Evening was settling on the Upper Quay like dust on old globes: slowly, layer by layer. The warm smell of bread still wafted from the bakery beneath the townhouse, mingling with the salt from the harbour and the dry scent of paper. It was as bright as midday in Mira's studio; lamps on long brass arms illuminated tables swamped with rolls of parchment, boxes of quills and drawers full of scales. Hanging on the walls were maps - some ordinary, urban, with a division into quarters and a network of streets, others so precise that it made your throat dry from looking at them: maps without rain, maps of silence, maps on which the wind was marked in grey graphite, as if you could roll it up and put it in your pocket. Mira, a cartographer by office and persistence, had just finished marking the new course of the rain channels. She pushed back the calico, corrected an unruly strand behind her ear. On the tabletop, between the sketches, there was still a jug of cool water in which someone - perhaps herself, or perhaps someone she couldn't remember - had dipped a sprig of rosemary. This sprig no longer smelled of the kitchen, but of emptiness, as if the water had sucked all the memories out of her. The envelope came without a stamp, slipped under the door so silently that none of the clocks in the corridor vibrated. It was made of thin, shiny bark, sealed with a spot of wax in which someone had imprinted a tiny wind rose. On the back was an address: "The West that isn't there". And on the front, where someone's name was usually written, the letters formed a handwriting that Mira knew all too well - her own. "For Mira, who paints the absence." Her heart clattered harder, dumbfounded, like a child caught peeping. She sat up, flipped the envelope from hand to hand. It was cool, as if someone had held it against the glass moments before. When she lifted the wax, a breath of distant air poured inside: heat, dust, the shadow of a bird flying high, so high that even thought could not follow it. Inside, she found a vial of sand - tiny bright grains that rustled quietly, as if each one said something - and half a sheet of thin paper. It was no ordinary carbon paper, rather something between leather and fog: transparent, yet resistant to light. On this paper was a map. Half of a map. Slightly crookedly cut along some line of width, with a legend writing under the fingers like a shiver: "Scale: one courage to one step. Drawing: M. K." "M. K." - her initials. In the margin, in faint crayon, someone - her? - added: "The Desert of Whispers". Mira knew no such place. And yet she recognised the thickness of the line, the recurrence of her hand, the clinging of the pen to the paper. It was like looking in a mirror at a smile she couldn't remember, but which fitted her. She carefully sprinkled a bit of grain onto the tabletop. They spread out, arranging themselves in a slender, narrow ottoman, then - although there was no draught - began to move towards the edge of the map, as if searching for something. Mira reflexively placed a heavy pad next to it to stop the movement. The sand stopped just short of the word 'Entrance'. There was a time when decisions are made as if from the body's memory, before the head has time to say something aloud. Mira pushed the documents away from the office, reached for a goose quill and for a small, dark inkwell she had once bought at the Bent Needle Shop. On the back of the inkwell someone had scrawled in ink: "Warning - writes with light". She had laughed it off at the time. Now she unscrewed the lid and the smell of cool ash hit her nose. She touched the nib to the edge of the half map. At the other end of the paper the line twitched, as if waiting for her to move. She drew the missing shadow of a dune, a piece of outline, a few dashes that in her hand usually marked the limit of the wind's reach. The ink took hold of the paper all too well. When she took her pen away, the line flowed lightly on its own, running along the fibres of the fibrous sheet, like a trickle of water seeking a lower path. The air in the studio grew dry. The herbs in the jug went grey. The mangled clusters of dust in the corners suddenly became sharp as glass. Mira licked her lips - they cracked as if she had spent a day in the sun. From the street she heard the sound of a van, the whine of brakes and children's laughter coming in through the cracked window, breaking into voices and... sounding like grains in a vial. She heard it in the glass. In the sand. It occurred to her that maybe it wasn't the sand that was moving, but the city aligning itself to something as if against a light. - 'No, not now,' she said to no one, or maybe to herself, and moved the map until the edge hovered over the emptiness of the table. - Not yet. Paul knocked. She knew his knock: three quick beats, a pause, one tentative. The watchmaker from the floor above, with perpetual oil smudges on his fingers, with a memory for rhythms that no one else had in her. As soon as she opened it, Paul lifted his pocket watch to his ears, as if checking to see if he could hear a stranger's heartbeat. - Did the air shake at your place too? - He asked without greeting, which did not occur to him. - All the pendulums stood still for a second, as if someone had stretched time and let go. And... it smells of desert. - It smells,' she admitted. - 'Or I think it does. Paul came in, stopped at the table, looked at the map. For a moment he had a look she had never seen in him: like a boy peeping at a mechanism he doesn't understand. - 'It moves,' he said, without really asking. - 'Mira, with you the paper is making a draught. - The ink was too good - she tried to turn it into a joke, but it came out of her mouth like chalk. - 'Remember what I told you about the Atlas of the Imagination? He, who always listened carefully, looked at her from under his eyebrows. - 'You said that people had maps