第4章 Two Versions of Tuesday

The study kept three records of a night, and by the second week Cleo had learned that they could disagree. The first was the cuff, which was a machine and had no opinion. The second was the corridor camera, which was also a machine, though a worse one, mounted high and pointed at the doors so that what it saw was mostly the tops of heads and the tiles. The third was the Recall Sheet, which was paper, and hers, and filled in each morning before breakfast with a pen that she was told not to remove from the common room and did. Tuesday of the second week was the night the three records separated. Her cuff log, which Dez printed for her without being asked, showed sleep from 22:20 to 05:50 with a single interruption at 02:40 to 02:55, forty minutes after the 02:30 check, described in the code the Institute used as *ambulatory, within-berth, non-contact*. Fifteen minutes of motion inside a room with no clock and one door. The corridor camera, which Cleo was permitted to watch on a small screen at the staff desk while Dez ate a sandwich, showed an empty hallway at 02:40 and an empty hallway at 02:55, and nothing between but a shadow that could have been anything and was probably the flicker of a light. The third record was Iva's. Iva came to the drying room on Wednesday with the corner of a sheet in her pocket, torn small. On Tuesday night, Iva said, she had gone to the drying room herself at 02:50, because she could not sleep, and Cleo had been standing in it, in the dark, facing the machines, and had not turned around when Iva said her name. Iva said Cleo had been crying, but quietly, and that she had left the room after a minute because it felt wrong to stay. Iva said she had written it on her Recall Sheet because there was nowhere else to put it. Cleo had not been in the drying room. Cleo had been in berth three, in the dark, asleep, and the cuff agreed with her, and the camera agreed with her, and Iva was her only friend in the building and had no reason on earth to lie. The fourth record was the one that ended the argument before it started. That morning, before breakfast, on Recall Sheet R-8, under *recall of task content*, the box had been filled in her handwriting with a single line. *I dreamed I stood in the corridor and the red door was open.* She asked for the long interview with Dr. Voskuil, which was normally scheduled once a week and which she had not yet had. It was granted for the following afternoon. Orvin Voskuil was a large, quiet man with the hands of someone who had once worked with tools, and he interviewed her in a room with two chairs and no desk, which she understood was meant to make her feel that nobody was taking notes. He let her lay out the Tuesday night in order, all four records, and he listened the way a doctor listens to a chest, without interrupting and without agreeing. When she was finished he said that memory and log were two different kinds of instrument, and that instruments failed in different directions. The log, he said, could be wrong about almost nothing, but it also did not know what a person had meant by a movement. Memory could be wrong about almost everything, and still be the only place a person lived. He said the study was not in the business of deciding which one was her. He said that was the part that belonged to her, and that he was sorry, in a way that sounded rehearsed, that the protocol made the question urgent when it had no business being urgent at all. He reached for a folder on the little table beside him to find a schedule, and the folder fell open, and Cleo saw, for the second it took him to close it, a sheet at the back with a date on it that was eleven months before intake, and a box at the top of the sheet that carried her name. She went back to the corridor camera a second time on her own, on the fifth day, because a record you are only shown once is a record you do not have. The screen was on the staff desk in the office, which was empty between seven and eight in the evening because that was when the shifts changed and the phone hour overlapped it, and Cleo had learned by then which doors were on the latch and which were not. She rewound the Tuesday to 02:38 and let it run at quarter speed, and watched the fifteen minutes of empty hallway go by one frame at a time, and at 02:47 there was a person. The person came from the direction of the drying room and went toward the berths, and the camera caught the top of a head and the line of a shoulder, and the shoulder was in a coat, and the coat was grey, and the head was bent, and the figure went down the corridor and out of the frame in under four seconds, and if Cleo had blinked she would have missed it, and she did not blink. She could not tell whose it was. She sat in the empty office with the image paused on a blurred grey shape and understood that the camera was pointed at the doors and not at the corridor, that it saw shoes and the tops of heads and read nothing from either, and that the moment she claimed the figure was her, the log would claim the figure was Iva, and the moment she claimed it was Iva, she would be a participant accusing another participant of being where she was not, which is the first entry on the sheet that ends a participant's credibility. She wrote the times in the notebook and drew no conclusion, and went back to berth three and lay down and did not sleep. She tried, once, to produce the interval deliberately. On a quiet night in the sixth day she counted her way to 02:30 and stayed awake through the check and lay perfectly still for the following hour, with the tap as her metronome and her eyes open on the ceiling, and she did not move at all, and the log in the morning showed the interval as flat and unbroken, which meant that the fifteen minutes of Tuesday had not been produced by her lying awake and moving. It had been produced by something else. She had proved a small thing and it did not make her feel better, because a small thing proved against a large machine is a splinter against a wall. Her weighting rule, which she wrote in the notebook and used for the rest of the study, was this. A machine's record was reliable about events and useless about meaning. A person's record was the reverse. When the two disagreed, the correct move was not to choose one but to look for the place where the disagreement itself had been produced, because a disagreement is an artifact and an artifact has a maker, and the maker of the disagreement between Cleo's cuff and Iva's sheet was not Iva and was not the cuff, and was somewhere in the building in a room she had not yet seen. The room with the two chairs was warm and had a window onto the lift shaft, and Voskuil interviewed her in it without notes and without a clock, and the absence of the clock was, she thought later, the only piece of furniture in the room that mattered, because a person describing a time to someone with no clock is a person building the time as she goes, and Voskuil listened to her build it and never once corrected her. Voskuil closed the folder and set it on his knee and asked whether she had been sleeping better, and Cleo said yes, because it was true, and because she had learned in the last two weeks that a person could be honest and still be keeping something back, and that the thing she was now keeping back was the fact that she had begun to be afraid of her own handwriting. ---