CHAPTER 17
Avery
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I carried the transcript under my left arm with the edges squared.
It had never been out of my room before.
A bead of water stood on the handle of the laundry-chute door.
That door has been painted shut under three coats, and its brass is rubbed bright by hands that could not have opened it.
The south wind had been at the building since dawn.
Fifty-six and muggy for the date, and every cold surface on the floor was sweating.
The pages under the plaintext had been mine long enough to feel like property.
Having them and carrying them turned out to be two different jobs.
My hand kept going back to the cover to check that the edges were square.
The edges had nothing to do with it. The closets on this floor breathe damp cedar in weather that cannot decide what season it belongs to.
The wing keeps Sunday hours, so the kitchen was the only room with anybody awake in it.
The oak under the runner gave me away before my foot came down.
The kitchen door’s spring let go all at once at the end of its travel.
Rook came through it with a dish towel over his shoulder.
Behind him the warped skillet was turning slow circles on the burner.
He had the copper key out in his left hand, going end over end, bow to teeth and back.
He had been doing that in front of everybody for a while now, and nobody in the wing had asked him about it.
“It opens nothing. I keep it because I am the one who took it off you.”
“You did not take it.” My hand had gone back to the cover of the book, and I made it come down. “I put it into your hand.” He knew that, and he let me put it into the record anyway. “That is a different verb, and you were standing right there for it.”
The grin came up out of him before he had a vote in the matter. He put the key away in his hip pocket without any hurry at all. “I will take the nicer verb. Nobody here has offered me a nicer verb since the summer.”
He tipped his chin at the book under my arm. He did it with the towel hand, so the question would look like something he thought of on his way past. “What is in that today that was not in it yesterday?”
“My handwriting, on ninety-eight leaves, and none of it belongs to anybody else.”
It was true and it was no kind of answer, and he heard both halves of it land. He moved out of the doorway to let me by. His hands stayed out where I could see them. That is a rule he wrote for himself long before I ever got here, and he has not bent it once for his own convenience.
Alistair was at the kitchen table in the chair with its back to the window.
The elevator had not run all morning. He had the white bishop between two fingers, the replacement one in the wrong ivory.
He finished the move he had started before he allowed that I was in the doorway.
He set the piece down on its square, and he took his time arriving at the square.
“You slept four hours and checked that book twice before you lifted it.”
“I slept four hours because the pipes went off at eleven and again at four.” He had asked about my sleep and not about the book, and both of us knew which one he had come down for. “The pipes belong to the Institute. The Institute has a man for that.”
He did not take the bait, and he was never going to.
The pipes were not what either of us had come into that kitchen for.
He turned his cuff back and looked at a wrist with nothing on it.
“I am not going to ask you what is in the book.” He put the cuff down over the wrist again.
“Declining to ask is the most expensive thing I will do today.” He left a pause with a hook in it, which is the only kind he builds. “The day is not half over.”
He wanted it. He wanted it badly, and he had spent a whole sentence proving he could keep his hand off the table, and I was supposed to be warmed by the restraint. “Note it in the index, then.” He would, too, on a buff card in his own hand. “You are the one who keeps the records here.”
I went past both of them and down the corridor to the far end. The floor announced me a step early the entire way.
Julian’s office door stood open the width of a hand.
The lamps were burning at midday, because the sun leaves this floor by noon and does not come back until morning.
He was at the desk with a fountain pen uncapped.
A sheet of Trust letterhead sat squared in front of him with four lines written on it.
He looked up when the corridor gave me away.
“Do I need to sit down?”
“You do.” I put the ledger book down on the near side of the blotter. “It is not a short thing.” My hands went to the corners and squared it against nothing in particular. “I am not going to summarize it to make it go faster.”
He capped the pen and laid it in the tray parallel to the edge of the blotter. Then he sat. His hands went to the arms of the chair and settled there.
I had pushed the door shut with my heel on the way in.
The latch took hold with a dry tick, and then a second one, softer, as the door came to rest in its frame.
I turned the transcript around and opened it flat, past the plaintext they had all seen.
The leaves that come after it are the ones nobody has looked at but me.
The paper had gone soft at the corners from being handled in a room where the walls sweat.
The first layer had been gap-toothed from the beginning.
For a long time I called the gaps damage.
They are not damage. Every hole in the plaintext is a place where a second pass sits underneath.
Once I had the shape of it, the gaps stopped being holes and started being a table of contents.
It came apart on a night when I had meant to sleep, and I sat on the rug with the lamp down beside me and told nobody.
“There is a second layer under the plaintext.” He did not move his hands off the chair. “It came apart this week, and I have not told anybody in this building.”
“How much of it reads clean?”
“All of it, and it reads clean the whole way down.” Something crossed his face and was gone before I could get a word to it. “It is a procedure in five stages, each one with a marker. It is written the way a man writes something he expects other people to run without him.”
He asked the next question in the voice he uses for the weather. “Run on whom?”
“On you. Your name is in it in three places.” I gave him that much and stopped. The rest of it was a different fight and I did not have the ground under me for it. “There are three hands in the margins, and the newest one is still alive.”
He did not ask me which one it was. He did not reach across for the leaves either. “I know whose it is.”
“So do I, and we are not having that conversation this afternoon.”
He took the fence I had put up and did not test it. Nobody else in this building has ever extended me that particular courtesy, and I have never been sure whether it is respect or a way of saving himself the trouble.
“Read it to me in order. Do not soften it, and do not stop to explain the words to me.”
I read it to him. The lamp on that desk is old and it makes a small sound while the filament is cold. For a long stretch of the afternoon, that sound and my own voice were the only things working in the room.
“Stage one is removal.” I found the line with my finger and held it there. “The instruction runs four lines, and most of it is about letters.” The leaf says who may answer one and who may not, and it is very clear on the point. “The marker is that he stops asking when he is going home.”
“I stopped in the second week. I was fourteen. Miss Vance, go on.”
The scar through his left eyebrow is a hairline.
I had only ever had it across a room before.
From that chair I could see the two short places where the hair does not come back on either side.
I put my finger under the next line and kept it on the paper, because the paper was where my hand had a job.
“Stage two is correction.” The leaf puts the instruction in the passive, which is how these people write when a person is going to be the object of the verb.
“The subject supplies the correction himself and is not to be assisted.” The next part I read slower than the rest. “The marker is that he begins to apologize for what is being done to him.” I made myself finish it. “He is not performing it when he does.”
“That was February.” He said it to the blotter and not to me. “The pipes on the whole floor were out and nobody came for them until March. I apologized for the noise they made.”
I stopped there. Over us the wind picked up something loose on the roof and set it back down. A boy apologizing for a pipe went into me and lodged. He waited without asking me why I had stopped. He did not put anything into the gap, and after a while my finger found the line on its own.
“Stage three is economy. The instruction is one sentence long.” I read that sentence twice to myself before I gave him the marker, because I knew what the marker was going to be. “The marker is that he stops making any motion the work does not require of him.”
His hands had been on the arms of that chair since he sat down.
Same angle, same distance apart, no drift in either direction.
Every man in this building calls that his nature.
Two of them have told me to my face it is the reason they would follow him into a room with the door shut.
Somebody built it into a boy upstairs, on a schedule, with a marker on a page to check the work against.
“Stage four is custody.” My voice had gone flat and I let it stay flat. “The marker is that he asks permission for what is already his, and is grateful when it is given.”