Rafi makes the first round at midnight, keys clinking against the torch in his pocket, the kind of sound that says someone is meant to be here. The block sleeps heavy: laminate doors with worn peepholes, the yawning drag of the bin chute. He moves like he’s part of the building’s circulation, blood in a concrete body.
He checks the lift panel: 0–12 in neat white squares. A tiny bloom of static, then, as if a finger pressed an unlabelled place, the display breathes 13.
“No,” he says, softly, to the dead air. “Not tonight.”
He has patched seams in the block for three years and a bit, though he can no longer recall the day he started. The training lives in his hands. He carries the little kit—fluorescent tape, a pot of clear resin, a narrow blade, paper tags stamped CIVIC CONTINUITY. The rules are simple, until they’re not: seal what shimmers; label what hums; never force a join.
On the third-floor landing a crack has opened in the mirror opposite the lifts. It isn’t a crack; it’s a seam. You can tell because the flicker isn’t in the glass but in the world behind it. Rafi holds the torch to the edge and sees, not himself, but a near-Rafi across the gap, torch held to his face, mouth set. Between them, a hair-width of otherness. He breathes out, steady, and tapes the seam with a strip of fluorescent yellow that dulls to ash in the mirror-world. He hums under his breath and his hum comes back a half-tone sharp.
Every time he finishes, something leaves him. Tonight it is a bird. The name is there—curve of a beak, legs like wire—the exact syllables wash away.
He writes on the paper tag: 3F MIRROR / HAIRLINE / TAPE APPLIED / LOSS: small brown bird (name). He initials it. He initials like muscle memory because the actual memory of what his initials stand for is blurred at the edges. Rafi. Rafique? Rafid? The badge on his chest has been rubbed smooth by years of his coat.
The lift comes with a sigh. He presses 0 to ride down for a tea and the panel gives a little private shiver and offers 13 as if it’s always been there. He does not press it. He watches the number like one watches a dog that can bite.
On the fourth round, at two, he hears a sound that cuts through painted concrete and the radio fuzz of late telly. A child crying. Not the restless grizzle of a baby, but a calling-out, words soaked with tears.
He follows it past the labelled flats, counting: 8, 9, 10, 11… a gap where the corridor turns, a space that shouldn’t be. The floor between 11 and 12 runs a few steps longer than it should, and then another few. The carpet pattern repeats wrong. He turns the corner and there is a door numbered 12A, not the council’s stencil but a factory brass plate affixed neat.
He knocks. “Caretaker.”
The crying stops with a sucked breath. Footsteps. A chain drawn. A woman opens up a hand’s breadth. In the slot of light he sees a child behind her, hair sleep-messy, face blotched.
“We rang hours,” the woman says. “It kept changing. Is this the right… is this…?”
Rafi knows then that the block is misaligned. He sees the off-register details: the door furniture a grade too nice, the smell of a different brand of bleach. He feels for the seam as one might feel for a pulse. It hums beneath his fingers, the way the lift cable hums as it climbs.
“Name?” he asks the child, crouching without thinking, voice low as you speak to someone on a ledge.
“Mina,” she says. Her hand tightens on the woman’s sleeve. He should know if the woman is her mother, but the world is in that narrow shiver and in some other version of this corridor Mina’s mother is a different face.
“Stay inside. I’ll make it right.” He says it before he has weighed the cost.
He goes back to the mirror on 3F where the seam is taped. The other Rafi is there, watching. The seam looks stable, but the lift’s phantom floor has given the block a mouth to pull through. Two near-buildings have found a way to overlap. He needs to persuade them apart.
The manual—he has lost the words of it, but not the shapes—says: Anchor or release. Do not dither. Anchor Mina’s flat here by sealing the seam tight, and the block will prefer this configuration: Mina stays, but the other block loses her. Release the seam and the preference flips: this block snaps back to the old plan and Mina takes a breath in a world one step to the left, where her mother waits as she should.
The cost rides on the choice. Anchor: give up his last clear memory of his mother. Release: keep the memory, and accept that here, this mother will lose her child.
He sees the memory in his head like a photograph he carries, edges finger-worn. His mother at the sink in a morning kitchen, sleeves rolled, steam rising. The window fogged in a halo. She is singing under her breath, a song in a language he can’t write, and the rhythm of her hands is the rhythm he uses now to tape, to smooth, to seal.
He stands between two choices on a landing that exists in two stacks of brick.
He goes back to 12A. The woman opens enough to speak, chain still on.
