CHAPTER 2
Avery
◆
Twenty hours earlier — Tuesday night
The platen glass had been warm under my wrist since nine o’clock, and it was the only warm thing four levels under the quad. I set the next leaf face down, water-stained corner first, and brought the lid down slowly. The scanner walked its bar of light across the page.
A folded index card kept the cracked platen level. The college had known since April; replacement cost more than my annual pay. The card stayed.
Stack four was the lowest floor of Kestrel Library and the only one with no camera. One tube flickered. Vinegar came off the microfilm cans. After eleven, the crank wheels stopped and the steam line kept its own schedule.
I worked after closing because the room was free and students with stipends do not get to be late. The Carrow Trust held my tuition, housing, and pay. Its renewal was countersigned by the Chief Psychiatrist at the Carrow Institute, a man I had never met.
My phone lit against the intake box at eleven and buzzed itself in a half circle. The box had been down on the concrete since July and the cold of the floor had come up through the cardboard into my knuckles. The screen said TEDDY.
“The good news is I have finally done something impressive,” he said.
“It is eleven at night,” I said, “and impressive people are asleep by now.”
“I need you to hear the whole thing before you do the voice, and I need you to promise me that first.”
I squared the leaf on the glass with two fingers.
“I do not have a voice. I have a tone, and the tone comes free with the family name.”
“It’s the tone,” he said. “It came off our mother, and she aimed it at me for nineteen years straight.”
“She had two children and she only ever had to aim it at one of them.”
Teddy laughed, and the laugh was three notes short.
“There was a room in Marrow Creek,” he said. “One night, in the back of a place that rents out the back. I signed the sheet, and I played small.”
“I know what the sheet is,” I said. “The name on it eats the whole room, and the room does not care which chair lost the money.”
“I am giving you the arithmetic and not the voice. I want the figure the room lost, and I want it first.”
“Eighty-four thousand. Don’t repeat it back to me.”
Eighty-four thousand. I did not hand it back to him. I laid my palm flat on the platen glass because it was warm and I wanted my hand on something warm, and the stepper motor came to the end of its travel and stopped, and the room got quieter than a room should be able to get.
“It isn’t mine, exactly,” he said.
“It isn’t yours, legally,” I said.
“There is a difference between those two things,” he said, “and you know there is. I sat in the chair. I did not lose the money.”
“I know the difference and it does not help either of us. The sheet is a signature, and a signature is the one thing in this world that travels.”
“That’s why I called you and not anybody else.”
“I need the name of the man who opened that room, and I need it tonight.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “The men who open rooms do not hand out names, and the one who took my sheet did not raise his head the whole night.”
There was a sound behind him that was a car door and was not a car door. It came twice.
“Teddy. Where are you standing right now?”
“I’m in the lot behind the diner on the state road. There’s a car parked across two spaces that has been sitting there since—”
The line did not drop the way a call drops.
It stopped in the middle of a word. The screen went back to the home screen with the little battery icon on it, and the little battery icon was the only thing in the room with an opinion.
I called back. It rang once and went to the recording.
I called back again and it did not ring at all.
Wren Halloway came down the stair at a quarter past eleven with her wire glasses pushed up into her red hair and a payroll form held out in front of her.
She is the only person on this campus who will come below grade after hours, and she does it for other people’s paperwork, which is the entire case for Wren Halloway.
“They kicked your hours back at payroll,” she said, “and they want a wet signature on the new page before the next run goes out.”
“I will read it when this leaf finishes. The motor does not care about payroll.”
“It’s four lines,” she said. “I already filled in three of them for you, which you are welcome to resent.”
“I don’t sign anything I haven’t read twice.”
“It is four lines long and one of them is your own name.”
“That is the one people get wrong most often.”
She put the form down on the corner of the intake box, where the light off the platen could reach it, because she has watched me do this before and has stopped arguing with the order of it. I read it once for what it said. I read it again for what it did not say.
That took under a minute and cost nobody anything, and it is the whole defense of the rule.
“What is in these boxes,” she said. “Somebody in circulation says the fifth range is not on any shelf list. There is a wheel down here with no number painted on it.”
“It is asylum intake, boxed by somebody who did not label the boxes.”
“The Carrow one,” she said. “The one they turned into the psychiatric institute out past the lake.”
“The same. Ashgrove has had these boxes since the trust moved them, and nobody has opened one of them in my lifetime.”
“That is the best thing anybody has said to me all week.”
“Somebody should get you out more.”
“I get out plenty,” she said. “It is sixty-four degrees out there and the air has not moved all week, and I hate that you get to be down here alone with the good boxes.”
She pushed the glasses down onto her nose and looked at the crank wheels the way a person looks at a locked door in somebody else’s house.
“They call this room the cell upstairs, in case nobody has told you. It started in circulation and now the whole building says it.”
“It has a door, a light, and a chair. The word for that is a room.”
She counted the room off on her fingers, which is a thing she does when she is winning.
“It has one chair, no window, a woman in it at midnight, and a machine that makes a noise on the hour.”
“It would take one email to fix that.”
“It is a better fight in writing,” she said, “and I would lose it slower.”
I signed the page, once, on the line, and she watched me do it and did not say anything about how long the reading had taken.
“When they finally tap you for the Cell, I want it on the record that I said it first, and I want the good chair at the dinner.”
“I have been to one faculty dinner in six years, and I bused my own table, and nobody has tapped me for anything since.”
She took the page, went up the stair, and turned around at the door with the form pressed to her chest.
“The Cell. The dining society nobody has ever been invited to.”
She left at eleven-thirty. Wren Halloway thinks the Cell is a story about a long table in Vandeleur Hall, told by people who did not get in. She was wrong. So was I, for about another hour.
The dehumidifier came on and ran its water down the garden hose somebody had taped into the floor standpipe. That is the sound this room makes instead of company.
Patient Forty-One’s file came out of the second box on the unnumbered range, and it was the only folder in that box that had ever been wet.
Buff card stock, soft at the corners, water-stained along the bottom third in a tide line the color of weak tea, and the stain ran higher on the back board than on the front.
Ninety-eight leaves. A rust ring on the inside cover where a clip had sat long enough to leave its own weather.
Where the fifth range should have had a number, the crank wheel was blank.