CHAPTER 8
Elena
◆
The folder he asked for is at my left hip — a sample log from the named-only program, twelve patient codes, twelve fields I will be asked to verify against the freezer manifest at the second negative-eighty from the left.
I have read the log in the cage on the way down.
I am a nurse. I do my job whether the room is dressed for one thing or another.
The folder is also a pretext. I have known for forty minutes. The knowing settles the fear into a shape I can carry.
Lab A's door is propped a hand's width open with a glass weight the size of a paperback book. The room beyond is dim and full of a steady low note that is the closest thing I have heard to a tuning fork at the back of a church. I push the door with my elbow.
One over-table lamp at its lowest setting throws a pool of yellow over the spine of the long stainless-steel table that runs down the middle of the room.
Twelve feet, polished to mirror, edge-channels cut for fluid runoff.
The fluorescents have been turned off. Three matte-grey negative-eighty freezers along the east wall; the second from the left has a thumbprint reader and the sort of weight in the room that an altar has.
The electron microscope on its anti-vibration table is awake; its monitor casts a thin blue glow.
The constant ambient hum is the floor centrifuge. Sixty hertz, I think, although I do not know what frequency sixty hertz is supposed to feel like; I know only that the sound vibrates in the bone behind my sternum and that the hum cycles a soft swell every four seconds. The room has a heartbeat.
He is standing at the head of the table.
The lamp lights the angle of his jaw, the long line of his throat, the thin gold chain that catches against the placket of his black roll-neck under the white research-wing coat.
His hair is tied back with a black elastic; one strand has come loose at his temple.
His left hand is flat on the steel, fingers slightly spread, in as I have learned, since the corridor on Day 3, means he is about to speak.
"Elena," he said. "Thank you for coming."
Until now, he has called me Ms. Rossi every time. My body notices before my mind gives it permission. The shift of address is the first piece of the architecture and he wants me to feel it land. I feel it land.
"Dr. Castellan."
"Gabriel. In this room you are Elena. In this room I am Gabriel.
The chart you are carrying is real. The log is real.
I am asking you to verify twelve identifiers against the manifest in the freezer at your left.
You will do that work in twenty minutes.
Before you do it I would like ten minutes of your attention.
You will give me those ten minutes or you will leave through the door behind you. Both are answers I will accept."
I set the folder on the table at his hand. I look at his hand. I look at his face.
"Ten minutes."
"Eyes here. There. Keep them there. I want your attention built where I can see it while I am speaking."
The brown of his eyes is the color of wet coffee grounds; that is the only metaphor I have for it and I am embarrassed to have only one. He holds the look for a long time, unblinking. His voice stays low. It has stayed low all night, and I expect it will stay that way.
"There are three doors out of this room.
The one you came in. The one to my office at your right shoulder.
The corridor door to OR-Z at your left shoulder.
You know which is yours. I would like you to choose to stay regardless of which is yours.
I would like you to know, before you choose, the shape of the room I have built for you.
I am going to describe it. After, I am going to ask you what word you would like for stop.
You will give me a word. I will use that word. Tell me you understand."
"I understand."
"Good. Then listen."
He spoke for two minutes. The centrifuge hummed under his voice. I counted the four-second swells without meaning to and I counted six and stopped, because what he was saying required more of my attention than my counting was costing.
He said: four years in a Naples cell is a long time to learn what a body is.
A body is a load-bearing structure. It can hold more than it knows.
He said he had moved slowly for fifteen years and would move slowly tonight.
He said the room he had built for me had walls; the walls were his; the door was mine.
He said the room was for the part of me that wanted to be asked to give itself precisely.
He said the asking is the gift; the receiving is the gift; everything is offered and accepted.
He said the silk in his left pocket served this one purpose in his life.
He said if I said the word I chose, the room would end.
He said it twice. He said it the second time as a fact about geometry.
He said yellow was an honored color in this room and meant the scene shifted to a thing I could name.
