The first thing Teel does with a new client is ask them to describe the direction. Not to name what it points at. Just the direction itself: the angle, the quality, whether it changes with weather or season. Most people have never been asked this. They have been asked what they want, which is a different question entirely.
Tava says north-northwest without hesitation. Seventy-four years old, the pull has been at that heading since he was twenty-three. Fifty-one years. Teel writes it in the notebook without comment. They have heard longer. They have heard shorter. Duration is not the same as intensity and neither is the same as clarity. Tava's pull is, by his account, quiet but unambiguous. It has not moved. He has spent fifty-one years not moving toward it.
"Most clients come because they want to know whether to act, " Teel says. "Is that why you're here?"
Tava shakes his head. He is not here about acting. He is here about something that happened once that he has never been able to place. On a riverbank, at twenty-three, sitting with someone he knew at the time, the pull went still. For approximately forty seconds. Then it came back. It has not gone still since.
Teel sets the pen down.
"What were you doing during those forty seconds?"
"Nothing in particular. Sitting. She was reading something aloud. I wasn't following it closely." He pauses. "I was just there. That's all I remember."
Teel has heard people describe the stillness before. It is rare. In twenty-two years, eight clients. The stillness is not a destination reached; it is a recognition registered. The want stops not because it has been satisfied but because something it has been tracking has, briefly, been present. Teel has theories. They do not share the theories early.
"The person who was reading, " Teel says. "What happened to that relationship?"
"We lost touch. Not badly. Just lost touch." He looks at the window. "I don't think she's the point. The pull didn't point at her before or after."
"No, " Teel agrees. "It wouldn't be her."
What it would be is harder to say. Teel thinks about the riverbank, the afternoon, what conditions would allow forty seconds of stillness in a pull that had been running for two years already. Not the person. Not the location, since returning to rivers had not helped. Something in the quality of the attention. Being there without tracking, without managing the gap between now and whatever north-northwest holds. The want had recognized something and stopped measuring.
"I've been wondering for fifty-one years what it meant, " Tava says. "Whether I was supposed to find that again."
"I don't think it was a signal about what to find, " Teel says. "I think it was a record that something complete happened. Your want recognized it and went quiet because there was nothing to want in that moment. That's not a map to another place. It's a notation. It says the want can do this. It has done it once."
Tava is quiet for a while. "That's a very small amount of comfort."
"Yes, " Teel says. "Usually."
After the session Teel walks home. The notebook is in their bag. Forty-one pages of compass headings, sessions, careful notes. The headings vary wildly. No two clients point at the same thing, which means either the wants are entirely individual or the thing they point at is enormous and everyone is approaching it from a different angle. Teel has not resolved this question in twenty-two years. They do not expect to.
Walking north through the evening, Teel notices, as they sometimes do, their own pull. North-northeast. It has been there since they were twenty-nine, which is when they started this work, and they have never added it to the notebook. There is a page reserved at the back. The page is blank. They pass a lit shopfront. The pull attends them, north-northeast, steady, as it always is.