CHAPTER 8
Julian
◆
The forecast said six o’clock. At twenty to six I laid two candle stubs and a flashlight square along the top of my blotter, with the wicks turned toward the window. Then I sat down and put my hands on the desk. Wind came off the lake in long shoves, and the sash moved in its frame with each one.
Two nights ago she came up the east stair with her left palm open and held away from her coat. I stood at the head of that stair and I said nothing to her at all. I could have asked to see the hand. I have asked permission for smaller things than that, from people with far less reason to grant it.
There are eleven panes in my office window, and one of them is older than the other ten and holds the light wrong.
I have been inside the Ware Protocol twenty-two years.
That is a fact about my employment and I do not offer it as anything more.
Nothing in this building has surprised me in a very long time, which is a poor thing for a man to be good at.
The lamps went at four minutes past six. All of them dropped together, and the corridor beyond my door ran black to the far end of the wing. I counted. The generator caught on the twelfth second, and the corridor fixture came back at half its old color.
That generator carries the wing, the kitchen and the corridor lights.
It does not carry the cameras in the Gallery.
Those would be dark until a line crew got up the county road, and no crew was coming out in a northeast wind at forty gusting sixty.
Six hours was the number I would have given if a man had made me give one.
The telephone rang at twenty past six. I let it go twice and lifted it on the third.
“You have no lights,” Alistair said. “I am told the entire county has no lights.”
“We have the generator. The cameras in the Gallery are down and they will stay down.”
“And for how long is that?” he said.
I put my thumb against the base of one candle stub and turned it until its wick faced the window with the other. “Six hours. Longer, if the crew waits for the wind to drop under forty.”
A gust took the window then, and the two of us waited it out on an open line without saying anything. He is very good at waiting. It is the most expensive thing about him.
“A car has been on the county road since four. Not ours.”
“Whose car is it?” I said.
“Nobody’s, so far as the plate goes.” Paper moved under his hand on the other end, one sheet and then another. “It sits past the second gate with its lights off and it has not moved since the rain started. I have sealed the wing. Nobody comes up the east stair tonight who is not on that floor now.”
“Then she should be told, tonight, in plain words, by one of us.”
“I would rather not alarm the young woman over a parked car and a wet night,” he said.
The lamp on my desk was dead and the room had nothing in it but what came under the door from the corridor. “Give her the logs.”
“I grant you it is hers to know, and I am still not handing her a thing she can carry to a table.”
I moved the flashlight a quarter inch to bring it square with the blotter again. The rain came at the glass in one long push and I let it finish before I said anything else to him. “She reads better than you and I do together. Give her the gate log and let her tell you what is in it.”
“You are very free with my paper tonight, Julian.” A drawer closed on his end, the last inch of it taken slowly, because he finishes everything he starts. “And you will sit up on that corridor, I imagine, since the corridor is yours.”
“I do not touch a patient. Ever. I put her on that roster myself.”
“Nobody in this building doubts the rule,” he said. “I am observing that you wrote it out in your own hand and then wrote her name underneath it.”
A hard warmth gathered behind my breastbone and I let it stay there. I put her on the night roster in her first week, because a name on a roster is a person somebody has to account for at eight in the morning. I cannot take her off it without a board, and no board sits on a Sunday.
“Keep the flashlight where you can reach it,” Alistair said, and the line went dead before I could answer him.
The generator ran up and dropped back each time the kitchen freezer called for it. I counted the gaps between the cycles. Forty-one seconds, then thirty-eight, then forty-one again. I have never told anybody that I do this, and nobody has ever asked me the question that would get it out of me.
The corridor floor is oak laid over sleepers, and it reports a person’s weight a moment before the step arrives.
It gave her twice before seven, once toward the kitchen and once coming back.
After that it said nothing for an hour. I sat with my hands on the desk and let the hour run all the way out, and a little after seven I stood up and took the flashlight with me.
By half past eight the wicker had given under me and the solarium had gone over to the corridor for its light. Glass on three sides, and the storm working all of it at once. I sat where I could see down the corridor and she sat where she could see the tree.