He said red and Hippocratic and whatever word I chose all meant the same.
"What word do you want for stop," he said.
"Hippocratic."
I had thought about it in the cage on the way down, with my back against the cold mahogany bench.
The word is a job and it is a vow and it is the thing I have been making since I was nineteen, and I had heard it in the back of my throat from the moment he set his hand braced on the steel and looked at me.
The word arrived on its own. I had waited for it.
"Hippocratic. If you say it the room ends. You understand."
"Yes."
"Hippocratic," he said again. "We will use it tonight if you need it. We will use it every night you need it. Tell me yes."
"Yes."
"Take the strap out of my pocket. Hand it to me. Put your wrists in my hands. We are at the beginning of the room I have been building for you. The room has walls. The walls are mine. The door is yours."
I step around the head of the table. I stand at his left side. The lab coat hangs to his knee. I slide my fingers into the pocket and the silk is the first thing I feel and the silk is not what I had expected.
It is heavier than I had thought silk would be.
Charmeuse, I would say, although I do not know what that word means in a textile catalogue; I know what it means in my hand.
The strap is the cool of skin in a cool room.
It warms instantly against my palm and the warming is not a thing that happens with nylon, with rope, with cotton.
The hem is hand-rolled, no thicker than the inside of a wedding band.
Three-fingers wide. Folded into a precise rectangle the size of my driver's license; when I draw it out it slips open in my hand like a length of dark water. The black absorbs the lamp's yellow.
I put the strap into his hand.
He sets it on the steel and turns and faces me. He puts both of his hands around both of my wrists. His grip is exact, weight-bearing, as a surgeon would test the give of a tendon. He keeps his eyes on my face.
"Take off your lab coat, Elena. Fold it. Put it on the stool at the head of the table. Then your top. Then the rest. Each on top of the last in the order they come off your body. I will tell you when to stop."
I take off the coat. I fold it the long way and the short way and I lay it on the stool where the lamp throws yellow on the dove-gray lining.
The scrub top. The medallion's chain catches under the neckline for half a breath and I free it without thinking and the silver comes to rest against my sternum where it has come to rest every day since I was twenty-three.
The bra. He waits, eyes level with mine.
"Stop."
I stop.
"There. You are at the threshold. Up on the table, Elena. On your back. Head at this end. Wrists above your head."
The steel under my shoulder blades is the cold of a freezer when you reach in for an instant.
I lie back. The lamp warms my face. The centrifuge cycles a long swell under the table and I feel it against my spine through the steel and the swell is the first thing in this room that has touched me without asking, and I hold still under it, because the touch is exactly what it is.
Sophia was on a table. The metal under her was different metal — gurney aluminum under a fluorescent grid.
Her room was a strip-lit corridor of an ER bay.
Her light was the white of overhead tubes at three a.m. Her table took her.
This one is asking. I am the one in the room.
I have chosen the table. I let my breath out and put my wrists above my head.
He brings the silk around the inside of one wrist, and then the other, with the same unhurried gesture he would use to hand me a chart.
The silk is warm by the time he has it wrapped.
He passes the long end through a steel ring set into the head of the table — a ring I had not noticed and would not have noticed in daylight, polished flush to the spine, no larger than a wedding band, set there long ago for some other protocol and repurposed — and he ties the knot to the ring in a way I cannot see, the knot lying flat against the back of my hand, the silk weighted just enough that I feel the silk.
"It comes off on a word. Watch."
He pulled a tail of the silk and the knot opened.
He pulled again and the strap was loose.
I felt the silk leave my wrists and the absence was a small grief.
He turned the strap, refolded the long end, wrapped my wrists again, and tied the knot back as it had been.
He showed me without being asked, because showing me was part of the room.
"On Hippocratic. On yellow. On red. On the moment you stop saying yes. Do you understand."
"Yes."
"Color, Elena."
"Green."
"There."