned to the woman who had followed me down.

“What happens if I enter the water?”

“You will find yourself somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

She looked into the pool.

“On what you are leaving.”

I looked again at the reflected traveller. He had raised his head and was looking directly at me. I could not tell whether he was waiting for me to enter the water or whether he had already done so.

Above us, I heard the train whistle.

I climbed back to the platform.

The clerk was at her window, and the train stood ready. I asked for a ticket to the house with the red door.

She wrote it out.

This time the journey seemed long. I watched the landscape pass, though I could not have said what landscape it was. When the doors opened, I found myself standing before the red door once more.

I knocked.

Someone moved inside.

I waited, listening to the faint sound of footsteps approaching. Beneath my feet, somewhere far below the garden, water was running.

The door began to open.

The Station That Connects Different Scales of Existence [original version]

The station appeared on a morning when I had nowhere particular to go.

I had been walking along a disused railway line, following it through fields and patches of woodland, when I came to a platform beneath a canopy of dark iron. Beyond it stood a station building of pale stone, with tall windows and a clock above the entrance. The clock had no hands.

A timetable hung beside the door. It listed destinations, departure times, and platform numbers, but the names meant nothing to me. Some were familiar words arranged in unfamiliar combinations; others looked like place names I might once have heard in a dream.

I went inside.

The booking hall was almost empty. A row of wooden benches stood against the walls, and a ticket window occupied the far end. Behind the glass sat an elderly man in a dark uniform.

“Where do the trains go?” I asked.

He examined me over his spectacles.

“Where they go,” he said.

“I mean, what places do they connect?”

“Ah.” He reached beneath the counter and produced a timetable. “That depends on what you mean by a place.”

I waited for him to smile, but he appeared entirely serious.

I asked for a ticket to the nearest town.

“There is no nearest town,” he said. “But I can give you a ticket to the room in which you first understood that you were alone.”

I stared at him.

“I don't want to go there.”

“Then perhaps the building in which you first felt at home?”

“No.”

He nodded, as if I had confirmed something.

“Very well. You may travel without a ticket, but you must decide where you are going before the train arrives.”

He slid the timetable towards me and returned to his newspaper.

I studied the destinations. One was called The Room Behind the Door. Another was The Country Within the Wall. A third was simply Outside. Several were marked with the same symbol: a small circle containing a smaller circle, repeated until the centre became a dot.

I chose a platform at random.

The train arrived without a sound. It was short, with three carriages and windows that reflected the station rather than the landscape. I boarded and sat beside a window.

There were no other passengers.

The train moved, and the station disappeared behind me. Outside, the fields gave way to a street of terraced houses. Then the houses grew larger, until their windows were as tall as buildings and their doors rose above the train like gates. I could see the brickwork in extraordinary detail: each brick had its own surface, its own little variations of colour and texture. Mortar lines became narrow roads, and the windows opened onto spaces that seemed to extend far beyond the walls that contained them.

The train slowed.

A sign beside the track read: THE ROOM BEHIND THE DOOR.

I stepped onto a platform that was no wider than a corridor. At its end stood a wooden door, familiar in its proportions, with a brass handle and a small scratch near the lock. I had seen it before, though I could not remember where.

I opened it.

Beyond lay a room I knew from childhood: my grandmother's parlour, with its faded curtains, the heavy armchair beside the fireplace, and the little table on which she kept her sewing. Sunlight fell across the carpet. The room was empty.

I walked to the window and looked out. Instead of a garden, I saw the station, impossibly distant, its platforms stretching across a landscape of brick and stone. The train I had arrived on was moving through the station building itself, passing behind the clock and emerging through a window on the opposite side.

I turned from the window and examined the room more closely.

The pattern in the carpet resembled the railway network on the timetable. The little flowers formed branching lines, each dividing into smaller lines. At their intersections were tiny circles, and within each circle another pattern repeated. I knelt to look, and for a moment the carpet seemed to open beneath me, revealing a landscape of ridges and valleys, with a railway running through it.

I stood up quickly.

A door had appeared beside the fireplace. I opened it and found myself back on the platform.

The train was still waiting.

I boarded again.

This time, the carriage was full of people, though none seemed to notice me. A woman held a small glass globe in her hands. Inside it was a landscape of mountains and rivers, and I could see a railway winding through the valleys. A man opposite her was reading a newspaper whose columns were arranged like streets. At the far end of the carriage, a child was looking through a magnifying glass at a drop of water on the floor.

The train stopped at a station called THE COUNTRY WITHIN THE WALL.

I stepped down.

