CHAPTER 15
Avery
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Rook walked the north path half a step behind my shoulder, counting exits out loud.
The frost had come off the grass by nine and the morning stood bright and windless, and the quad was full for the first time in a week.
Somebody had raked the leaves into windrows along the walk.
Wren had called the ward phone last night and asked me to come, and would not say why, and hung up before I could make her.
The paper that let me cross the road was folded in my coat pocket, the Chief Psychiatrist’s signature on a half sheet with the ward stamp in the corner.
My bag had the transcript in it. The transcript had never been out of the Ledger Room before this morning, and I had carried it down three flights with my arm across the front of the bag.
“Three ways off this path,” Rook said. “The gate, the gap in the hedge by the bike racks, and the loading door under the library that they keep chained.”
“Two ways off this path, and one chained door,” I said.
“Fine. Two ways off this path and one door I could open with my shoulder in about four seconds,” he said.
He is six foot four and he was walking at half his stride, which on a path full of undergraduates makes a man look like a dog on a short leash.
The gate at the north end is iron, and the name cut into the lintel is CARROW. I had walked under it for fourteen months without reading it, because a scholarship student reads the amount and never the donor. The letters are cut four inches deep into the stone. Somebody paid for the depth.
“How many times have you been under that gate?” he said, and he was not looking at the gate.
“Every day for fourteen months, and I never once looked up at it,” I said.
He stopped walking, which he does not do outdoors. “Tell me what it says.”
“It says the same word as the sign over the door I sleep behind now. I took that for a coincidence for fourteen months,” I said.
The registrar’s building keeps a waiting hall with a radiator under the window and a bench that nobody sits on. Rook read the room before he looked at me. His knuckles are split and have been since before I ever met him, and they went pale on the strap of my bag before he handed it across.
“Two exits. The stair behind you and the one you’re not allowed to use.”
“There’s a fire door at the end of the hall,” I said.
“That’s the one you’re not allowed to use.”
Counting exits is how he says the thing he will not say out loud. I let him finish the count before I went in, because taking it away from him would have left him holding it.
Cecily Pryn was behind the table before me, with a folder squared to the table’s corner and her hands resting on top of it. Her hair is silver and cut to the jaw and it has not moved in any room I have ever seen her in.
“Sit down,” she said. “You are four minutes early and I have marked you present.”
I sat. “Does the marking matter?”
“It matters for the ones who are late. It has never mattered for you,” she said.
The people who are allowed to be late are the people who own a piece of the room. I have never been late anywhere in six years and it has never bought me one thing.
“Three questions,” she said. “The Kestrel Fellowship is a year in residence, a stipend of eighteen thousand dollars, and a room in Vandeleur Hall. First question. What are you working on?”
“A nineteen-eleven manuscript in a book cipher,” I said. “Ninety-eight leaves. I have most of the first layer and none of the second.”
“Second question. Who taught you to read one?”
“My mother. I was nine. She wrote me letters in a running key and would not give me a word of them back until I brought her the plaintext,” I said.
Cecily wrote something short. My mother has been dead three years and I still had to take that sentence apart and set it back together before it would come out of me in the past tense.
“Third question. Why should the Fellowship pay for a year of that?”
I had an answer written for that one. I had been writing it since the letter came, in margins, in the dark, on the back of a courier flimsy. I gave her the other answer.
“I don’t know that it should. I’m going to finish it either way. I would rather eat while I do it,” I said.
“You have not asked what the Fellowship is worth to the Institute,” she said.
“I know what it is worth to me. That is the only number I can check myself.”
She closed the folder and set her pen beside it, square to the edge, the way a person does when the next sentence is the one they came for.
“One correction, since you have not asked for one. Anything you produce inside the term is the Institute’s work product, published in its name. The 1908 charter, second paragraph.”
“Whose name goes on it if I finish it?”
“The Institute’s.”
I squared my bag on my knees until the seams lined up, and then I squared it again.
What I had wanted out of a year was a page with my own name at the top of it.
She had told me the truth about that in two sentences, before I signed anything, which is more than any man in that building has ever managed.
