Chapter 8 Four days early #2
She stood very still, with the sweater in her hands and the tea going cold on the counter, and checked, and then made herself check it against the calendar rather than against the wanting, because a body could be wrong about a date and a date could not be wrong about itself.
Slick, and the ache under it pitched so low it was less a pain than a note held under the room.
Four days early. Three assessment days still to be scored, and the top road above the units already shut.
Four days early. She did the rest of the sums standing up, because it was clinic arithmetic and she had been doing it.
The letter had said Saturday — the clinic scheduled trial weeks to clear the cycle, that was half of what the letter was for, this week was supposed to have been safe.
Four days early put the first ache tonight, the rise Wednesday, the peak Thursday evening, the break by Friday morning.
All of it inside the assessment days. The report filed at nine on Friday, while she was still coming down off it. The unit vacated Sunday.
And she knew what a heat inside an assessment week was worth on a form, because she had typed that too.
Cycle onset, unscheduled. It had its own code and its own consequences: every response-derived score from onset forward got the asterisk — confounded — and downweighted to near nothing, because a body in a rising heat answered yes to the instrument no matter what the instrument asked.
Some panels voided the whole week outright and rebooked eight weeks out, a new cohort, three different names drawn out of the pool, as if the week had been a contaminated sample in a lab.
Which was, she understood, exactly what the form thought a week was.
The implant, sited two years into its five, expiry logged, countersigned, checked once on Monday morning in front of Okonjo out of the same habit that made her check everything twice.
That was one sum she did not have to do standing in a dark kitchen with an ache under her ribs, and she did it anyway, because doing it was cheaper than wondering whether she had.
The paired-scent exercise she had refused at ten that morning, on the record, in front of three men whose scores she was spending — it would have been invalid by Thursday anyway.
Contraindicated in a rising heat. It measured what her body did when it was handled, and by Thursday her body’s answer would be yes to anything with warm hands, and the form knew that, and discounted for it.
The form agreed with her refusal, in a column she would never see — but it agreed, and nobody would ever enter that agreement anywhere, and she stood in the dark kitchen and laughed once, quietly, into Halvor’s sweater, because it was that or put the cushion on the chair again.
That was the shape of the whole week in one field, wasn’t it.
The form could not tell a decision from a cycle, so it discounted both.
Ask a woman with her sense about her what she wanted and score it; ask a woman in a heat and void it; and never, in either case, admit that the answer had come from the same person.
The reflex was to fix the record. She felt it in her hands like the cushion — walk her own cycle to the counter herself, declare it, make the file accurate, because she had spent three years making files accurate and accuracy was her religion.
But declaring it tonight handed the week to the discount.
Everything she had said with the lamp on, everything she had refused, Halvor on the ridge and Danny in this bed and no to the exercise and no to being charming — all of it re-entered as biology, all of it asterisked, a woman answering yes to the instrument.
She was not going to give the form a way to read Tuesday as weather.
And hiding it was not on the table, because hiding was not something this room did.
Danny would know before he was properly awake — he’d know in his sleep, probably, and tell her about it in the morning in the middle of a sentence about something else.
Halvor would know from the doorway and would wait, as long as it took, to hear what she intended to do about it.
Kwabena would know from the far side of the room and say nothing at all, which was how you would know he knew.
The household would have it by breakfast, because the household had everything by breakfast; that was the deal with the air in this place, and she had signed for it.
The form could have it as the form had everything — through the assessor, in the assessor’s time, in the menu the assessor was given.
She was done assessing herself. That was the one job in this valley she was never doing again.
What it changed: she wanted them. More, and sooner, and the word she had made a rule of arrived in her head uninvited and was allowed to stay, because the rule was that she would ask for it by name when she asked for it, and tonight was not that.
What it did not change: anything she had decided by Tuesday at eight in the morning, when the window for walking out had closed with all four of them still in the room.
Nothing here was being decided by her body that she had not already decided with her whole mind.
The heat could make her want it more. It could not make her want it.
She folded the sweater and carried it back to the bed and put it at the foot where it had been, and she slid in under the wreckage of blankets, and Danny took her back against him without waking, warm as a stove, and muttered — she was nearly sure — the rest of the sentence about the plow.
The cold came off the window and sat on her face.
The ache held its low note under everything, not unpleasant yet — a promise with a date on it, and the date was Thursday, and Thursday could look after itself.
She lay in the bed she had built wrong, in the room the form could not read, with her hand on the frame and the smell of all of them around her and the new thin thread of herself under it, and she wanted what she had already wanted, only more of it.
There was no box for that anywhere she had ever typed. She was beginning to think the boxes were the problem.