for memory, and you were making one that could be walked on. You also said that you no longer wanted to draw places that came by themselves. Mira nodded her head. Something twitched in Paul's gaze - not judgement, but attentiveness. The watch ticked in his fingers, once more sonorous, once almost soundless. Each of his 'ticks' formed a word that she couldn't catch. - 'It came by itself,' she added quietly, and told him about the envelope, about the sand, about her own signature. Words filled the studio according to the measure of time: released, grabbed, left behind. She also talked about what she didn't tell anyone: that for years she had only been drawing things 'for hire', straightening other people's paths, because otherwise the world was starting to move. That once, a long time ago, she drew a gate in a basement wall and for three days she couldn't close the window because the wind on that side no longer felt like tidying up. Paul did not touch the map. Nor did he touch her hand. He rested his finger on the edge of the table, as if he wanted to stop something that could not be seen. - 'Sometimes,' he said, 'the mechanism wants to go back to the factory settings. And sometimes it wants to go where it hasn't been before, otherwise it will rust. The difference is that with the former a person is calm, and with the latter he is not. What you have brought is not a mechanism. But it is a movement. - Which is? - Mira went from politeness to nervousness. - So what do you want me to do? - 'Either you're going to paint out the absence, or we're going to listen here as the beans learn the alphabet themselves,' he replied. - And clocks don't like it when something else dictates their rhythm. Suddenly something knocked somewhere far away, as if someone had dropped a metal ball on a rock. Once, a second time. Mira looked around reflexively, as if the sound might have a place, not just a source. The wall between the two bookcases, the oldest one on which the maps of winters and silences hung, had had a tiny crack all along. Now the crack was thicker. No, not thicker - truer. It darkened, stretched vertically, twitched, as if drawing in air. Dust, golden, lightly sparkling, came out of the corner. It fell to the floor and immediately rustled quietly, like grains hitting glass. - Mira - Paul didn't need to add anything. They both looked at the scratch, which had ceased to be a scratch and had become a line. A line that could mean 'entrance' on a map. Mira pushed the maps away from the wall. On the plaster, between the two streaks, the outline of something that almost everyone in the town had known since childhood and that adults pretend to have stopped seeing was already drawn: the door frame. First a thin shadow, then a line, then a moulding, and finally, the outline of the handle. The doorknob was made of ink, sparkling like midnight water. It gathered all the lamps from the studio and twisted in a spiral that for a moment reminded Miri of the night city from above. - Is this the entrance? - Paul asked, although he knew anyway. Mira looked at the map. On the legend someone - as if the pen knew more than the hand - had added another line: "Entrance: between silence and the clock". She looked at the wall. On the left, indeed, hung a map of silence; on the right, a narrow pendulum clock, an heirloom from Paul's grandfather, once lent to her "for a while". The pendulum was silent, though nothing stopped it. - 'It looks like a door,' sobbed Paul, as he had a dry hoarseness in his throat, as everyone does when they daydream in the middle of the day. - And it looks as if someone is waiting on the other side. Mira picked up the pen. For a moment it seemed as if the ink from the inkwell was staring at her, dark, cold. Before she had time to touch the paper, something brushed the edge of the map from below, like a scaly shadow. The vial of sand she had left too close tilted from the non-existent blast. Two grains jumped over the slat and rolled towards the wall. When they touched the plaster, they disappeared without a sound, like droplets disappearing into the heated sand. - 'If I don't paint now, this door will open anyway,' Mira said, not asking, just understanding. Her finger ached from holding the pen, but the pain was like the needle of a compass: it pointed to where the north of her heart was. - 'And if you paint, they'll open more,' Paul craned his neck, as if to see what was above the doorframe. - Maybe faster. Maybe more precisely. Above their heads, outside the window, a pair of seagulls flew by. Someone somewhere called out from the street, and it echoed four times, each time in a different voice. The studio was quieter than usual, quieter even than during a downpour, when the sound is like a wall. It was a silence that was tense, twitching and yet soft, like fabric moved in the twilight. Mira leaned over the paper. At the height of the word 'Entrance', one, maybe two lines were missing - so small that the ordinary eye would not recognise them as significant. She added them very slowly. The line took in these dashes like the house of a visitor who had brought bread and salt. Underneath the plaster, something rang out: first a crackle so thin it could only have been the cracking of varnish on an old skirting board, then a scraping sound that missed the memory of any known animal. The inkblot handle moved a millimetre. Then by a second. She froze. Paul took a step back to stand beside, not in front of. - 'Whatever it is,' he said in a whisper, 'it has our address. Mira felt the skin on the back of her neck lift, as if someone had blown from the inside. She took a breath. The pen in her hand flashed for a moment like fish scales in the harbour. The handle vibrated again, more surely this time. And then, imperceptibly, someone's hand pressed against it - a gesture so small, so everyday as to be impossible - and began to press it.