Chapter 6 The Fifth Berth

The berths had no locks, which the intake sheet had described as a safety measure and which Cleo had begun to think of as an invitation. On the sixth morning, before breakfast, while the corridor was empty and the camera above the doors was pointed the other way, she opened the door of berth five. The room was identical to hers and had never been slept in since being stripped. The bed had a bare mattress with a shallow dent in the middle, the kind a body leaves when it is moved off a surface it has occupied for a long time. The desk was clear. The speaker grille was set into the wall at the height of her collarbone, and beside the door, where the nameplate had been, there was a rectangle of clean metal in a rectangle of grime, and the name had been taken off with a thumbnail in nine or ten passes that had left small curved scars. She looked under the mattress because that was where you looked in every institution she had ever been in, and there was a folded sheet of paper there, and the sheet was a Recall Sheet R-1, and the handwriting on it was hers. She knew her handwriting the way a person knows their own gait in a window. The *g* closed its loop; the *t* crossed late and low; the capital C was drawn in one stroke and finished with a small unnecessary tick. The sheet was headed with the study number C-13 and the berth number five, and under *dreams*, in the box Cleo had left empty on her own intake form, someone had written four lines. *I stood in the corridor. The red door was open. It was not my door. I did not go in.* It was the same four lines that had appeared on her own R-1 on the first morning of the study, the lines she had carried folded in the lining of her duffel, and it was not a coincidence because handwriting is not a coincidence. She sat on the bare mattress in the cold room and held the sheet and made herself do the arithmetic. Either she had written this before she ever arrived, which meant she had been here before and did not remember it, or she had written it since she arrived and left it in a room she had no reason to enter, or the handwriting was not hers and her own certainty about her own hand was just one more record that could be wrong. She was still sitting there when she noticed the drawer. In the drawer was a bundle of paper, and inside the bundle, wrapped in a discharge summary printed on letterhead she recognized from three years of transcription work, was a hospital wristband. The band was plastic, the colour of old milk, and it carried a name and a date of birth and an admission number, and the name was her mother's, and the admission number was one Cleo had typed into her own employer's system maybe two hundred times during the eleven months of her mother's decline, because she had been the one who filed the notes, because it had been easier to be the one who filed the notes than to be the one who sat in the chair. Her mother had never been in this building. Her mother had died in a facility on the other side of the city, and Cleo had been there at the end, and there was no version of the world in which a wristband from that facility found its way into a drawer in a sleep clinic in Larkmoor unless somebody had put it there on purpose. At the door she stopped, because the terminal on the desk had woken, the way the terminals woke, when a cuff came near it. She was not supposed to touch the terminals outside her own berth. She touched it. It asked for a study number, and she typed C-14, her own, and it accepted it without complaint, and it opened a screen she had not seen before, headed *cohort schedule*, and in the left column was a list of names with dates beside them and a row of small boxes to the right of each, and most of the boxes were ticked, and next to her own name, C-14, there were three boxes that were not ticked, and to the right of the last unticked box, in the thin grey of a system printing its own math, a number. The closet had a rail and four hangers, and on the third hanger there was a coat. It was grey and thin and had the particular nap of a coat that has been rained on a hundred times and dried a hundred times on the back of a chair, and Cleo took it down with two fingers the way she handled anything in the building, and held it up in the light from the corridor. It was her size. The left cuff was worn shiny at the inner edge, where a hand goes into a pocket, and when she put her own hand into that pocket her fingers found a folded card, and the card was a bus ticket, and the ticket was stamped with a route number she knew and a date eleven months before her intake. The route was the one that ran past her mother's facility. She had bought that ticket herself, more than once, on the days she could not make herself walk the last four stops, and the date on this one fell in the week her mother had stopped recognizing her, and Cleo stood in the cold room holding a coat she did not remember owning, in a building she did not remember entering, holding a date she remembered with the grain of weather. She put the coat back on the hanger and the hanger back on the rail and did not take it with her, because a thing left in the room is evidence and a thing carried out of the room is just a thing you have. She wrote the wristband down in the notebook that afternoon, and the admissions number, and the ticket, and the four lines in her own hand, and under all of it she wrote the one fact she could not get around, which was that an object from her actual life, dated eleven months before the study, had been placed in an empty berth in the Ondale Institute, and that either she had put it there or somebody had taken it from her flat, and that a person who has no memory of the first and no evidence of the second is a person with two impossible stories and a choice. Corbell was at the desk at four, doing the thing she did at four, which was to reconcile the linen count against the previous week's sheet with the patience of a woman who had decided long ago that the job was the job. Cleo asked her when berth five had last been occupied, and Corbell said it had been occupied earlier in the year, and Cleo asked by whom, and Corbell said she was not permitted to discuss other participants, and Cleo asked whether berth five was assigned to cohort C, and Corbell looked up for the first time and said that berth five was assigned to whoever the study assigned it to, and that the study had a waiting list, and that the waiting list had a name on it, and that Cleo would meet the name on it in due course if she stayed to the end. She said it all in the flat voice of a woman reading a stock count, and then she went back to the linen, and Cleo understood that Corbell knew the answer to every question she had asked and had answered the only one that did not matter. The terminal in berth five had woken when her cuff came near it, the way the terminals woke, and she stood in front of it with her hand on the desk and read the cohort schedule twice, because she read everything twice. Five names, five boxes per name, and the boxes for the first four names were nearly all ticked, and the boxes for C-14 were not, and there were three left, and beside the last unticked box the system had printed its own arithmetic without being asked. The number was small and grey and sat where a number sits when it is not meant to draw attention but also not meant to be hidden, and it was a number she had seen before on other forms in other institutions, in the column that counts the days between an admission and an outcome. It was a countdown. It read nineteen. ---