Chapter 13 Subject Rill

Juno Farr left on the twentieth morning, and nobody was told she was leaving until she was already gone. She came down the corridor with a wheeled case and a cardboard box of the sort they give people at hospitals, and she stopped at the table where the cohort took breakfast, and she said goodbye with the easy warmth of a person leaving a holiday rental. She did not look tired. She looked rested in a way none of them had looked in weeks, and when Iva asked her how she had slept, Juno said she had slept like a stone, and then she said something that nobody followed up on because everybody was being careful: she said she could not wait to get home to her flat, and Cleo had heard Juno describe her flat three times in three weeks, and Juno's flat was the flat from the paragraph about the house on the hill. The replacement came the same afternoon. Her name was Rill Brunk. She was young, maybe twenty-six, with short hair and a way of holding her shoulders that suggested she had been an athlete and had stopped. She was given berth five, which had stood empty since before Cleo arrived, and she carried her own bag in, and she did not need to be shown the rules, and when Corbell began the intake recitation, Rill finished two of her sentences for her. Rill found Cleo in the drying room on her second day, which was faster than anyone made friends here, and leaned against the machine and looked at her with an expression Cleo could not read. "You're C-14," Rill said. "Yes." "They put me back in five." Rill pulled at the cuff on her wrist, which was new and still had the shine on it. "I said I didn't mind. I mostly mind that they scraped my name off the door." Cleo stopped folding the towel in her hands. Rill watched her stop, and then Rill's face did something complicated, the way a person's face does when they have said the true thing and watched it land. "I was C-13," Rill said. "I withdrew in the first week. That's what they'll tell you if you ask. It's true, mostly." She shrugged, and the shrug was an old person's shrug on a young person's frame. "I came back because they called and offered the completion rate up front, and because the flat I had went away, and because I have a thing I'm paying down that doesn't care whether I remember the nights." Cleo asked her, in the flat voice she had learned in this building, whether she remembered the nights. "I remember one," Rill said. "I remember a corridor with a red door. It's not mine. I know it's not mine the way you know a coat is not yours when you take it off the rack by mistake." She looked at the door of the drying room, and then at Cleo. "The night before you got here, I had a dream about standing in a corridor with you. I didn't know what you looked like. I do now, though, because I've seen you. That's how it works, apparently. You fill in the face afterward and the filling-in feels like remembering." That evening, at the long table, Dov Roon ate for the first time in four days. He was a big, slow, careful man in his sixties who had hardly spoken since the washout, and he ate his rice and then he set his fork down and he told the table, in a clear and pleasant voice, about the room he had grown up in, which had a crack in the plaster shaped like a bird and a lamp with a burn on its shade. He described the burn. He described the bird. He said that his mother used to leave the lamp on for him and that the burn was from the night the bulb had gone and she had changed it in the dark. Cleo knew that room. It had never been Dov Roon's room. It had been the room in the paragraph that Dez had read to her from a screen at six in the morning, and it had been in her own ten sentences, and she had written it in a notebook that was folded into the lining of a bag on the other side of the wall, and she sat very still with her hands in her lap and listened to a man across from her become, in the space of ninety seconds, the owner of her childhood. Nobody at the table said anything. Iva watched Dov. Rill watched Cleo. And Cleo understood that she had crossed, in the last three days, a line she had not marked, from a participant who suspected the study to a participant who knew that the study suspected her, and that there was no longer any version of her that was not, in some file, a component. Rill Brunk settled into the cohort in three days, which was faster than any of them had settled, and she did it by being useful. She did not ask questions. She took the tray when the tray was there to be taken and left the drying room when the drying room was full and learned the shift times of the staff without ever being told them, and she spoke to Cleo only in the drying room and only in the flat voice they had agreed on without agreeing on it, and in the four days she was in the building she told Cleo three things that turned out to be true. The first was that there were six berths on the floor below and that the sixth was newer than the other five and had been used in the year between cohort C's first run and cohort C's second. She said it the way a person reports a bus route. The second was that Dov Roon had been in cohort C before, in the spring, and that he did not remember it either. The third was about the red door. Iva, at the table the night Dov recited the room with the crack shaped like a bird, put her cup down and said, in the way of a person conceding a point she had been holding for weeks, that she had heard the bird room before too, in her own second week, from a screen at the terminal, and that she had assumed at the time that she had dreamed it and had written it on her sheet, and that she had heard it again from Dov at breakfast and had heard it again from Juno before Juno left, and that the three of them had all been given the same room and had all written it down in their own hands, and that she had decided at some point during the third week not to notice, because noticing did not pay the rent. Rill had a notebook of her own, which she kept in a sleeve of her running jacket, and she showed it to Cleo in the drying room on the third day, which was a thing that could only be done deliberately, because showing a person your record is the only form of trust the building allowed. The notebook had nine pages and the ninth page had four lines on it, and the four lines were the four lines, in Rill's handwriting, and Rill said she had woken with them in her head on her fourth morning of cohort C the first time and had written them down without knowing where they came from, and that she had since learned that everybody who could carry woke with them, and that the lines were not a memory at all but a door with a handle on the inside, and that the study liked a participant who could draw the handle. Cleo asked her what residual class she was, and Rill said E, and Cleo felt the cold arrive from the base of her spine and travel out into her hands, because E was the letter on the one entry in the berth-five directory with her own name on it, four days before her intake, and because a class is a shelf and shelves are built to hold more than one thing, and because if Rill was E and Cleo was E, then the study had, somewhere, a place where it kept people who could carry, and Cleo was beginning to think that the place was a cohort and that the cohort was a queue. Before she went to her berth, Rill caught her at the door and said the last thing, quietly, in the way people say things that are worse than the rest. "Berth five's terminal still has a folder in it," Rill said. "It has your name on it. I looked. I'm telling you because I'd want to be told." She let go of the door. "It's dated next month." ---