Chapter 17 The Funder

Voskuil sent for her on the twenty-fifth night, and this time the room with two chairs had three chairs in it, and the third was for Sandoz, who sat with her hands folded and did not look comfortable, and on the little table between them was the folder, open. He said he was going to tell her the truth, on the record, with a witness, and that he was doing it because she had reached the point in a study where the participant's account was about to become the product, and that it was his view, which he had expressed in writing twice and been overruled on twice, that a participant who is about to become the product deserves to know which market she is in. The funder was a company called Corveil. Corveil did not sell sleep. Corveil sold certainty to people whose money was made by statements about the past — insurers settling claims, lawyers preparing witnesses, boards preparing to hear what a person remembered. For years their problem had been the same problem it had always been: memory is a bad instrument, and a good witness is a rare and expensive thing, and a witness who cannot be broken on the stand is rarer still. So Corveil had funded, quietly and for a long time, a line of research into whether a remembered past could be *prepared* the way a brief is prepared. Not invented from nothing. There was no invention in the protocol. The bank was full of ordinary hurts because ordinary hurts are the shape of the door, and the technique was not to put a stranger's life into a person but to give a person a *draft* of a past that she could then hold as her own, and to test whether she would defend it, and to measure how much of it she would defend. He said the technique worked. He said that was the finding, and that it had worked in cohort A and cohort B and was working in cohort C, and that the reason Cleo had been selected and re-selected was not cruelty and was not chance. It was that she screened highest. She was, in the language of the annex, a high-capacity carrier. She could hold material that was not hers and report it as hers, with detail, under pressure, and defend it against contradiction, and there were not many people alive who could do that, and Corveil had found that the people who could do it were, almost without exception, people who had spent a long time awake in the dark with something they could not fix. Sandoz said his name, once, warningly. Voskuil did not stop. He said that the final phase, nights twenty-eight onward, was called consolidation, and that it consisted of one thing: the participant was asked to give a full account of the material she had recalled over the study, aloud, on camera, as her own, and to sign the account as her statement. He said that most participants gave the account, and that the account was the product, and that the money was paid on delivery. He said the material in her account was drawn from the bank, and that she had been rehearsed in it for a fortnight, and that if the account was delivered cleanly the study was a success and she went home with the debt cleared and a clause that bound her silence. Cleo asked which material. Voskuil turned the folder around and slid it across the table, and there was a single sheet, and on the sheet was a summary of the material scheduled for her consolidation, and the material had one entry, and the entry had her name on it, and the date on it was the night her mother had died. She looked at the date for a long time. Voskuil let her. And then he said the thing that was the reason he had put three chairs in the room, which was that her residual entry, the file dated that same night, was not a fiction of the bank. It was real. It had been taken from her eleven months ago, during the first participation, as the study's seed material, and it was the one piece of her actual life the Institute held, and the only way to give it back to her was to place it back through the same door they had taken it through, which meant that on the twenty-eighth night she would be given her own memory of her mother's death, and she would hear it in a voice she trusted, and she would be asked to sign it as her own, and it would be hers, and she would not be able to prove that. "That is the offer," Voskuil said. "I am not dressing it. You can refuse and forfeit and owe us, or you can consent and be paid and have the night back. I have been overruled in this building before, and I am overruled now, and I am telling you the shape of the machine because Sandoz asked me to and because I have stopped being able to tell the difference between a protocol and a person reading a number off a sheet." Sandoz, without looking at either of them, said, "That is not why you're telling her." She asked him how many times the protocol had been run, and he said three times before this one, and she asked him what had happened to the participants, and he said that they had been paid and discharged, and that one of them was eating breakfast on the fifth floor that morning, and that the fact that Dov Roon had come back for a second cohort was the answer to the ethical question she was about to ask, and he said the question for her first, so that she would know he had heard it before. The question was whether any of them had been harmed. Voskuil said that he did not know, and that this was the honest answer and not the careful one, and that a person who has been given a past she did not live will live in it, and that living in it is not the same as being harmed and is not the same as being unharmed, and that the protocol measured whether the material held and did not measure what it cost, because the funder had not asked it to and because a thing that is not measured is a thing that is not seen. He said that he had written the missing measurement into two memos and that both memos were in the folder on the table and that neither had changed anything, and that this was the whole of the reason he was telling her, and that she could believe him or not, and that believing him was not required. Sandoz said, from the third chair, that the study had a real door in it and that Cleo had already been told so, and that the door would still work on the twenty-eighth night, and that the money would still be paid if she delivered the account, and that the money would not be paid if she did not, and that the funder did not care which door she used so long as the account was on the tape. Cleo asked the question that had been sitting in her chest since the ninth day, and asked it in the flattest voice she had, because a flat voice was the only protection the building gave a person, and the question was what had been taken from her and where it was now. Voskuil opened the folder and took out a single page and turned it so she could read it, and the page was a consent, dated eleven months earlier, and the consent had her signature on it, and there was a line on the consent, in the small print that participants are taught not to read, that said that the participant agreed to the extraction of *residual material* for the purposes of the protocol and understood that the material would be held by the Institute and returned, if at all, through the course of a subsequent participation. He said that the material was the night her mother died, and that they had taken it in the spring, during her first participation, because it was the strongest piece of her own material that the screening had found, and that the protocol took the strongest piece on purpose, because the strongest piece is the one a participant will work hardest to get back, and the working hardest is the whole mechanism, and the mechanism had a name in the annex and the name was *draw*. And then he said that he had told her all of it in the presence of a witness and that he would deny none of it and that none of it changed the arithmetic of the twenty-eighth night, and Cleo sat in the third chair and looked at the consent with her own name on it and understood that the offer on the table was the offer she had been carrying for eleven months without knowing it, which was her own mother's last night, held in a folder, retrievable through a door she would have to walk through of her own free will, and that a person who is offered her own grief back will walk through any door to get it, and that this was not a coincidence but a design, and that the design had her name in it because her name was the shape of the lock. Voskuil looked at the closed folder. "No," he said. "It isn't." ---