The platform stood beneath a vast stone wall that curved away in both directions. Beyond it stretched a green landscape, with hills, rivers, and scattered villages. A railway crossed the plain and disappeared into a tunnel in the wall.

I walked towards the nearest village. The houses were small and closely packed, and the streets were narrow. In the square stood a fountain whose basin was filled with clear water. I looked into it and saw the station.

Not a reflection of the station, but the station itself, with its iron canopy, its clock without hands, and its rows of empty benches. The platform lay beneath the water as clearly as if I were looking through a window.

I leaned closer.

A train was arriving. Tiny figures stepped onto the platform. One of them looked up towards the fountain.

I recognised myself.

I drew back, and the image dissolved into ripples.

The fountain overflowed into a narrow stream that ran between the houses and towards the wall. I followed it to a small opening in the stone. Beyond the opening, the stream passed through a tunnel, and the tunnel emerged on the other side of the wall.

I crawled through.

When I emerged, I was back on the platform.

The train had gone.

I returned to the station building and found the ticket clerk at his window.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“A station.”

“But the destinations—”

“Are places.”

“And the places are inside one another?”

“Sometimes.”

“Then where is the outside?”

He looked past me, towards the platform.

“Which one?”

I left before he could say anything more.

For the next several days, I travelled between the station and its destinations. I visited a house whose rooms opened onto different parts of a city. I walked through a tunnel that emerged inside a mountain, then climbed a staircase in the mountain's interior until I reached a room whose walls were covered in maps of the mountain itself. I found a village contained within a stone, and a stone lying on a table in a room I had visited before.

The destinations were not simply smaller or larger versions of one another. Each had its own inhabitants, its own paths and boundaries, its own ways of being a place. Yet the relations between them were unmistakable. A doorway in one world might be a railway tunnel in another. A river might pass through a wall and emerge as a corridor. A room could contain a landscape that, when entered, contained the room.

I began to understand the station as something other than a building. It was a point at which these relations became traversable.

The trains did not carry me through a single landscape. They connected places whose relation could not be expressed by distance alone.

One afternoon, I returned to the station and found a new notice beside the ticket window.

WATER SERVICE: DEPARTURES NOW AVAILABLE.

Beneath the notice was a narrow staircase descending to a basement I had never seen before.

At the bottom lay a chamber containing a shallow pool. The water was perfectly still, and the station was reflected in it. But the reflection showed the building from above, as if the roof had been removed. I could see the platforms, the waiting room, the ticket office, and the staircase by which I had descended.

A woman stood beside the pool.

“You can travel this way too,” she said.

“Where does it go?”

“Where the train goes.”

“That cannot be right. The train goes to places.”

“So does the water.”

She knelt and touched the surface. The reflection changed. I saw a landscape of dark hills beneath a pale sky, with a river winding between them. In the distance stood a house with a red door.

I recognised it from somewhere, though I could not say where.

“What is the difference?” I asked.

“The train connects places,” she said. “The water connects what makes them different.”

I looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

She offered none.

I returned upstairs and took the next train.

It carried me to a place called THE OUTSIDE, though the name appeared on no map I had ever seen. The station stood on a plain beneath a sky without clouds. Beyond the platform was a vast curved surface, pale and smooth, extending in every direction. I walked towards it, expecting to find a wall, but when I reached it, I discovered that the surface curved inward. I was standing inside something enormous.

I followed the curve until I found a doorway.

Beyond it lay another station, much larger than the first. Its platforms crossed a landscape of hills and forests, and its railway lines ran through tunnels in the ground and across bridges suspended in the air. Trains moved through the landscape at different scales: some no longer than a carriage, others so long that their ends disappeared beyond the horizon.

I walked into the main hall.

At its centre stood a model of the first station. It was complete down to the smallest detail: the iron canopy, the clock without hands, the ticket window. Inside the model, a tiny train was moving towards a platform. I bent closer and saw that the platform was occupied by a tiny figure looking up at me.

I stepped back.

The hall around me seemed to grow larger. The model remained on its table, but the table now appeared to be a platform, and the floor beneath it a landscape. Far away, I could see another station, and beyond it another, each connected by railways that crossed and recrossed the same territory.

I hurried back to the train.

When I returned to the original station, I found the ticket clerk waiting for me.

“You have seen the Outside,” he said.

“I don't think it was outside.”

He smiled faintly.

“Then you are beginning to understand.”

I went down to the pool.

