The Forty-Seventh Crossing

The wall in the basement had always been there. David knew this because he'd bought the bookstore with the basement, and the basement had come with the wall, and the wall had come with whatever had come before him, which was probably a man who'd been a bookbinder in 1970 and had smoked too much and died with glue on his fingers and ink in his lungs and probably a lot of other things David didn't want to think about.

He knew the wall was there. He stood above it every day when he was stacking shelves or making coffee or staring at his phone waiting for a text that never came. He knew there was a corridor behind it, narrow and dark, and at the end of the corridor was a door, and behind the door was a place that smelled like canal water and old bread and something he couldn't name.

He'd stopped trying to name it years ago.

The forty-seventh time, he went alone. He always went alone. He took nothing with him except a ballpoint pen he'd bought at a store on 14th Street and a small pack of mints—two things he could trade for something valuable in a century that didn't have Bic or Wrigley's. He was good at this after forty-seven trips. He knew the rhythm of the corridor, the sound of the door handle, the way the air changed when he stepped through.

Venice in 1567 was quieter than New York. This was the thing David noticed every time, and this was always the thing he missed most when he came back. The silence—actual silence, not the fake silence of earplugs or white noise machines, but the real thing, the kind of silence that only exists in a city that hasn't been built on top of itself thirty times.

Isabella was at the printing press. She always was. The press belonged to her father—Giovanni, who was a good typesetter but a terrible businessman—and Isabella ran it because Giovanni had a cough that he couldn't shake and hands that shook when he held a letter. She was nineteen. She had dark hair that she kept tied back with a ribbon and a way of looking at things that suggested she understood more than she let on.

"You're late," she said. This was the forty-seventh time she'd said it, or something like it. Sometimes she didn't say anything. Sometimes she just smiled.

"I know."

She went back to work. David stood beside the press and watched her set type—small metal letters, each one carved in reverse, each one pressed into ink and then onto paper. She worked fast. She worked well. She worked the way people work when they haven't decided yet whether the work matters or whether they just need something to do with their hands.

David took out the pen and held it out to her. She looked at it. Turned it over. Tested the weight. Then she uncapped it and made a mark on a scrap of paper.

Black. Smooth. Instant. No inkwell, no quill, no waiting.

"Where did you get this?"

"It doesn't matter. It's yours."

She looked at him then—the way she looked at him when she was deciding whether he was telling the truth or making something up. People made things up in Venice. It was what you did when the truth was too expensive to pay for.

He didn't explain. He never explained. The pen was just a pen, but it was a pen from 2023, and it contained within it the entire industrial machinery of a century that hadn't been born when Isabella was. That was explanation enough.

She kept the pen. She put it in her pocket, next to a small knife and a piece of chalk and a dried flower that had lost its color and its scent and its story and was now just something she kept because it was there.

They talked. Not much—Venice doesn't talk much, either, not anymore, not after the tourists and the cruise ships and the water and the sinking. In 1567, it talked when it needed to and was quiet the rest of the time. They talked about the weather, which was warm even in October, and about the price of paper, which had gone up because the papermakers' guild was squeezing everyone, and about a play that had been performed in the piazza the week before, which Isabella had attended and found "adequate."

David smiled. "Adequate?"

"It had too many deaths. Real life has enough deaths."

He thought about this. He thought about Pages, the bookstore he ran in Chelsea, and how many times he'd walked past a newsstand that showed a death count—car crash, shooting, overdose, accident—and how he'd kept walking because that's what you do in New York, you walk past deaths and you don't stop and you don't look back.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess it does."

She looked at him. Not at the pen, not at the mints, not at anything he could trade. At him. Her eyes were brown—dark, like the canal water, like the ink on her fingers, like the wood of the printing press. Brown and steady and not asking anything of him that he wasn't already giving.

"Stay longer this time," she said.

"I always stay longer."

"Not this time. This time you leave in three days. I can tell."

He could have lied. He had lied before, smaller lies, the kind of lies that don't hurt anyone—a date, a price, a name. But with Isabella, he'd never lied about anything that mattered.

"Maybe," he said.

Three days later, he stood at the door and she stood beside him and they didn't say much because there was nothing to say that hadn't already been said forty-six times before.

"Will you come back?" she asked. This was the first time she'd asked it.

"Yes."

"Will you come back this time?"

He looked at her. He looked at the corridor, narrow and dark and exactly the same every time. He looked at the door, the one that led back to a basement in Chelsea where the light came through a window that faced a fire escape and a wall that had a crack in it shaped like the coast of Italy.

