The pull arrived on a Thursday in April when Ciell was thirty-three, three months after he left his position at the university in the north and came back to take the secondary school post. He was standing at the window of his new classroom after the students had gone, looking at the parking lot, and the pull started. It was directional, the way a smell is directional: unmistakable, pointing at something, pointing consistently northwest.
He wrote it down that evening. He has been writing it down ever since. The journal has forty-one entries. The direction has not changed. The intensity has not changed. He has worked out, to the degree that one can work these things out, the approximate coordinates the pull points toward: a city three hours north. The city he came from. More precisely, a neighborhood in that city, near the university, near the street where he spent two years of his life being a different kind of person.
He has tried to interpret this. The want might be for the city, which he left reluctantly. It might be for his work there, which was difficult and interesting in ways his current work is not. It might be for a person he was connected to there for two years, who he does not think about deliberately, who he knows is still in the same city, doing something not unlike what she was doing when they last saw each other. He has not been able to determine which.
He has thought about going north, about testing whether the pull changes when you close the distance. He has thought about this for eleven years and has not done it.
What he has done: kept the journal, kept the job, built a life in this city that is fine. He has friends here who know the version of him that stayed. He has a flat with decent light. He is good at explaining things to sixteen-year-olds, better than he expected to be. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings he explains things he has explained many times before, and the pull attends him while he explains them. He does not mention the pull to anyone. He is not sure what would be said.
After the last class on a Thursday, a student stays late with a problem she is stuck on. He works through it with her at the board. She thanks him and leaves. He turns to erase the board. The pull is there, northwest, unchanged. He erases the board.