The woman was still there. The water reflected the station, but now I could see something beyond it: a landscape of hills and forests, and a house standing beside a river. The house was surrounded by a garden. In the garden stood a tree whose branches divided into smaller branches, and in the spaces between them I could see the shapes of rooms, corridors, and railway lines.

I recognised the pattern.

It was the same pattern I had seen in the carpet of my grandmother's parlour, in the stone wall, in the timetable, and in the landscape beyond the Outside.

I knelt beside the pool.

“Where does this lead?” I asked.

The woman looked at me.

“You know the place.”

“I don't know it at all.”

“You know its relations.”

I thought of the house with the red door, the room behind the door, the country within the wall. I thought of the station, and of the train moving through the building itself.

I could board a train and arrive at a place. I had done so many times. But the water seemed to offer something different: not another destination, but a passage through the relations by which destinations became what they were.

I was afraid of losing the distinctions that made places recognisable. If I entered the water, would I find the house, or would I become part of whatever connected it to the station? Would I return as the person who had left, or would I discover that the person who left was only one way of being related to the world?

The woman did not urge me to choose.

Above us, I heard a train approaching. Its sound travelled through the station, along the platforms, and down the staircase. The water trembled. In the reflection, I saw the train entering the station, though the real platform was empty.

I stood.

The train was waiting upstairs. The pool lay before me.

I could take the train. I could choose a destination, board a carriage, and arrive somewhere I had never been. I could continue to explore the relations between places, learning how one world contained another and how their boundaries could be crossed.

Or I could enter the water.

I knelt and put my hand into the pool.

The water was warm. Its surface yielded without breaking, and beneath it I saw the station, the house, the river, the tree, and the landscape beyond the Outside. They were not arranged in a sequence. They appeared together, each retaining its own shape, each connected to the others in ways I could almost recognise.

I understood that the water would not take me to the house in the way a train might. It would not deliver me to a place and leave me standing at its entrance. It would bring me into the relations through which the house, the station, and the landscape belonged to one another.

I withdrew my hand.

The choice was not between a safe route and a dangerous one, nor between an illusion and the truth. I wanted to visit the house. I wanted to know what lay beyond its red door. I wanted to remain someone who could arrive, look around, and leave.

So I went upstairs.

The train was waiting on the platform. I boarded and sat beside the window. As it moved away, I looked back at the station, with its clock without hands and its iron canopy. I knew that I could return.

The train carried me through a landscape of hills and forests. After a while, the trees parted, and I saw a river. Beside it stood a house with a red door.

I stepped off at the next platform and walked towards it.

The garden was quiet. The tree stood beside the path, its branches dividing into smaller branches, and through the windows I could see the rooms of the house. I approached the door and raised my hand to knock.

Before I could do so, I heard the sound of a train in the distance.

I turned and saw, far beyond the garden, a station beneath a canopy of dark iron. A train was pulling in, and a figure was stepping onto the platform.

The figure looked towards the house.

I could not see its face, but I knew it was watching me.

For a moment, I considered going back to the station. Then I heard water running beneath the garden, somewhere under the roots of the tree. I knelt and brushed aside the leaves.

There was a pool beneath them, small and still.

I looked into it.

The reflection showed the house, the garden, and the river. Beyond the river stood the station, and beyond the station lay a landscape I had never seen. I could see the trains moving through it, connecting places that were near and far, inside and outside, large and small.

At the centre of the reflection, a figure knelt beside the water.

It was me, looking up.

I did not enter the pool. I did not return to the station.

I stood and knocked on the red door.

Someone inside began walking towards it.

And beneath the garden, the water continued to flow.

The Water That Remembers Another World [revised version]

I found the pool by accident, though afterwards I could never remember what I had been looking for.

It lay in a hollow among the trees, perfectly still, with no stream feeding it and no leaves floating on its surface. When I leaned over, I did not see my face. I saw the house where I had grown up.

The red door stood open. Behind it was the hall, the stairs, the clock my father had once tried to repair. And at the foot of the stairs stood my sister, Anna, who had been dead for eleven years.

I knew the coat she wore. I knew the way she held her head when she was waiting for someone to explain himself.

I reached towards the water.

It gave way beneath my hand.

I climbed through into the hall.

The house smelled of beeswax and rain. The clock was ticking backwards. In the kitchen, a cup of tea stood on the table, cold enough to have formed a skin, yet sending up a thin thread of steam.

Anna appeared in the doorway.

“You took your time,” she said.

I could not speak. She looked exactly as she had on the last afternoon I remembered us being together: the same dark hair, the same small scar beneath her chin. I had spent years trying not to remember that afternoon.

