Chapter 7 The Difference in the Log

The log had a shape, and once Cleo saw the shape she could not stop seeing it. Dez, who had begun to leave things where she could find them — a printout on the staff desk, a screen turned a few degrees too far toward the corridor, a handheld reader set down while its owner answered a telephone — had left a week of her own raw log on the desk one morning, and Cleo copied the times into her notebook before the shift changed. Six checks a night. Six, from 22:30 to 06:00, every ninety minutes on the schedule, and the schedule was on the wall in the common room for anyone to read. She counted the checks in her raw log for the first seven nights the way she counted the tap. Six, six, six, six, six, six, six. And then, on nights two, five, and seven, which were the hold nights, there was a seventh line, printed in a lighter grey than the others, numbered with the same sequence but labelled with a word the schedule did not use. *Practice.* The practice lines fell at 02:15, which was not a scheduled check time, which sat neatly between the 01:30 check and the long gap to 03:00. On night two the practice line was followed by a voice line, the same voice line that had played in the review room. On night five the practice line was followed by five seconds of silence and then a motion event, *ambulatory, within-berth*. On night seven the practice line was followed by nothing at all. Cleo decided, in the flat and final way she decided things, to stay awake through it. She chose a quiet night, because the rules said a quiet night was hers, and lying awake on a quiet night was not against the protocol; it was merely pointless. She did it anyway. At ten she took the nine and did not swallow it, holding the capsule under her tongue until the corridor had gone quiet, and then she put it in the empty cup on the desk, where the night staff never looked, and lay on her back with her hands on the blanket and counted the tap. At 02:15 the speaker clicked. The voice that came out of the grille was hers. She had spent three days now listening for it and she was past the point of pretending otherwise; it was her voice down to the small hitch of breath before the *h* sounds, the hitch she had heard on her mother's bedside recorder a hundred times. And it did not speak the required sentence. It said her name. "Cleo." She did not answer, because answering was what they recorded, and she had promised herself on the third drip of the tap that she would not answer. The silence went on for a long time. Then the voice said, in the same flat register, "Which door?" And Cleo, who had not meant to answer, whose mouth had not been part of any decision she could find in herself, heard her own voice in the room say, "The one that was open." The speaker clicked off. She lay in the dark with her heart going and counted herself back down to a number she trusted, and at 02:40 she felt for the cup on the desk to check that the capsule was still there, and it was, and she looked at her hand in the faint light from the door and the hand was shaking, and the tap dripped, and she lay there until six, and she did not sleep. In the morning she filled in her Recall Sheet before breakfast, as required, under the eye of the camera that saw the tops of heads. Under *dreams* she wrote nothing, because she had not dreamed. She had spent four days learning to read the raw log the way Dez read it, which meant learning that every night is a column of codes and that the codes are not secrets, only abbreviations, and that a person who takes the trouble to learn eleven abbreviations can read the rest of her own file over a technician's shoulder and nobody will stop her, because nobody believes a participant will bother. Six checks a night, six lines, and the seven-line nights were the hold nights, and the seventh line had the word in it. On the eighth night she asked Dez, in the flat voice they used with each other in the corridor, what *practice* meant in the log, and Dez said practice meant a task block outside the scheduled sequence, and that the hold nights had one, and that it was on the annex sheet, and he said all of it while looking at the reader in his hand, and she understood that he was telling her the truth as far as the truth was documented and no further, which she had come to recognize as the only kind of help available in the building. The night she stayed awake she made herself a rule and kept it. She would not speak, whatever spoke to her. She would lie with her hands on the blanket and her eyes open and count the tap and not move, because movement was a line in the log and stillness was a line in the log and between the two of them stillness was the cheaper one. She took the nine and did not swallow it and put it in the cup. She listened to the 22:30 check and the 00:00 check and the 01:30 check, and each time she said the sentence in her own voice and each time the click came back, and in the intervals she counted and held her eyes open and did not sleep, and the counting began to be hard in a way she remembered from her nights at her mother's bedside, when the counting had been the only thing between her and the shape of the room. At 02:15 the speaker clicked and the voice came and it was hers. The first minute of it was the worst minute of the study, and she was ready for it and it was still the worst, because there is no amount of rehearsal for hearing your own voice arrive from the wall of the room you are lying in with the breath you use and the flatness you use and saying the name you have not been called by in this building in four weeks. It said her name the way her mother had said it at the end, from the far end of a long hall, and Cleo lay with her hands on the blanket and did not move and the tap dripped once and did not drip again and the room was so quiet that she could hear the paper of the Recall Sheet on the desk and the water in the riser and her own blood. Then it asked its question, and the question was two words, and Cleo had promised herself not to answer, and she did not answer, and the silence after the question went on for a long time, longer than the protocol allowed for any check, longer than a machine would leave a gap unless the machine was waiting for something. And she lay in the gap and held her mouth shut, and her mouth opened anyway, and her voice said the answer, and the speaker clicked off, and the room took its silence back, and she lay there with her heart going and her mouth still open. In the morning the capsule was still in the cup, and Dez looked at it for a moment before he looked at her, and neither of them said anything about it, and Dez wrote the check up as answered in the usual way and put the reader in his coat and left. But when she lifted the pen, the box under *recall of task content* had already been filled, in a hand she knew, and the line it carried had six words in it, and she had spent four nights now learning exactly what that line cost. *I answered the question. It was my turn.* ---