The Compass Points at Something That Follows

I collect old instruments, and the brass compass at the boot sale was lovely and cheap and clearly broken — its needle didn't point north, it pointed off at some fixed random bearing, which is why the seller let it go for pennies. I bought it for the case and the craftsmanship, meaning to leave the dud needle to its confusion.

At home I noticed the needle wasn't random. In my study it pointed to a spot near the door. I turned the compass; the needle swung to keep pointing at the same spot. I walked around the room holding it level; the needle tracked that one fixed point in space, unwavering, the way a compass tracks north — except it wasn't north, it was a specific location in my study, about six feet from wherever I stood, roughly behind me.

I carried it into the kitchen. It found a new spot — again about six feet away, again roughly at my back — and locked onto it, and held it as I moved around the room, the needle always indicating a position a little behind me and to one side, a fixed distance, a patient constant bearing on something that was not a magnetic pole and not a lump of iron in the wall, because I checked, exhaustively, for both.

Whatever the compass points at, it points at it in every room, at a consistent distance, consistently behind me. When I walk down the hall, the needle swings to keep the spot at my back as I go. When I turn around quickly — and I have, many times, some of them not proud — the needle simply resettles, smoothly, to put the spot behind me again, wherever 'behind me' has become. The compass has, in effect, one true north, and its true north is a point that maintains a fixed following distance from me, at my back, always.