“Where have you been?” I managed.

She frowned. “Where have you been?”

I told her she was dead.

She looked past me, towards the hall. “Is that what happened to me?”

I could find no answer.

She said that I had left home when I was seventeen and never returned. I told her that I had stayed until she was grown, that we had quarrelled on the afternoon she died, and that I had carried the quarrel with me ever since.

She listened without interrupting.

Then she said, “I don't remember that.”

“You don't remember dying?”

“I don't remember you leaving.”

For a moment I thought she was trying to spare me. Then I saw that she was frightened.

The clock continued to tick backwards.

I went back through the water.

The pool closed over me without a ripple. I found myself kneeling in the leaves, with the ordinary wood around me and my own face looking up from the surface.

I returned the following day.

The house was still there, but the red door was shut. Through the window I could see the hall, and on the wall hung a photograph of Anna and me as children. We stood beside our mother in a garden I did not recognise.

I crossed over.

Anna was in the kitchen, writing at the table. She looked up with no surprise.

“Did you remember?” she asked.

“Remember what?”

She turned the paper towards me. It was a list of things we had done together: a bridge we had crossed, a dog we had found, a night we had spent hiding in the garden because we thought our parents were going to separate.

I remembered the bridge. I remembered the dog. I had no memory of the night in the garden.

“You told me about it,” she said. “You said it was the happiest night of your life.”

“I never said that.”

“You did.”

She returned to her writing. I stood beside her, looking at the familiar shape of her hand moving across the page. I had the sudden, absurd wish to take her wrist and hold it still, as if I could keep the moment from becoming another memory we would disagree about.

Instead I asked her what year it was.

She told me.

It was the year before I had been born.

I laughed, but she did not. She looked at me as if I had made a joke at a funeral.

“You always do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Laugh when you don't know what to say.”

I had no memory of her ever saying that before. Yet I knew it was true.

On the table lay a second sheet of paper. I turned it over. In my own handwriting were the words:

I will come back when I remember.

I slipped it into my pocket.

When I crossed back, the paper was gone.

I did not return for several weeks.

I told myself that the pool had been an effect of light, that grief had supplied the rest. But the explanations would not stay in place. I began to remember things that had never happened, or things that had happened to someone else. Sometimes I could almost hear Anna laughing in the next room. Sometimes I remembered her voice so clearly that the silence afterwards seemed like an answer.

At last I went back to the pool.

The house in its depths was dark. No light shone behind the windows. I crossed over and found the front door unlocked.

Inside, the furniture was covered with sheets. Dust lay thick on the stairs. In the kitchen, the table stood bare.

Anna was waiting in the hall.

“You came back,” she said.

“I don't know why.”

“Yes, you do.”

She led me upstairs to the small room that had once been mine. The walls were bare, and the floorboards were dark with age. In one corner stood a bowl of water.

I looked into it.

The house appeared beneath the surface, bright and new. In the hall stood a young girl with dark hair. Beside her was a boy I recognised as myself, though I had never seen that expression on my own face.

They were arguing.

The girl turned away. The boy reached for her, but she went through the red door and disappeared.

I looked up at Anna.

“Is that how it happened?”

She shook her head.

“How did it happen, then?”

“I don't know.”

“But you were there.”

“So were you.”

I looked again into the bowl. The boy was alone now, standing in the hall. He seemed to be waiting for someone to return.

Anna took my hand.

Her fingers were warm.

“I thought you had forgotten me,” she said.

“I thought you were dead.”

She nodded, as though both statements were true.

We stood together for a long time. I wanted to ask her which of us had remembered wrongly, which of us had been left behind, which of us had come here first. But every question seemed to require an answer that would make one of us disappear.

At last she said, “You should go.”

I held her hand more tightly.

“Will I see you again?”

She smiled, though there was sadness in it.

“You always ask me that.”

I went down through the hall and out of the red door. The pool was waiting in the wood, as still as before.

On the other side, the water showed only trees and sky.

I leaned over. For a moment I saw my face, pale and tired, and behind it the faint outline of a house.

Then the image changed.

Anna stood on the other side of the water, looking down at me. She raised one hand. I raised mine.

Neither of us crossed.

I still visit the pool. Sometimes I see the house, sometimes only the trees. Once, I saw Anna sitting at the kitchen table, writing something I could not read. Another time I saw a boy standing in the hall, waiting for a girl who had gone through the red door.

I have stopped trying to decide which of us is remembering.

I only know that when the water is clear, I can sometimes hear Anna speaking.

And sometimes, just before I leave, I hear her say my name.