第8章 The Exit Interview

She asked to withdraw on the ninth day, and the interview was granted the same afternoon, which she understood later was not generosity but procedure. Dr. Orvin Voskuil saw her in the room with two chairs and no desk. He had set a folder on the little table, closed, and he left it closed for the whole of the conversation, which she took to mean that this time nothing was going to fall out of it. He asked her, first, whether she was sleeping. She had stopped sleeping, mostly, and she said she was sleeping, and he wrote nothing down, because there was nothing to write with. She said she wanted to leave. He said she could. Then he took her through the arithmetic, calmly, in the way of a man who has done this arithmetic for many people and has stopped finding it sad. Half the stipend was paid at the midpoint, the fourteenth night. The rest was paid on the twenty-eighth. Withdrawal before the midpoint forfeited the whole of it, including the half already earned, because the completion payment was the only payment and the other half had been an advance. So by leaving now she would owe the Institute for the fortnight of room and monitoring she had consumed, at the daily rate printed on page two of the contract, which worked out to slightly more than the four thousand two hundred she had been promised, and the difference would be billed to the address she had given, which was the address of her sister's flat, because Cleo herself had no fixed address that would take a bill. She said that was not legal. He said, in the same unraised voice, that it was a contract, and that contracts that could not be enforced were still contracts, and that the money was real and the debt was real and the building had a lawyer. He said all of it without any pleasure, and that was the part that frightened her, that he was not a man enjoying a leverage over a woman who could not afford to be free. He was a man reading a number off a sheet to a person who had asked for the number. She asked what happened on night twenty-one. Voskuil did not pretend not to understand. He said that nights twenty-one onward were the *consolidation phase*, and that the protocol did not require participants to be awake or asleep for it, and that it was shorter than she expected. She asked about Dov Roon, who had not come to breakfast in three days. Voskuil said Dov Roon had requested withdrawal on night twelve and was completing his washout, which was seventy-two hours during which a withdrawing participant remained on site under observation, because the protocol took a dim view of participants leaving with unconsolidated material. He said Dov was comfortable. Cleo asked to see him. Voskuil said that was not possible, and then he said the thing that she would carry out of the room, without any change in his tone at all: that she had done all of this before, on night twenty-one of an earlier cohort, and that she had signed the same withdrawal form then that she was asking to sign now, and that the protocol did not require the Institute to remind a participant of a participation they had elected to withdraw from, because reminding them was itself an intervention. He opened the folder, at last, and turned it toward her, and there was the withdrawal form on the top, and at the top of the withdrawal form was the box labelled *previous participation*, and the box had been ticked. It was ticked **yes**. The date beside it was eleven months before she had ever answered the advertisement, and the initials beside that were hers, drawn in one stroke with the small unnecessary tick. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at her own handwriting on a form she did not remember, and she searched herself the way she searched the berth each morning for a thing she had not yet lost, and there was nothing there. There was no memory of a first time. There was the corridor with the red door, and there was her mother, and there was the arc of a decision she had made after her mother died that had brought her here, and none of it contained a form. She asked him, because she had to ask something, whose handwriting it was. She asked for the contract and he gave it to her, and she read page two three times, the way she read everything, and the arithmetic on page two was exactly the arithmetic he had recited, which was in his favour and not suspicious, because a contract that has been drafted by people who expect to enforce it is a contract that is arithmetic all the way down. The daily rate was printed in a smaller font than the payment and in a larger font than the clause about the washout, and the washout clause ran to a paragraph of its own, and the paragraph said that a withdrawing participant remained under observation for seventy-two hours and that the observation was not punitive and was a safety measure and that the participant's consent to the observation was the same consent she had given at intake and was therefore already given. She asked what observation meant, and Voskuil said it meant a berth and the cuff and the checks and a staff member available at all times, which was, she noticed, a description of the study itself, minus the tasks and minus the money. He said that Dov Roon was in observation and that he was comfortable and that he was sleeping, which was, Cleo thought, the only entirely true sentence Voskuil had said to her, because Dov Roon had not slept properly in weeks. On the way back to the corridor she stopped at the fire plan by the lift, because the fire plan was the one document in the building that nobody was careful about, and she read it the way she read everything, and it showed the fifth floor as a ring of rooms with a red line for the exit route and a small crossed box marked *assembly*, and it did not show a stair down and it did not show a room with a chair in it, and she stood in front of it for a while and thought about how a building comes to have a document that is both official and wrong, and decided it comes to have one when the people who make the document are not the people who need to know. Sandoz caught her at the lift. She had a coffee in one hand and a folder under her arm and she looked like a person at the end of a long day, and she said, without preamble, that she had heard about the withdrawal request and that she wanted Cleo to know that the request would be honoured on the twenty-first night if Cleo still wanted it then, and that the twenty-first night was a real threshold and not a trick, and that Sandoz would personally walk her to the door. Then she said the other thing, in a lower voice, with her eyes on the lift indicator, and the other thing was that she had worked in this building for four years and that in four years she had seen eleven withdrawals and that every one of them had made it out, and that the reason she was saying so was not to reassure Cleo but so that Cleo would understand that the building had a real door in it, and that a real door is the most dangerous thing in a building like this, because a person who has a real door stops looking for the wall. Cleo thanked her and took the lift up and stood in berth three in front of the desk and looked at the Recall Sheet for the next morning, which was blank, and which would be filled in by her before breakfast, and she thought about the box on the withdrawal form and the small unnecessary tick and the date eleven months old, and she did not ask herself whose handwriting it was, because she had asked that already and Voskuil had answered, and the answer was not a thing that could be made untrue by wishing it. What she asked herself instead, and asked the tap, and asked the dark, was the only question that had any operational use, and it was not *whose hand wrote it* and it was not *did I do this before*. It was this: if I was here eleven months ago and withdrew on the twenty-first night, then on the twenty-first night of that earlier study the door was open and I chose to stay, and if I chose to stay then, I will choose to stay now, and the choice will feel like mine, and that is the part of the machine I have not yet found. Then she went to the door of the berth and looked down the corridor at berth five, which was dark, and at the ring of doors, and at the place where the corridor made its last turn before coming back, where the wall was the same colour all the way along and there was no door, and she counted the doors she could see from where she stood, because counting was what she did, and she got to eighteen, and the fire plan said twenty. Voskuil closed the folder and looked at her for a moment with something that might have been patience and might have been the total absence of it. "Yours," he said. "That is not a thing I get to decide." ---