第3章 The Private Notebook

On the third day Cleo started a log of her own. The notebook was cheap, from the stationery shop on Larkmoor Road, and she carried it folded into the lining of her duffel, which the staff searched only at intake. The rules did not forbid her to write. There was no rule against keeping a record, because the record that mattered was the Institute's, and the Institute had evidently never considered that a participant might keep a second one. She wrote down what she could verify and nothing else. The delivery van that came for the linen at 06:20, and again on a warmer morning at 06:26. The number of times the tap dripped before the pause, counted every night before the checks began. The colour of the light in the corridor at each check, which changed from a sodium yellow to a bluish white at some point she had learned to time without a clock. She wrote the sentence she was required to say, and beside it whether she had cause to doubt that she was the one saying it, and in the first four days the answer was always no. The phone came back between seven and eight, and at 19:15 on the fourth day her sister called. Nita worked in a call centre and spoke in the compressed shorthand of a person whose entire job was sentences timed by a stopwatch. "You sound awake," Nita said. "That's new." "I'm doing the study." "I know. You called me. Three times." Cleo stopped, with the receiver against her ear and the counting part of her mind gone suddenly silent. "When?" "Night before last. Around three. You sounded fine. You sounded better than fine, actually. You sounded like you had slept." A pause, the sound of Nita lighting a cigarette off-camera. "You kept saying the same thing, is the thing. You kept saying they were taking too long and the door was open and you hadn't gone in yet. Then you hung up and called back. I figured you were dreaming at me." The corridor outside the phone booth was empty and bright. Cleo asked Nita whether the calls had come from her own number. Nita said yes, and then, more slowly, that the last two had come with no voice at all, just breathing and the water going somewhere, and she had assumed the signal had dropped. Cleo wrote it all down that afternoon: the three calls, the dates, the words. Under it she wrote that she had no memory of the calls, that her cuff log for that night, which Dez had shown her without being asked, was a clean line of sleep from ten to six with one movement at 03:12 that the log described as a shift of position. Under that she wrote a sentence she would come back to: *Either I did it or the log did. One of us is not reliable.* The drying room was where the rules bent. Nobody was supposed to talk to another participant, but the drying room was small, and hot, and the tenants had a schedule they never discussed and understood perfectly. Iva Molt came in with an armload of towels on the fifth afternoon and stood beside Cleo at the facing machines and said, without preamble, that she knew Cleo had been talking in her sleep, because Iva had heard it through the wall. "You're in berth one," Cleo said. "There are two rooms between us." "I know," Iva said. She was maybe forty, thin, with the particular stillness of someone who had been very ill or very careful. "That's how I know it carries." Iva talked the way the tap dripped, in bursts with pauses. She said she had been in the study six days longer than Cleo and that her own Recall Sheets had begun to contain things she did not remember writing, and that when she had raised it, Dr. Sandoz had explained carryover to her in the same voice Corbell used, and Iva had decided to stay anyway, for the same reason as everyone: the money, and the fact that no other room in the city would let her be awake at night without asking her to be somebody's employee while she was at it. Then Iva said something else. She said that on Cleo's second night she had heard Cleo through two walls, and that Cleo had said, in a clear voice, that her mother had wanted the coast, and that the door had been open, and that she had not gone in yet. Cleo had not told Iva about her mother. Cleo had not told Iva about the door. Cleo had written both of those things in a notebook that was folded into the lining of a bag in a room Iva had never entered. The notebook changed how the days went, because a person with a private record starts living by it. She bought it from a stationer on Larkmoor Road that sold paper by the ream and had a card in the window advertising passport photographs, and the woman behind the counter asked her whether she was a student, and Cleo said yes, because the study had taught her that claiming an ordinary thing stopped questions better than claiming nothing. The notebook was small enough to fold once and stiff enough to keep a fold, and she kept it in the lining of the duffel, which the staff had searched at intake and would not search again, because a rule that has been enforced once is a rule the enforcer believes has been settled. She calibrated the tap on the second night. A drop, then a drop, then a drop, then a pause, and she counted the drops and timed them against the checks she could hear through the wall, which were the same for everyone and announced by a click in every berth at once. Six checks a night made five intervals, and she knew the length of a check interval from the sheet, which was ninety minutes, and so she could take the number of full tap-cycles between two clicks and divide, and it gave her a unit of time that belonged to the building and not to the Institute. Over a night she got the ratio to eighteen cycles to a check, sometimes seventeen, sometimes nineteen, and she wrote the numbers down and trusted them the way she trusted a balance sheet, which is to say exactly as far as it went and no further. There was a second clock available to her, and she found it by accident on the fourth night. The lift came up past the fifth floor on its way to six and went back down, and the door mechanism on the fifth floor gave a double clack each time the car passed the landing, and the clack was loud enough to hear from berth three if the berth was quiet. She did not know what the lift was doing down there or how long it stayed, but she knew the pattern of the clacks, and a pattern is a record. On the fifth night she tested the door. She took a single hair from her brush, which was long and pale and would show against the dark wood, and she laid it across the jamb of the berth door at the height of her knee and closed the door on it carefully, so that the hair ran from the hinge side to the lock side and would be broken or moved if the door opened. She made a note of the shape of it, and its position against a small scratch in the paint, and then she took the nine and lay down and did not swallow it and did not sleep. In the morning the door was ajar by a finger's width, as it always was, because the berths were left unlatched for safety, and the hair was gone from the jamb. She found it on the floor inside the room, half a metre from the door, in a place a hair could only reach if the door had been opened and closed and the hair carried in on the current of the air. She wrote that down too, and under it she wrote a sentence she did not enjoy writing, which was that a hair proves a door moved and proves nothing at all about who moved it. Iva knew about the hair without being told, because Iva had done the same thing in the first week and had found her own hair on the floor, and had come to the conclusion that every door in the building was opened at least once a night by somebody whose job it was to open doors, and that the interesting question was not whether the door moved but whether the person who opened it expected to find her asleep. They stood in the drying room with the fans running and said this to each other the way two people say the outlines of a problem they have each been carrying alone, and it was the closest thing to company Cleo had had in a month, and she understood it was also the closest thing to a trap, because the drying room was the one place in the building where a person could say something and have it be her word against nobody's. That was when Iva told her about the voice through two walls. She asked Iva to repeat it. Iva repeated it exactly. ---