Chapter 2 The First Hold Night

The schedule for the study hung on the wall of the common room, which nobody was supposed to use and everybody used: a laminated grid, twenty-eight squares across, each square marked *quiet* or *hold*. Quiet nights allowed sleep. Hold nights did not. On a hold night the participant stayed awake from lights-out to sunup and worked at the terminal on tasks assigned by the Gallery, in ninety-minute blocks broken only by the checks. Every third square was a hold. The second night of Cleo's study was a hold. At 22:00 she took the nine and sat down at the terminal, which woke when her cuff came near it and asked for her study number. She typed it. The screen filled with a paragraph in plain font. *Read aloud. Then type what you read.* The paragraph was nothing: a woman on a bus, a coat left on a seat, a stop missed in the rain. Cleo read it aloud to the empty room and typed it from memory, and the screen told her she had made no errors. A new paragraph appeared. This one was a man in a kitchen, a kettle boiling dry, a telephone ringing from the next room. She read it. She typed it. No errors. At 01:30 the speaker clicked and she gave the sentence, and the screen brightened with a third paragraph, and she read it, and the lift went past somewhere beyond the wall, and the water in the riser ran, and then the speaker clicked again and the voice said, *04:30*, and Cleo sat back and looked at the clockless dark and understood that two and a half hours were simply gone. She had answered the 03:00 check. Somewhere on the tray of the terminal, in the log the Gallery kept, the words *Here, awake, no carryover* had been spoken in her voice and logged under her number. She remembered the 01:30 click. She remembered the paragraph about the man in the kitchen. She did not remember the 03:00 click, or the paragraphs between, or standing up, or sitting down, or the cup of water on the desk that had not been there at half past one and was there now, half full, the water still cool against her wrist when she touched it. The terminal asked her to type what she had read between 01:30 and 04:30. Under that was a field headed *recall of task content*, and below it, in the docile grey of a form waiting to be filled, a sentence in her handwriting that had already been typed, letter by letter, into the system: *The woman on the bus was my mother. She was going to the coast. The coat on the seat was mine.* Cleo had never told anyone in this building about her mother, and her mother had never gone to the coast, and the bus in the paragraph had not contained a woman or a coat or rain, because she had read the paragraph three times and it had been about a man and a kettle and a telephone. She sat with her hands flat on the warmed plastic and waited for the feeling she was supposed to have, which was fear, and got instead the smaller, colder feeling of a machine that has resolved a text and found it consistent. At six the corridor lights came up. Dez Quenby came through with the morning tray, a young man with a shaved head and a way of looking at the middle distance as if the middle distance were a screen. He collected the cups and checked the cuffs against a handheld reader. "You did well," he said, without emphasis. "What was the task between half one and half four?" Dez looked at the reader. "Reading and transcription. Four paragraphs. You made no errors." "What were the paragraphs about?" He scrolled. "One was about a bus. One was about a man in a kitchen. One was about a house on a hill. One was about a door." Cleo asked him to read the fourth one aloud, and Dez did, in his flat voice, and it was not the paragraph that was stored in Cleo's recall field. It was a description of a room she had lived in as a child, down to the crack in the plaster shaped like a bird and the lamp with the burn on its shade, and it was not wrong in any detail, and she had never given the Institute a word about that room, or about her childhood, or about anything that mattered, because the intake form had asked her for a recurring dream and she had left the box empty. She knew she had left the box empty. She remembered deciding to. The common room had the grid on the wall, and Dov Roon stood in front of it that evening with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, following the hold nights across the row with his finger. He was a big careful man in his sixties and he did not look up when Cleo came in, but he spoke, because the room was empty and the rules against talking were made for rooms with two people in them. "They want you tired," he said. "That's the whole trick of it. Not tired the first night. Tired the third, when the checks stop lining up with where you think you are." Cleo asked him what he meant. Dov took his glasses down and looked at the grid again and said that the schedule put the hold nights three days apart and the checks ninety minutes apart, and that ninety minutes was almost exactly the length of one full sleep cycle, and that the reason the checks were at ninety minutes and not at two hours was so that a participant would keep being pulled up out of the deepest part of sleep, and that after a week of it a person's sense of time came loose from the clock the way a tooth comes loose from the gum. He said all of this in the tone of a man describing the route of a bus, and then he said that he had been in cohort A for a study that he half remembered, and that he had come back for cohort C to see whether the half was the true half. On a hold night the sheet told you what you were permitted and what you were required, and the sheet was more careful than the forms, because the hold nights were where the money was made. You were permitted to sit, to stand, to walk the berth, to drink water, to wash your face at the basin. You were required to answer every check and to complete every task set at the terminal. You were forbidden to lie down, and forbidden to close your eyes for longer than the time it took to blink, and forbidden to cover the grille of the speaker with anything at all, a rule which Cleo found interesting and stored away without examining, because a rule about covering a speaker is a rule about who is listening. The tasks came in blocks of ninety minutes and they were not hard, and that was the thing that made them hard. Between 22:00 and 01:30 the terminal gave her paragraphs to read and retype from memory, and short lists of words to sort into categories, and a grid of faces to rank by how much she would trust them, and every block ended with the same question, which was whether she felt she had done the block, and she always answered yes, and the system always wrote down the time. The Gallery spoke to her four times in the first ninety minutes, and the voice was always the voice of whichever technician was on, reading the checklist, and it had the flat courtesy of a person who has read the same list many hundreds of times. She had not expected it to be a person at all; she had expected a tone, and the person was worse, because a tone can be a machine that does not know you are there, and a person on a checklist is a person who knows exactly where you are and is not troubled by it. By midnight her eyes had begun to do the thing they did at work, which was to slide off the screen and come back a half-second later without having registered the journey. She stood up and walked the length of the berth, fourteen steps, and counted them on the way back and got fourteen again, which she took as evidence that she was still herself. She drank the water. She pressed her nails into her palm. The paragraph on the screen was about a door, and she read it twice and typed it once, and somewhere in the typing the light in the corridor changed, and she looked up, and the screen said the time was 04:30, and the light had changed at least two hours ago and she had not seen it change. Dez put the reader in his coat and took the tray out, and the door closed, and Cleo sat for a long time with the cup she had emptied twice in the night and did not remember emptying once. ---