Chapter 2 Intake
I was early. Yuki was earlier.
She was already in the treatment room when I came in at seven fifty-six, scrubs immaculate, black hair clipped back so precisely it looked measured, a tray laid out beside the table with a geometry to it that nobody had asked for.
Vials in a row. A pen-light. A timer. White sneakers without a scuff.
She was the smallest person I’d seen in the building and she ran the room like she was the largest. Yuki Tanaka, the badge clipped to her breast pocket said, and Marlene had told me the rest the night before: twenty-six, midwife and phlebotomist both, the youngest licensed pair of hands on the mountain and the steadiest.
“Sit,” she said, not unkindly, the way you’d speak to a chair that had wandered in. “Sleeve up. Left.”
I sat. I rolled the sleeve. She found the vein without touching me anywhere she didn’t need to, swabbed, and had the first vial filling before I’d worked out a joke.
“You’re efficient,” I said.
“Yes.” She switched vials. The blood came dark and even. “Most people say that to delay the next vial. There are six.”
“I wasn’t delaying. I meant it.”
She glanced up. Dark eyes, exacting, the kind that don’t waste a blink. For a moment she looked like she might be deciding whether efficient was a compliment or a complaint, and had no protocol for either. Then she went back to the vials.
I tried the joke anyway, because I’m a professional. “If you find anything good in there, I get half.”
Her face didn’t move. But she picked up the pen and wrote something on the chart clipped to her tray, and I leaned just enough to read it upside down. Patient relaxed. Pulse 78, elevated for resting. Attempted humor.
“You charted my joke,” I said.
“I charted your pulse. The joke is in the margin so the pulse makes sense.” She capped the last vial, labeled all six in a hand like a typeface, and set them in the tray in an order I was fairly sure had meaning.
“Done. You did better than the last one. He fainted at vial three and I had to chart that too.”
It was, I suspected, about the warmest thing she had in her to give.
Bianca was a different climate entirely.
She came into the second treatment room like weather, husky voice arriving a beat before she did, dark waves pinned up and already working loose of the pins, deep tan skin against therapy whites cut for a smaller, tamer body than the one pouring out of them.
The first thing the eye did, against every intention, was follow the line of her down.
Strong shoulders, trim waist, and then a body the white fabric strained over at the hips and rear in a way that should have come with a warning label.
She walked like she knew exactly where every eye went and had decided, years ago, to be amused by it.
“Novato,” she said, looking me up and down with frank professional interest, sizing me like a tool she might keep. “Marlene says you have good hands. We’ll see. Take off your shirt and get on the table.”
“I thought I was training on guests.”
“You can’t sell what you’ve never felt.” She patted the table.
“First you get the massage. A good one, mine, so you know what the bar is. Then you’ll show me yours and I’ll tell you everything wrong with it, and there will be a lot, and you’ll thank me later because the guests would eat you alive otherwise. ” She grinned. “Shirt.”
I took off the shirt. I lay face down on the table. And then for the next forty minutes Bianca Moraes took me apart with her hands and put me back together, and I learned what the bar was, and the bar was humbling.
She was the best I’d ever felt. I’d had massages from instructors with decades on them and none of them had hands like this, this exact pressure that found the knot under the knot, the years-old grief I carried in my right shoulder where I favor the burned arm, how she’d lean her weight in and then ease it off at the precise second before pain, every time, like she was reading me off a gauge.
She worked oil into her palms first; I heard the bottle, the slick of it, then the heat of her hands settling on my back like something laid down on purpose.
Warm oil and warm skin and the faint green smell of whatever she’d chosen, eucalyptus and something sweeter under it.
She started at the base of the neck and worked out along the trapezius with the heels of both hands, and the pressure was so exactly right that a sound came out of me I hadn’t authorized.
“There it is,” she said, pleased. “Everybody makes that sound eventually. Some of them pretend they didn’t.”
“I didn’t pretend.”
“No. You’re honest in the body, at least.” She dug a thumb into the band beside my spine and held it, breathing, until the muscle gave up the argument. “The mouth I don’t know about yet.”
