Chapter 16: What Vision Saw Through the Wall

He arrived the way he always did — without sound, which I had stopped remarking on, and without the slight preparatory beat most people use before entering a room, which I had not. There was no knock. The door simply opened, and Vision was there, and then he was inside, and the door was closed again behind him with the same unhurried precision a surgeon applies to instruments.

My office on the forty-third floor had not been designed with visitors in mind. The case files were stacked in three columns along the left wall — the ones nobody had asked me to review, and the handful they had. The desk held the lamp, the legal pad, the notebook, and the printed correspondence with Marcus Vell arranged in the sequence I had spent the morning reconstructing. There were two chairs. The second one, the low-backed one I kept for the rare occasion, had a box of archived interview transcripts on it.

I moved the box to the floor without ceremony. Vision watched this without comment, which I appreciated. Some people feel obligated to say something during the logistical awkwardness of making space for them. He didn't. He sat when the chair was clear, and folded his hands in his lap, and looked at me with the particular quality of attention he had that was attentive in all directions simultaneously — not rude, not intrusive, simply complete.