It took Dain and Ansel to get him down to the second floor and it took a while, and Wick apologised the entire way, and Ansel told him twice to shut up and be carried.
They got him onto the long couch with his back against the arm and his leg out straight.
The second floor was the one Rurik had run out of money on.
The booths down the left were finished and the ones at the back were still frames, and the carpet stopped halfway across the room in a line he’d been looking at since November.
But the front half was done, and the front half was what he’d built it for: the couch, the low table, and the screen on the wall.
Seventy-five inches.
It had cost more than his first car.
He had bought it in the second month, when he still believed, and it had been switched on maybe a dozen times, always by him, always alone, usually late.
“That is a slate,” Ansel said.
“A very large slate.”
“It’s a TV.”
“There is nothing on it.”
“It’s off.”
“What is—”
“Sit down, Brother,” Dain said.
“You are standing in the boy’s way.”
Rurik crouched by the cabinet and took a long time over it, longer than it needed, because his hands were not quite behaving.
He had thought about this.
He had a whole idea about what he would put on for a first-timer, a person who had never seen anything, and he had built the idea into a little ritual over the months because there had been nobody to try it on.
The idea had been something with scale.
Something enormous.
He had a list.
He looked over at the boy on the couch.
Wick was lying with his hands folded on his stomach and his eyes on the dead screen and his jaw set, and he was nineteen, and he had spent two days on his back in the sun on a cart apologising to people, and he could not read, and he could not stand, and there was a war outside the building that had eaten everyone he arrived with.
Rurik put the list away and picked something else.
“Okay,” he said.
“This one’s old.
It’s about a schoolteacher.”
“A what?”
“Just watch it.”
He hit play and stood up and moved out of the way.
The screen came on.
Wick’s whole body went rigid.
It was not a reaction to what was on the screen, because nothing was on the screen yet except a wash of colour, and Rurik had not accounted for it.
He had been thinking about the show.
He had not been thinking about light.
The boy had gone stiff the way you go stiff when something large moves in the dark, all down the arms, both hands flat on the couch.
Then the picture resolved, and there was a man on a motorcycle.
Wick made a sound.
The man on the motorcycle was going somewhere and the road was going past behind him and his hair was moving in the wind, and the camera swung, and the man’s face turned and he was grinning like an idiot, and the music came in, and Wick said, very clearly, “he’s moving.”
“Yeah.”
“He is moving, he is—” The boy’s hand came up and pointed at the screen and stayed there.
“That is a picture and it is moving and that is a face, that is a man’s face, and it is moving—”
“Sit back.
Don’t twist on the foot.”
“How is he moving?”
“I’ll explain after.”
“How is he moving?”
“Wick,” Dain said, from the back, in a voice that had put nineteen-year-olds in ranks for a long time.
“Watch the man.”
Wick watched the man.
Forty seconds later the man on the motorcycle did something ill-advised at a set of traffic lights, and the woman he did it in front of said something very short, and Wick laughed.
He laughed and then made a noise because laughing had moved his foot, and then he laughed again anyway.
Rurik went and stood against the back wall where nobody could see his face.