And it was not, technically, a sexual thing. She kept it clean. There was a sheet, draped correctly, moved correctly. She talked me through it as she went, teacher to student: where the pressure points were, why she worked the fascia before the muscle, when to talk and when to shut up.
But she was a half-dressed woman with a body like that leaning her warmth into my back in a small warm room, and I am twenty-six and not made of stone, and there is a particular flavor of dignity required to keep absolutely still and breathe like a man receiving instruction when your whole body has opinions.
I held it. White-knuckled, face in the cradle, I held it, and I’d swear she knew, because at one point her warm chatter cut out and her hands went quiet on my shoulders and she laughed, low and delighted, at nothing she’d say out loud.
“You’re polite,” she said. “I respect it. Up. Your turn. Show me what you’ve got.”
I showed her. I worked her back and shoulders as I’d been taught, and I was good, I knew I was good, and she let me get most of the way through before she started telling me everything that was wrong.
“Too apologetic,” she said, into the cradle.
“Your hands say sorry. Stop apologizing with your hands. The knot doesn’t want an apology, it wants you to mean it.
” She reached back and grabbed my wrist and pressed my thumb down harder, into a band of muscle beside her spine that had been giving me trouble.
“There. Feel that? That’s a year of carrying other people’s tension. Mean it.”
I meant it. She made a sound that was entirely professional and not professional at all and said, muffled, “Better. Okay. You’ll do. Marlene was right about the hands, don’t tell her I said it.”
I worked down her back, found the band of it that ran into her lower back and over the upper slopes of an anatomy I was being extremely disciplined about, and she sighed into the cradle like ten years were coming out of her at once.
“Nobody,” she said, half to herself, “asks about mine.”
“About yours?”
“Nothing.” But her hand came back and squeezed my forearm once, light, and then she was up and bright again, pinning her hair, all weather, the moment passed.
I held onto it. The first woman in Silberquell had told me something true and dressed it as nothing, which was, I was starting to see, the house’s native language.
Staff lunch was at the long kitchen table, and the table, I was beginning to understand, was where Silberquell actually happened.
Ute fed us Kn?del and a stew and her terrible silent verdicts on each of us. Poppy ran an interrogation of my romantic history that found it disappointing.
“So there’s no one,” she said, scandalized. “No tragic ex up here ruining you for the rest of us emotionally?”
“There was a girl in physio school. She finished the degree. I didn’t. It worked out the way that works out.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole file?”
“That’s the whole file.”
“God, you’re boring.” She said it like the highest praise, which up here it might have been. “Boring is good. Boring keeps secrets. Bianca, isn’t boring good?”
Bianca was eating with her bare feet up on the bench. “The guests are going to eat him alive,” she said, comfortably, to her plate. It was, from her, clearly a compliment, and clearly also a prediction, and I couldn’t yet tell which one she meant harder.
“Eat him alive how,” Poppy said, fork halfway up, delighted. “Specify. For the file.”
“You keep a file.”
“I keep several files. He’s in three already and he’s been here a day.” She pointed the fork at me. “Punctuality. Boiler. And a tab I’ve labeled ‘says noted,’ which is going to get a lot of entries, I can tell.”
Ute set down a basket of bread between us with the finality of a gavel and said, to no one, “He chews with his mouth shut. The last one talked while he chewed. I could see the Kn?del.” She let that sit, the verdict entered into evidence. “This one I will keep.”
“High praise,” Poppy stage-whispered. “She threatened the last one with a ladle.”
“I did not threaten him.” Ute went back to the stove. “I held the ladle. He understood.”
I ate my bread. I’d been in the building twenty hours and I’d been adopted, threatened by proxy, catalogued and cross-referenced, and warned I’d be eaten alive, all before the stew was cold, and I found I didn’t mind any of it, which should probably have worried me more than it did.
Marlene didn’t come to lunch. The seat at the head, which I’d guess was hers, stayed empty, and Yuki ate fast and precise and left to do something with her vials, and the warmth at the table had a hole in it the exact shape of the woman upstairs.
In the afternoon I met a guest who was leaving.