"Yes," he said. "I'll come back. I promise."

She nodded. She didn't hug him. They didn't hug in 1567 Venice—maybe they did, maybe she was just too proud to do it, maybe it was a cultural thing, maybe it was something about the way the light fell through the window and made her look like someone carved from wood and shadow.

"Okay," she said. "Then go."

He went. He walked through the corridor. He opened the door. He stepped into the basement of his bookstore. He closed the door. He stood there for a while and listened to the sound of New York traffic—cars, sirens, people shouting, something musical coming from a window three floors up.

He went upstairs. He opened the store. He sold books to people who didn't know that behind the wall in his basement was a door to 1567 Venice, and that was fine, because that was his secret and he didn't need to share it. Sharing was for people who had nothing else.

He waited fourteen days.

On the fifteenth day, he went back.

The corridor was the same. The door was the same. He turned the handle—

And it didn't open.

He pushed. It didn't budge. He pulled. It was solid. He pressed his ear against it. Nothing. No sound from the other side. No smell of canal water. No sound of a printing press.

He turned the handle again. Pushed. Pulled. Kicked. The door didn't move. It wasn't locked. It wasn't stuck. It was a door that had become a wall.

David stood in the dark corridor and put his hands on the door and pushed with both palms. It was solid stone on the other side. He could feel the weight of it, the thickness of it, the absolute certainty of it. A wall. A wall where a door had been. A wall that hadn't been there before.

He let go. He stepped back. He looked at the door—looked at the wall—and waited for something to happen. For it to open. For him to wake up. For the corridor to end and the bookstore to be where he thought it was and none of this to be real.

Nothing happened.

He went upstairs. He sat behind the counter in Pages. He watched people come and go. He sold a first edition of Hemingway to a man in a suit who didn't know he was buying a Hemingway. He sold a paperback to a woman who said she was reading it on vacation and would return it next week. He nodded and said "See you" because that's what you say and that's what he meant.

He went home. He made pasta. He ate it standing up, in the kitchen, looking out the window at the fire escape and the brick wall across the alley and the light that comes through brick walls in Manhattan and makes everything look slightly yellow, even in October.

He didn't think about Venice. Not really. He thought about it the way you think about a phone number you half-remember—the way it sits behind your eyes when you're trying to fall asleep, the way it flickers on and off like a screen you're too tired to unlock.

Isabella. Giovanni. The printing press. The pen in her pocket next to the knife and the chalk and the dried flower.

Will you come back this time?

He didn't answer. There was nobody to answer. The kitchen was quiet. The fire escape was quiet. The brick wall across the alley was quiet.

The next day, he went to the basement. He opened the door. He stood in the corridor. He touched the wall.

It was cold. It was solid. It was a wall.

He stood there for a long time. Then he went back upstairs and opened the store and sold books and made pasta and watched the light come through the fire escape and fall on the floor in patterns that looked like nothing and everything.

He went to the basement every day for three months. He opened the door. He touched the wall. He stood in the corridor. He came back upstairs. He opened the store.

On the ninety-first day, he found something on the wall.

It was a mark. Small, shallow, written in a hand that wasn't his. Or maybe it was his hand and he didn't remember doing it. The mark was two letters, carved into the stone with something sharp, maybe a knife, maybe a letterpress type, maybe a fingernail with enough determination and not enough sense:

DC.

He touched the letters. They were old. Or they were new. He couldn't tell the difference anymore.

He went upstairs. He opened the store. He sat behind the counter and waited for someone to come in and buy a book and ask him a question and make him feel like the world was still a place where things made sense.

No one came in. The light changed. The fire escape cast shadows on the floor. David sat still and thought about a door that had become a wall and a wall that had once been a door and a girl who had asked him a question and he'd answered yes and it hadn't been a lie and it hadn't been the truth and it had been something in between, which was the only place anything ever lived anyway.

He picked up a book off the shelf. It was a collection of Carver stories. He opened it to a random page and read a paragraph and put it back and picked up another book and opened it to another page and read another paragraph and put it back.

He didn't know how to read anymore. He knew the shapes of the letters, but the meaning had gone somewhere he couldn't follow. He sat behind the counter of a bookstore in Manhattan, surrounded by books he could no longer read, and thought about a wall in a basement that had once been a door, and that was enough. That had to be enough.

It wasn't. But it was all he had.