Chapter 10 The Narrative Bank

The paragraphs had a home. She found the name of it on page seven of the annex, in a footnote about data retention, and the name was *the narrative bank*. Every scripted memory used in the protocol was drawn from the bank and given an index number and a category. The categories were the ordinary hurts: grief, debt, departure, a room left behind, a person who does not come back. The bank held several hundred entries, each one written to be about somebody's life without being about anyone's in particular, and the annex said that entries were retired and replaced on a rotating schedule to prevent participants in later cohorts from recognizing shared material, which meant the bank was old, and meant that the red door had a number, and that other people had stood in front of it long before Cleo arrived. She went looking for the number in the only place she could reach, which was berth five's terminal, in the two minutes before breakfast while the shift changed. The terminal in the empty berth did not require a badge; it required a study number, and it had accepted hers before, and it accepted it again. She typed the word from the footnotes. The screen returned a directory, and the directory returned a list, and the list was long enough to scroll, and she did not have time to scroll it. She had time to notice that the entries were indexed by category and by date, and that at the bottom of the visible page there was a block of entries whose dates ran back eleven months and further, and that one of the entries in that block was not a number. It was a name. *MARRICK, C. — residual.* The date beside it was four days before her intake. The date beside the entry above it was the same. She heard the lift and closed the terminal and was in the corridor before the doors opened, and she did not sleep that morning either, and she lay in berth three and did the arithmetic again, with the arithmetic slowly turning over into something that arithmetic could not hold. A residual entry was a memory that had been banked and not yet placed. A banked memory needed a participant. A residual entry dated four days before she arrived meant that something of hers had been written down before she was here to write it, which meant either that they had taken material from her in an earlier participation she did not remember, or that the residual entry was not about her and her name had been attached to it for no reason at all, which was worse, because a name attached for no reason is a name attached on purpose. At breakfast the four of them ate at one long table with their heads down, which was how cohort C ate, and Cleo watched Juno Farr talk to Iva Molt about a film neither of them had seen, and watched Juno describe the plot with a confidence and a detail that struck her as suddenly wrong. Juno had not seen the film. Juno had said so yesterday. Juno was describing it anyway, in the sensory present tense, with the particular flat certainty of a person who has rehearsed a paragraph until the paragraph has a smell and a temperature, and Cleo sat with her spoon in her bowl and recognized the cadence because she had heard it in her own voice on a screen at 03:00. That afternoon, in the drying room, she caught herself doing it, too. Iva asked her what she had done before the study, and Cleo opened her mouth to say *transcription*, and what came out was a story about a coat left on a bus seat and a stop missed in the rain, and she told the story well, in the sensory present, with the smell of wet wool and the sound of the bell, and she heard herself tell it and could not find the seam where the telling had begun. The directory in berth five's terminal had a column for category and a column for date and a column she did not understand, headed *residual class*, and the values in that column were letters, and the letters ran from A to E, and she had two minutes and used them to write down what she saw rather than to understand it, which was the correct way to use two minutes. She got eleven entries onto the last page of the notebook, in the shorthand she had taught herself at work. Four of them were category *departure*. Two were *grief*. One was *debt*. One was *room, abandoned*. Three were *door*, and the three *door* entries were consecutive in the directory and dated within a fortnight of each other, and all three of them were eleven months old. One of the eleven entries had a name where a number should have been, and the name was hers, and the date was four days before intake, and the residual class was E, which was the last letter, and which appeared nowhere else on the visible page. The common room in the morning belonged to Juno Farr, who had decided, sometime in the third week, that the best way to get through the study was to be pleasant in every direction, and who was describing a film she had not seen to Iva, who was listening with her hands around her cup and her eyes somewhere else. Juno described the film the way she described everything, which was well, and in the present tense, and with a specific and unearned intimacy about a house on a hill and the woman who lived in it alone, and the woman had a habit of leaving one lamp burning in the hall, and Juno told the table about the lamp with the burn on its shade and the particular way the woman changed the bulb in the dark. Cleo had heard the bulb changed in the dark before. She had heard it from Dov Roon at this table, and from a screen at six in the morning, and she had written it in a notebook, and now she heard it from a plump cheerful woman of twenty-eight who had never met Dov Roon's mother or her own and was telling it as though it were hers, in the sensory present, with the smell of the room and the sound of the lamp, and the table listened and nobody said anything, because everyone at the table was doing what Cleo was doing, which was to hear their own biography going around the room in somebody else's mouth and to decide, again, in the small flat way one decides things in this building, not to be the one who says so. The drying room was where it happened to Cleo, because the drying room was where she was doing something with her hands and had stopped watching her own sentences. Iva asked her what she had done before the study, an ordinary question, the kind of question a person asks a person she has known for three weeks, and Cleo opened her mouth to say *transcription*, and the sentence that came out was about a coat, and it went on, and it was a good sentence and then a good paragraph, and the paragraph had rain in it and a bus and a seat and a stop missed, and it had a man in a coat who was not in the story when she started telling it and who arrived in the third sentence without any seam, and Cleo heard him arrive and kept talking, because stopping in the middle of a story is a thing a person does not do, and because she had begun, in the last week, to be afraid not of the story but of the ease of it, and the ease was the part of the study that had gone deepest, because the ease did not feel like a machine and did not feel like a voice in a wall and did not feel like anything at all except Cleo being fluent, which was the one thing she had always believed about herself. She put the towels down. The coat was not hers. The coat had never been hers, and the bus had never been hers, and the room with the crack shaped like a bird had been a paragraph on a screen for three weeks now, and yet she had just told the story of the coat to a woman in a drying room and had felt, for the length of it, entirely at home in a life she had not lived. She stopped in the middle of a sentence and stood there with her hands full of towels, and Iva looked at her with the particular stillness of a person who has been very careful for a very long time and asked, without any surprise at all, "Which one was that for you?" ---