第14章 The Folder With Her Name

She took the Gallery on the twenty-second night, during the 01:30 check, when Dez Quenby was on his break and Sandoz had gone home and the corridor light had gone bluish and stayed bluish for forty minutes. She had learned the shape of the night the way she had learned the shape of the tap. Dez's break was nineteen minutes, sometimes twenty-two. The Gallery door was heavy and had a card reader, and the card reader did nothing tonight, because Dez had left the door on the latch, and Cleo had noticed the latch a week ago and had decided then that she was not going to notice it. Inside, the Gallery was smaller than she had imagined and duller, four monitors and a wall of equipment and a chair with Dez's jacket on the back. The main screen was logged in under Dez's session, which she could read but not use, and below it was the archive browser, which she could use. She searched her own name. The folder had eleven files in it. The first four were ordinary: intake forms, the consent, the cuff calibration, the daily sheets she had already seen. The fifth was labelled *residual, dated eleven months prior* and contained a single audio file, dated the night her mother had died. Cleo sat in Dez's chair and looked at the date for a long time without opening it, because she had spent the last year learning to hold that date at arm's length and the file had taken the arm out of her hand. She opened the sixth file instead, which was video, and understood before it played what it had to be. The timestamp was a Tuesday three weeks before her intake. The camera was the corridor camera, the one that saw the tops of heads. The corridor was empty, and then it was not, and a woman came down it in a long coat with her head down, and the camera caught only the crown of her head and the shoulders, and the woman walked to the door of berth three and stood in front of it for a while, and did not open it, and the shape of the shoulders under the coat was the shape of Cleo's shoulders in every photograph she had ever torn up. She watched it four times. On the fourth time she noticed that the woman in the coat had her gait, the slight favouring of the left foot that Cleo had had since the bicycle and the chain, and she noticed this the way a person notices that there is no scar left on her own wrist, which is to say that she noticed it and then spent a moment deciding which of the two pieces of evidence she was prepared to lose. The seventh file she opened was the one Rill had told her about. It was labelled with a date three weeks in the future, which was past the end of her study, and it contained four Recall Sheets, R-25 through R-28, and every box was filled, and every line was in her handwriting. She read them standing up, because sitting felt like agreeing to something. R-25, R-26, R-27 were ordinary and terrible. R-28 was the last morning of the study, and the box headed *dreams* contained a paragraph she had not written and had not dreamed, and the box headed *recall of task content* contained a single sentence that she read and read and could not make stop being true: *I told them about the door. They said it was mine. I let them say it.* She did not hear Dez come back. She only heard the door, and then the particular silence of a person standing in a doorway deciding what to do, and she turned in the chair with the printout of R-28 in her hand, and Dez Quenby looked at the screen and then at the paper and then at her, and closed the door. She copied what she could, which was the folder's index and the last of the future sheets, and she did not copy the video, because the video was on a server and copying it would leave a mark, and she had learned enough about the building in twenty-two nights to know that the mark was the thing they looked for. She photographed the screen with the telephone she did not have. She wrote the file names in the notebook from memory, then checked the notebook against the screen and corrected two of the names, because a name is a record and she had learned to treat her own memory as the least reliable of the instruments available to her. The fourth file was the residual, and she opened it, because it was dated the night her mother died and because a person who will not open that file has already decided to leave. It was four minutes and seven seconds of ward. You could hear it, in the first minute, before you could hear anything else: the particular hum of a long corridor at night, and the trolley wheels on the vinyl, and a bell somewhere at the far end that had been broken for the whole of the last year and had never been fixed. Cleo had spent eleven months in that corridor and she knew the bell and she knew the vinyl and she knew the exact distance the trolley had to travel before the wheels changed their note, and the file had all of it, and she sat in a dead man's chair in a control room at two in the morning and listened to the place where her mother had died being played back to her from a folder with her name on it. At two minutes past the first minute a woman's voice began to speak at the edge of the recording, too quiet to make out the words, and it was either her mother or it was Cleo herself recorded at a distance, and Cleo reached for the pause and did not press it, and listened to the whole of the four minutes and seven seconds with her hands flat on the desk, and when it ended she still did not know which of the two women had been speaking, and she understood that this was the most perfect thing in the whole building, that the one piece of her own history they had taken from her had been taken in such a way that she could not, even holding it, tell whether it had been hers. Dez came back at minute nineteen and stood in the doorway, and she turned in the chair with the printout of R-28 in her hand. She asked him what happened to a participant who delivered the account. Dez said that a participant who delivered the account was paid and discharged and that the funder owned the recording and that the participant's own copy of the recording was the account as she had given it, which was a copy of words and not of the file, and that the difference between words and the file was the whole business. He said it the way a man recites a thing he has recited to himself many times in the dark. "Okay," he said, and dragged the other chair over and sat down across from her, which was the first time anyone in the building had sat down to talk to her as if she were a person and not a record. "Okay. You have about ten minutes. What I need you to understand is that I am not going to stop you, and I am not going to save you, because there is no version of either of those that ends with me keeping this job." ---