CHAPTER 12 #3
Three inches, pale, starting at the wrist and running along the bone.
She had been nine. She did not talk about it.
He said nothing. He just traced it once, his thumb following the length of it, with the same deliberate attention he brought to the burn scars when she had put her fingers there earlier.
Not investigating. Not performing concern.
Acknowledging that it was there. She held still.
The stone basement was very cold and very quiet.
He left his hand there. Her pulse was still slightly elevated and locatable at the soft inside of her elbow; she could feel his thumb on her wrist scar registering against the still-quickened arterial pulse at the underside of the same wrist. She filed this also: the fact of two pulses, his slowing into hers, locatable at the exact place where her old scar lived.
She had no category for being touched there. She made one.
◆
At approximately 9:30 PM they were both on the mat.
Her head was on his shoulder. The Zippo was in his hand — she had heard it fall during the earlier unwinding, the soft clatter of metal on mat, and had noted it without moving to retrieve it.
He had found it and was turning it over now, the familiar motion, the old lighter that had never worked since she had first observed it.
The broken flint. The father who died in 2013.
She could hear his breathing. It was back to normal. Her own had been normal for several minutes.
The heavy bag hung motionless on its chain. The chalk smell and the basement cold had reorganized around both of them, incorporating the new data of their presence — warmth, their smells, the fact of two people staying somewhere past the point of any particular obligation to stay.
She was not going to move yet. He had not suggested she should.
"You always laugh at intense things," she said.
"Yeah."
"Why?"
He turned the Zippo over once. She felt the motion through his shoulder. "I don't know," he said. "I've tried to stop."
She considered this. "Don't. It's —" She stopped.
A breath. Then, very quietly, "It's what?"
She thought about how she would write this in the notebook. She thought about what cipher layer she would put it in, what encoding would apply, what the plain-text version of it was. She thought about the taxonomy of things she had no category for.
"It's you," she said.
He turned the Zippo over once more and left his hand where it was.
The fluorescent overhead light hummed. The mat held them both. She counted the seconds of silence and found that she was not counting toward anything in particular, which was a thing that had not happened to her in a long time.
◆
They stayed until 2 AM.
She did not track it hour by hour. She tracked it in intervals: the point at which she moved from his shoulder to lying beside him with the mat between her and the stone floor; the point at which they spoke again, briefly, about Section C and the 1999 question and whether what was in the sub-basement was a name or a transcript or both — the keypad sequence Simon had used in October, the transit time, retrieval without trace; the point at which he said he would slip the access code under her door in the morning.
Quiet conversation, not charged with anything. The particular temperature of talking to someone in the dark when the decision to be where you are has already been made.
He told her about the Zippo. Not everything — not a performance of depth, not the unsolicited intimacy she had learned to categorize as an attempt to accelerate closeness artificially.
Just: his father had given it to him. The flint had broken the year after his father died.
He had never replaced it. She asked why.
He said he didn't know. He said it honestly, with the bearing of a thing he had not fully worked out himself.
She filed this without comment and found that she did not need him to have worked it out.
At ten past two she sat up.
"I'm going up," she said.
"Yeah. " He was already moving to find his shirt.
She dressed in the fluorescent light, efficient, cataloguing nothing in particular, and went up the stairs.
In the corridor outside her room she paused once. Listened. Three minutes later she heard him on the stairs — not sneaking, not loud, just the sound of someone following at a reasonable interval. She went into her room.
The amber desk lamp was on. Her notebook was on the desk where she had left it that morning, the copper-wire cover catching the light, the back-cover brass wire clasp where she stored loose sheets dull in the amber.
She sat down at the desk. She opened the notebook to the current working page, where Layer 2 waited with its flagged gaps and its circled intervals, and she looked at the blank space at the bottom of the page where the next entry should go.
She thought about the weight of the mat. The fluorescent overhead. His laugh, the involuntary one, the one that arrived because joy did that. The way he had held her face. The motion of his thumb across the scar on her wrist.
The lamp was on. She wrote nothing.
There were things she couldn't put in a cipher.
She switched off the lamp.