Chapter 1 Intake

The Ondale Institute occupied the top two floors of a concrete block on Trenner Row, in the district of Larkmoor, where the streetlights stood too far apart and the last bus left at nine. Cleo Marrick arrived at 19:40 with a duffel bag, a folder of forms she had already signed twice, and the sanded-down tiredness of a woman who had not slept more than four hours in a night since March. She had read the advertisement three times before she answered it. Paid sleep study. Twenty-eight nights. Supervised accommodation. Four thousand two hundred dollars on completion. One line in small type said that participants must be free of shift work for the duration, and that line had nearly ended the whole thing, because Cleo worked nights for a medical records contractor, transcribing discharge notes from emergency rooms in three counties, and nights were the only work she had. The woman on the telephone had been patient about it. The study ran at night, she said. Night was the point. The debt was nineteen thousand and change, most of it the last eleven months of her mother's care, and arithmetic was a thing Cleo trusted more than she trusted most people. Twenty-eight nights of a stranger watching her sleep, and the debt would grow smaller, and she could stop doing what she did instead of sleeping, which was lie still in the dark and listen to the building settle. Intake happened in a room the size of a dental surgery, all grey laminate and a fish tank with no fish in it. Mireya Corbell ran the desk. She was somewhere past fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the unhurried manner of a woman who had moved several hundred people through the same paperwork and expected to move several hundred more. She did not look up when Cleo came in. She looked at the folder. "You signed the long form," Corbell said. "I signed three long forms." "Then this is the last one." She slid a single sheet across the laminate. "Consent to monitoring. Read the bold line and initial it." The bold line said that the participant consented to continuous audiovisual and biometric monitoring for the duration of the study and for fourteen days afterwards. Cleo initialled it. Beside it, in a box labelled *previous participation*, someone had already written **no**. The ink was the same blue as hers. She had not written it. She decided, in the flattened way of a person at the end of a long negotiation with herself, not to ask. Her mother's last year had taught her that institutions were rooms with a door in them and a person at the door, and that the person at the door was never the one who decided. Corbell walked her through the rules the way other people recited a prayer they had stopped listening to. The telephone stayed in a locker on the ground floor. It came back for one hour a night, between seven and eight, under supervision. Personal effects remained in the berth. The berth had no clock, no window, and no lock. The wrist cuff went on and stayed on for twenty-eight nights; it recorded movement, skin temperature, and the conductance of her skin, and it did not care what she thought about any of that. Lights went out at ten. At ten she swallowed one capsule from the tray, which the staff called *the nine*, and which might have been a sedative, a placebo, or a thing that had no name she was entitled to. Every ninety minutes, from ten-thirty until six, a voice would come over the speaker in the berth and she would answer with the same sentence, every time, in the same words. "Here, awake, no carryover," Corbell said. "Say it back." "Here, awake, no carryover." "Good. That sentence is the log's only evidence that you are you. If you miss a check, I have to write a note." Cleo asked what *carryover* meant. Corbell said it meant an interval the participant could not account for. She said it the way a pharmacist says *side effect*, as a word that had been worn smooth by use. Berth three held a bed, a desk, a terminal she was not yet allowed to touch, and a speaker grille set into the wall at the height of her collarbone. The bed smelled of industrial laundry. Through the wall she could hear the low music of the building — pipes, a lift somewhere, water in a riser — and she began, without deciding to, to count. Counting was an old habit from the years of her mother's illness, when the nights had been a corridor she walked without arriving anywhere. She counted the drip of a tap two berths away: one, two, three, four, then the pause, then again. She had no clock, so she made one out of water. At 22:30 the speaker clicked and the voice said a number, and Cleo said her sentence, and the click came again, and the room took its silence back. At 00:00 the same. She lay with her hands on the blanket and watched the dark the way she watched a screen at work, waiting for a text to resolve. The hours between the checks belonged to neither sleep nor waking, and Cleo spent them the way she spent most hours, which was in a state of low alertness that she had long ago stopped calling tiredness, because tiredness implied a before and an after and she had neither. She lay on her back and counted the tap and listened to the building. Two berths down, someone coughed twice and was still. Somewhere past the wall, a machine ran and stopped and ran again. She could hear four people breathing in four rooms, and she could hear, on the far side of the fifth door, the berth that was empty, which was silent, and the silence in it was of a different quality than the silence of a sleeping person, the way the sound of a room with a bed in it differs from the sound of a room with nothing in it at all. At six the corridor light went from yellow to white and the doors began to open. Iva Molt came out first, thin and upright, and stood by the common-room door without speaking until the rest of them arrived. Juno Farr came next, a plump cheerful woman in her late twenties who said good morning to everyone and got good morning from no one. Dov Roon came last and did not sit down until Corbell had put the tray on the table. Cleo looked at them and understood the shape of the group immediately, because she had been in enough waiting rooms to read them: four people who had each decided, alone and for reasons they would not share, to sell the nights of a month. Nobody talked at breakfast. The rules said they were not to discuss their material, and the rules had been read to each of them separately, and so they ate in a careful quiet that had more in it than a normal quiet has, and Cleo watched them and counted them and got to four, and then counted the doorways of the empty berth across the corridor and got to five, and there was a nameplate beside that fifth door with the name taken off it in nine or ten passes of a thumbnail, and the clean metal where the name had been caught the corridor light in a way the rest of the plate did not. On her way back from breakfast she passed the door of the Gallery, which opened, at that moment, and a large quiet man came out carrying a folder, and he held the door for her with his shoulder and looked at her the way a person looks at a number he has already read, and said good morning in a voice that was neither warm nor cold, and moved past her down the corridor toward the lift, and Cleo learned later that this was Dr. Orvin Voskuil, who ran the study, and who would not speak to her again for eleven days. In the morning Corbell gave her a form. One side, ruled lines, headed *Recall Sheet R-1*. At the top it asked what she had dreamed. Beneath that, it asked what she had done between checks. Cleo wrote *nothing* and *nothing* and *nothing* and *nothing*, and then she turned the page, because there was a page, and on the second page, in a box she had not noticed the night before, someone had written four lines in her own handwriting. *I stood in the corridor. The red door was open. It was not my door. I did not go in.* She turned the form over, and over again, and looked at the words the way a person looks at a photograph of their own face that they do not remember having taken. ---