The lemon tree stands at the south corner in a terra-cotta pot with a crack running from the rim to the drain hole, wired shut with picture wire long before I came up to this floor.
It arrived on a cart with four casters and one of them seized, so the pot sits crooked and the trunk has grown out and back again to correct for it.
Nine leaves. Four are yellow at the margins.
One fruit hangs at knee height, green, hard as a knuckle, and it has not changed.
Brush a leaf and it lets go a smell of bruised lemon.
That is the only part of the tree that works.
A brass thermometer is screwed to the frame between two panes, and it read 54 all night without moving.
The east glass runs with water on the inside and the wind finds a seam at the north corner.
She had laid her towel along that seam earlier and it had soaked through, and she had wrung it out into the pot of the lemon tree, which is the only reason anything watered it that night.
The chaise under the north glass has four brass rings set into its frame, low down, two at the head and two at the foot. The straps that ran through them were cut off flush at some point and the stubs left in place. Nobody has ever taken the rings out.
She had the towel wound around her left hand now, and a pen in the right, and the pen was doing nothing at all.
“You came down here because the floor stopped reporting me,” she said. “An hour of nothing, and here you are with a flashlight.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do not knock after ten unless there is a reason.”
She turned the pen over once against the towel. “There was a reason. You just gave it to me.”
“There was an hour of quiet. That is a different thing, and I will not wake a person up to prove it.”
“You stood in the corridor,” she said.
“I sat down in here instead.” The wicker took my weight and complained about it. “Do you want me to go?”
She looked at the tree and not at me while she decided, and she took her time about deciding, and I let her have all of it.
“No,” she said. “Sit there. Tell me what the telephone call was.”
“There is a car on the county road. It has been parked past the second gate since four this afternoon and it does not belong to the Institute.”
“Since four. And it is half past eight.”
“I learned of it at twenty past six,” I said. “I argued that you be given the gate log and I lost the argument.”
“You lost it to Alistair.”
“Yes. He is not wrong about paper and I am not wrong about you. Both of those can hold at once.”
The wind put a sheet of water across the south glass and took the room away for half a minute. That is how the whole night went. We waited each one out and picked the sentence up again on the other side of it.
“The wing is sealed,” I said, when the noise dropped. “Nobody comes up the east stair tonight who is not on this floor now.”
She turned that over. She is quick and she does not hide the working, and she came out the far side of it in about four seconds.
“Then anybody who is a problem tonight is already inside with me,” she said. “Who is on this floor?”
“I am.”
She did not flinch and she did not laugh it off. She held my eyes until she had what she wanted out of the sentence, and then she set it down somewhere she could find it later.
“That is not a comfort,” she said.
“It is not meant to be one,” I said. “It is the true version, and you may do what you like with it.”
She shifted in the chaise, and the cut hand came off her knee and went back down onto it. “Then hand me the rest. Why am I on a roster at all?”
“Because you are a patient of record,” I said. “A name on a night roster is a person somebody has to account for at eight in the morning. If you are not on that list, nobody has to say where you are, and nobody has to notice when the answer changes.”
“You put me on it.”
“I did,” I said. “In your first week, and without asking you.”
“Take me off it.”
That was the request I had been waiting on since six o’clock, and I had the answer ready, and I did not enjoy having it ready. “I cannot. It takes a board, and no board in this building sits on a Sunday.”
“The thing protecting me,” she said, “is a piece of paper you are not allowed to take back.”
“Yes.”
“Say the rest of that, please. There is a rest of it and you are sitting on it.”
“It means I never have to decide. The paper decides for me and I get to keep my hands where they are.” The generator came up under the floor and settled back down. “I am aware of how convenient that is, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.”
She was quiet for a while, and the tree let go a leaf onto the tiles, and neither of us went to pick it up.
“There are rings on this chair,” she said. “Four of them, and somebody cut the straps off instead of taking the rings out.”
“Yes.”
“Why leave the rings?”