第20章 Cohort D

They discharged her the same afternoon, without ceremony, and Corbell handed her a receipt and a bank card and her telephone, and Sandoz walked her to the lift and did not say anything until the doors were closing, and what she said was that the payment had cleared and that Cleo should not sign anything for a year. The bus to Nita's flat took forty minutes and Cleo spent them counting, because there was a tap in the bus shelter and she had learned the sound of it, and because counting was the last instrument she had and she did not intend to put it down. The flat was warm and had Nita's things in it and the drawer under the cutlery with the second envelope gone from it, and Nita made tea and asked no more than one question, which was whether Cleo was going to be all right, and Cleo said that she was, and then sat at the kitchen table for a long time with the tea going cold and did not sleep, because the nights were still this flat's worst thing and no study in Larkmoor had changed that. The debt was clear. Nineteen thousand and change, gone, and the feeling she had expected, which was lightness, did not arrive. What arrived instead was the habit. At 22:00 she found herself reaching for the cup on the desk that was not there. At 02:15 she woke without having slept and lay still and listened for the click, and the click did not come, and the not-coming was worse. At 06:20 she was at the window for the linen van before she remembered there was no linen van. She went back to the building once, on the third day, and did not go in. She stood on Trenner Row in the afternoon with her hands in her pockets and looked up at the top two floors, and the windows were the same windows and the concrete was the same concrete and nothing about the outside of the Ondale Institute admitted that anything happened in it, and that was, she thought, the only honest thing about the place. Then she walked the block, because walking was what she did instead of sleeping, and she came back around to the entrance, and the guard at the desk was a man she had never seen, and she asked him whether the study on the fifth floor was still running, and he said there was no study on the fifth floor, and he said it without any hesitation at all, which meant either that he had been trained or that he was telling her the truth and the study had moved. The letter from Corveil came on the fourth day and had no sender on the envelope and no name in the signature, only a seal and a reference number and a single page that confirmed the completion of a contract and thanked her for her participation and reminded her, in the polite language of the polite part of the business, of the undertaking she had given, which was that she would not discuss the content of the material with any person for a period of one year. She read it three times and put it in the drawer under the cutlery, in Nita's kitchen, which was where Nita kept things that were not to be opened, and it sat there beside the absence of the envelope and did not do anything at all. The nights did not come back the way she had feared and did not stay away the way she had hoped. Nita's flat was quiet and the room Cleo slept in faced a wall and for the first four days she slept like a stone, and then, on the fifth, she woke at 02:15 without any reason and lay still and listened for the click for an hour before she understood that there was no click and never had been, and that a person can be trained by a building the way a dog is trained by a bell, and that the training is a form of keeping, and that they had kept her in the smallest possible way and would keep her that way for a while. By the fifth day she had stopped going to the window for the linen van and had started, instead, to write things down again, because writing things down was the only instrument she had ever really trusted, and she had decided that the notebook was the last record and that a last record is a thing a person should keep even when she cannot be sure of the hand it is written in. The telephone rang once on the fourth afternoon, from a number she did not know, and a woman with a pleasant voice and a great deal of patience asked to speak to C-14, and then, when Cleo said nothing, said that the number was a courtesy and not a requirement and that the Institute was opening a new phase and that returning participants with demonstrated capacity were being offered a mentor rate, which was more than double the completion rate, and that no overnight attendance was required for the first fortnight, and that all she had to do was call the number back within the week. The woman said it all in the voice of a person reading a script she had read many times, and at no point in the call did she use the word *Cleo*, and at no point did she use the word *Ondale*, and when Cleo hung up without answering, the telephone did not ring again, which told her that the number had been a courtesy and not a requirement and that the week was a real week and would run out on its own. She wrote the number in the notebook and did not write the day and then, on the same page, wrote the word *capacity* and drew a box around it, because it was the second time the building had used the word about her and a word used twice is a word that means something. On the fifth morning she found the notebook. It was in the lining of her duffel where it had always been, and she had looked in that lining four times since leaving and it had not been there, and now it was, and it had more pages than the one she had carried out, and the extra pages were dated forward, and the last of them was dated that night. She opened to the last page and read it in the morning light with Nita's kettle ticking behind her. The handwriting was hers, in one stroke, with the small unnecessary tick. The page described a corridor and a red door and a room with a chair in it and a camera, and a woman walking down a worn rail holding it at the height of a hand, and at the top of the page, where a person writes a heading before she writes a day, someone had written a heading in the same hand. *Cohort D. Night one.* Beneath the heading, in four lines, was the material. Cleo read it twice. Then she read the last line of the page, which was not about the corridor and not about the door, and which had been written recently enough that the ink had not fully dried, and which she had not written and which she did not remember writing and which she recognized, all the same, as the truest sentence in the whole of the notebook. *Berth five is empty now. They will give it to the next one. Before they do, I should go back and take my name off the door.*