“I can fix it,” he says, “but there is a way it fixes that keeps you and a way that keeps her.” He nods to Mina. “I am not meant to ask you. But it is late and sometimes rules are smaller than people.”
The woman’s face makes the change he recognises, the way muscles harden to carry a question that tears. “She’s mine,” she says. “Of course she’s mine.”
A second later she adds, as if to herself, “In every world.”
Rafi nods. He hears the lift cable thrumming, a low steel note in the bones of the building. He thinks of the photo of his mother that is not a photo. He thinks of calling her once a week until the calls thinned and then stopped—except did they stop or did the memory of stopping go? He cannot be sure.
He takes the utility blade from the kit. He returns to the mirror seam on 3F and lifts the tape’s end. The other Rafi does the same. They have done this together before, uncounted times, because there is always a Rafi in any world where the block needs tending. He peels the tape back to let the seam breathe. The air tastes metallic.
To release is to ask the world to choose the simpler version. He makes the sign with the blade that says open.
The building shudders very slightly, as if settling. On 11 the corridor shortens by a step. On 12 the brass numbers blur like an eye blinking, and when he reaches the corner there is no 12A, only the council stencil and a scuff where a plate might once have been. From behind the door he hears a radio playing late news, no child crying.
Rafi stands still and holds what he has kept. The kitchen window, his mother’s song. He has chosen to keep the memory and to let the world return Mina to the place where the version of her mother who is hers will open the right door. He has chosen the release.
He goes to the lift. The panel shows 0–12. The phantom 13 flickers faint and is gone. He presses 0 and rides down. The block is itself again, which is to say it is the version he knows how to care for.
In the caretaker’s room he makes tea in an enamel mug that has outlasted three kettles. He writes the tag for the log: 3F MIRROR / RELEASE / COST: none immediate (kept: mother at sink). He is honest in the margin: Elsewhere loss: a mother alone for one breath longer than she should be. He doesn’t know if anyone reads the tags. He writes them for the shape of it, for the way writing pins the world.
At four, one last round. He checks the stairwells, the bin room, the red-lit hum of the plant. He is slower now. The day will arrive with washing flapping on balconies and taped notices for a residents’ barbecue that will maybe happen and maybe not. He could sleep on the plastic chair if he set the keys by his foot so the sound would wake him if the block called.
As he passes the third-floor mirror, the tape he lifted earlier hangs slack. He smooths it down with his thumb, then crosses it with a second strip, a stitch to remind himself what he did. Across the seam, the other Rafi does the same, their movements matching like hands in prayer pressed to a pane.
He catches his reflection—not just his face but the whole night in his face: dust, worry, a steadiness he didn’t own when he started this work whenever he started. He tries the bird name again, the one he lost. Wren, he thinks, and the word darts away. A loss is a loss. He accepts it as one accepts weather.
The lift doors open on 0 and a woman steps out, a neighbour he recognises by stride if not by name. She nods, and he nods back, the kind of exchange that belongs to two people awake in a sleeping place. The building breathes. He listens for any wrongness and hears, for now, only the tick of cooling metal and the slow quiet of the hour before first birds.
He finishes the tea. He lets the memory of his mother be not a thing he looks at but a rhythm in his hands. The fluorescent tape glows a little under the strip light. The logbook lies open, pages filling with careful tags, each one a small stitch in a large wound.
At five, the panel on the lift very gently inhales and exhales. It thinks about 13, like a dream the mind tests and discards. He pats it with two fingers as one might a horse. “Good,” he tells it. “Good lad.”
When the sun finally rubs colour into the tower’s concrete, he locks the caretaker’s room and makes the last walk to the entrance to prop the door for the postie. Outside, the day is ordinary and enormous. He stands a moment with his hand on the cool metal bar of the door and counts the floors by habit, lips moving, until he gets to twelve and stops.
He does not press the thought of thirteen. He lets the block be what it is, and what it is not. He goes back inside and listens to people wake, the dozens of separate mornings that, patched together, make the life of this place.
The mirror on 3F holds a clean seam with two bright cross-stitches. It looks like a wound closed well. He leaves it be.
On the back of his log tag, in small letters meant only for whoever knows to turn the paper, he writes: If you find this and you are me, remember the song. Don’t write it down. Keep it by doing the work.
He sets the tag under the magnet on the metal board. He steps out of the room and the door swings shut with the quiet click that says someone is on duty. The block accepts the morning. So does he.
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