“You may withdraw the application,” she said. “People do, and I never record the reason.”
“I’m not withdrawing it. I would like it noted that I asked the question first,” I said.
“Then I have a question that isn’t one of your three.”
“Ask it.”
I put my hand on the strap and kept my eyes off the bag, because looking at it would have been a whole sentence.
“The ward library. The reading copies the ward let patients keep on the day room shelf, the double-column setting with the printer’s device on the last leaf. Does the Kestrel hold that edition?”
“The library has held that edition since 1904. The accession is in the ward-library records.”
“Where in the building?”
“Stack four, below grade,” she said. “Wren Halloway keeps the shelf list. The stair door takes a card and the card writes a name.”
I got up faster than a woman who has been told no gets up. She let me reach the door before she spoke again, and she did not raise her voice to do it.
“I keep records,” she said. “I do not write reports.”
Rook ate a sandwich on the wall outside the registrar’s building and did not offer me half until I had looked at it twice. We walked down to the library at twenty past two with the sun on the stone and the day already turning toward forty.
“How long do you need down there?” he said.
“An hour. Less than that, if the shelf list is honest.”
The Kestrel sits at the low end of the quad, and its lower stacks are below grade, and the building admits nothing about them. No elevator. No sign in the lobby. One stair behind a door with a card reader bolted to the jamb.
Rook held his card against the reader without pressing it.
“This writes my number and the minute onto a log,” he said. “Somebody prints that log and somebody reads it.”
“Then wait for me at the top of the stair,” I said.
“No. I’m telling you what it costs so you don’t find it out from him later. It costs me a conversation. Go on.”
He pressed the card and the lock let go, and he put his shoulder to the door and held it while I went through.
The stair went down two flights and turned twice. At the bottom there was a steel door set into the end wall with no handle on this side. Looking at it put me back in the tunnel that takes eleven minutes at a walk, in the dark, with my palm open on a grating.
The air below grade smells of vinegar. Microfilm goes bad in its cans and that is the smell of it going, sharp and a little sweet, and it stayed in my coat all evening. Under the vinegar the dehumidifier cycled on and off, and under that the steam line ticked along the ceiling.
The ranges stood shoulder to shoulder on their tracks with the crank wheels turned out into the aisle. One tube at the far end flickered below the rate my eye could catch, so the room had a pulse in it that I could not point at.
Wren was squaring a truck of returns that was already square. Her hair is red and cut blunt at the jaw, and she pushed her wire glasses up with the back of her wrist twice while I stood there and said nothing.
“Tell me the thing you called about,” I said.
“A man called the desk Saturday afternoon and asked for the reading room and got me instead.”
I set my bag on the truck so my hands would have nothing to do. “All of it, please.”
“He said he was from the Trust and he had your file number and he wanted your schedule, and I gave him nothing, and then I was sick in the staff bathroom, and I’m fine.”
She took her glasses off and cleaned them on her cardigan, which they did not need, and put them back on her face.
“I told him you keep bankers’ hours in a building with no bank,” she said. “He didn’t laugh. Nobody ever laughs at that one and I am keeping it anyway.”
“What did his voice sound like?”
“Flat. Polite. A man reading off a card he had already filled out for himself,” she said.
“Is he coming back?” she said. “I need to know whether I take the late shift Thursday or hand it to somebody with a bigger brother.”
“Take the shift, and take it with the door propped and the counter staffed,” I said. “Then go home with two people.”
She stopped with her hand on the truck and made herself look up at me instead of at the books.
“Are you safe? Not are they dangerous. Are you safe.”
“Yes.”
It was the truest word I had and it cost me nothing to say, and that is why my hands went cold on the strap. She was standing in a basement being asked for my schedule because I had written her number on an intake form in a building that keeps every form it is ever given.
“I need a book,” I said. “Then I need you to forget I came down here and asked for it.”
“That’s two things and I’m only any good at the first one.”
“Then be good at the first one and I will owe you the second,” I said.
“The ward reading edition. The attack gave me back four continuous pages of the book itself, which is enough to name the edition, and your library has held it since 1904,” I said.