第18章 Which Log Is Hers

She did not sleep for the last three nights, and she did not fake it either, and the staff let her be, because by then the schedule belonged to the file and the file belonged to the funder and nobody was pretending anymore that her sleep was the subject. On the twenty-sixth morning she opened her own notebook and read it end to end, and it was not hers. That was the way she put it to herself, because she had no other sentence for it: it was not hers. The first thirty pages were, she thought, hers. The tap counts, the van times, the colour of the corridor light, the note about her mother's wristband, the note about the scar that was not on her arm. She could feel her hand in those pages and they had the grain of weather. Then the pages changed. Same hand, same tick on the *t*, and the sentences were not the ones she would have written, and she knew this the way a person knows a translation is bad without reading the original — not because she could point to the error but because the voice was standing too still. There were entries about Dov Roon that she did not remember writing. There was an entry about the lower floor with the six berths, written in the same hand, dated the night *before* she had found the stairs. There was a full page describing the red door opening onto a room she had never entered, and at the bottom of it a sentence that ended in the middle of a word, as if she had been interrupted, or as if whoever wrote it had been. And there was one entry that was worse than the rest, because it was dated the next day, and because it was plausible in every particular. It described the consolidation interview, and it described what she said in it, and it described the moment, near the end, when she decided to stop resisting and deliver the account cleanly, and it explained why she decided that, and the reason it gave was a good reason, the kind of reason she would give herself: *because the memory of the night my mother died is mine, and it is in there, and the only door to it is the one they built, and I am tired, and I would rather have it back through a door they built than not have it at all.* She read that entry four times. It was not true yet. It was not true for two more days. It was simply what she was going to do, written down in her own handwriting, in her own notebook, by a part of her that had gone on ahead of her and taken notes. She went to the drying room and worked it through the way she worked everything through, from the beginning. She was not sure, anymore, of two things she had been sure of at the start. She was not sure the Institute had been lying to her, because Voskuil had, in the end, told her the truth with a witness in the room. And she was not sure that the person worrying about all of this was the same person who had walked into intake, because the worry had the flat, rehearsed texture of the rehearsed paragraphs, and because she had caught herself, twice now, describing her own life in the sensory present tense with details she could not have seen, and once, in front of Sandoz, she had told the story of the coat on the bus as though the coat had been her father's. The only reliable instrument she had left was not her memory and not the log. It was the notebook, and the notebook had a future page in it, and a future page is a prediction, and a prediction can be tested. She tested the notebook the way she tested everything else, which was by putting a prediction in it and waiting. On the twenty-sixth evening she wrote, on a fresh page, four sentences about the following morning. She wrote that she would wake before the six o'clock check, that the corridor light would be white when she opened her eyes and would have been yellow when she closed them, that she would eat nothing at breakfast because the tray would be rice and she would not want it, and that she would not speak to anyone before nine. Then she wrote, in the same hand, at the bottom of the page, a sentence she made herself write, which was that she had written the four predictions and that the four predictions were hers. In the morning three of the four were true and the fourth was not, because she ate the rice. The interesting part was not the fourth; the interesting part was that when she opened the notebook at breakfast to check, there was a fifth prediction on the page, in the same hand, in the same ink, and the fifth prediction said that she would eat the rice. It had been written after the other four, and before the morning, and it was sitting on the page in the place where a person writes a prediction she expects to keep. She did not tear out the page. She had learned, by the twenty-sixth night, that tearing out pages is a thing a losing participant does, and that a person who is losing an argument with a building should keep every sheet. Instead she did the other test, the physical one, because the body was supposed to be the last record and she had spent a week finding out whether that was true. After the four o'clock checks she took the pen out of the common room and wrote, on the inside face of the berth door, at the height of her knee, a single line: a date, and three letters, and a small mark of her own. She pressed hard enough to score the paint. Then she went to bed and did not sleep and waited for the morning and the sound of the tray. In the morning the line was not on the door. The door had been wiped, and the wipe had left a faint sheen, and the paint was intact and unmarked, and Cleo knelt on the floor of berth three with her face a hand's width from the door and ran her thumb along the place where the line had been and could not find the groove she had cut. It was the cleanest result she had ever obtained. Either the door had been repainted in the six hours since midnight by people who cared about a scored door, or the line had never been there, and the only two instruments that could tell her which were her memory and the building, and she had already established, over twenty-six nights, that the building's records agreed with each other and that hers agreed with no one. She wrote the result in the notebook and did not write the conclusion, because the conclusion was the plan and the plan could not be in the notebook. She made it in her mouth instead, in the drying room, with the fans on, until the words sat right, and the plan was this: on the twenty-eighth morning she would give the account, because the account was the only door to her mother's night and because she was not, in the end, strong enough to refuse her own mother's last night out of spite for a building, and she would give it cleanly and take the money, and then, at the end of it, on the tape, on the record that the funder would own, she would say the one sentence that the protocol could not bank, because it was not a memory and not a rehearsal and not an ordinary hurt, and the sentence would be hers and would sit in the file forever and would be the first thing the next participant heard if the next participant went looking. Then she went to bed and counted, one, two, three, four, and the pause, and again, and she counted all the way to the twenty-eighth night. ---