The Tray
CHAPTER FOUR
A small white cup of yogurt with a foil lid.
A piece of toast cut into two triangles, the corners squared, the cut a hospital makes for a child.
A glass of orange juice, lidded like something they didn’t want spilled.
The toast sat on a porcelain plate with no maker’s mark on the underside.
I had turned last night’s plate over and checked.
Things without maker’s marks were the most expensive things in the room.
“Good morning, Amber.”
“Good morning.”
“How did you sleep?”
“I slept.”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”
He pulled out the stool across from me and sat close enough that the bar stopped being a table and started being the only thing between us.
There was room enough at that counter for distance.
He hadn’t chosen it. Eating in front of me wasn’t something he did either, not since the third day at the clinic, and I added it to the inventory behind my face.
Matthew didn’t eat in front of me, or yawn, or touch his own face. He never looked at his phone without showing me the screen. That was not a thing he withheld. That was a thing he aimed.
“You were on the floor from nine until six,” he said.
“You went into the bathroom at twelve twenty-eight and came out at twelve thirty-four. You didn’t answer the three o’clock check-in.
At six-oh-nine you took the band off. At six-ten you put it back on.
Then you dressed, and you sat where you’re sitting now, with your back to the door. ”
“You read all of that before breakfast.”
“I read it while the juice was being pressed.” He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the marble. “And at seven fifty-eight your pulse rose eleven beats. I was still on the other side of the door.”
His voice didn’t change when he said it. Something under my sternum did. The band would be writing that down too, in a column I would never see.
“The lock has a sound,” I said.
“It does. Most residents take a month to hear it.” He looked at me. A result, confirmed. “You had it in one night.”
It was praise, and I felt where it landed. Wanting his approval was a thing I hadn’t agreed to and couldn’t stop.
“You kept me awake.”
“I gave you the night. There’s a difference. We’ll get to it.” He nodded at the tray. “Eat, please.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s alright. Eat anyway. The system reads the tray.”
I peeled the foil off the yogurt. It was not poisoned. He had too much invested in my chemistry. The spoon was heavier than a spoon needs to be, chosen for it. I ate. He watched, and the watching had the same weight.
“You set me homework,” I said.
“I did.”
“Safety tastes like surrender.”
“I asked you to think about it. Not to recite it.” He folded his hands. “Tell me what it tastes like.”
I counted. I stopped on the six.
“You stopped on the six,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s not what’s interesting.” He set the cup down. “What’s interesting is that you stopped on the six, and your hand started toward your left wrist before you decided anything. Band side.”
I looked at my hand. It was in my lap.
“You didn’t notice,” he said. “You would have, in another week. You’re cataloguing everything in this building except yourself. That part of you is going to be the most useful to us. It’s also going to be the most expensive to you.”
He looked at his band. Not my wrist. His. The face held numbers stacked below the hour. Not the time. Three scores, three residents.
“The dose tastes like nothing,” I said. “That’s the answer to your homework. The nights at the clinic taste like nothing. There’s a lid over them. So if safety tastes like surrender, then what you’re calling safety is the part where I’m not there for it.”
He didn’t flinch. I’d wanted him to flinch.
“Rest,” he said, “is the word we use.”
“I know the word you use.”
“Consent requires clarity. Clarity requires rest.” He said it like a line he had said in rooms larger than this one. “You came to us with neither. The protocol restores both. You don’t have to like the protocol for it to be true.”
“And last night?”
He leaned into the space between us until there was none left to spend. “Last night I gave you the alternative.” Another quarter-turn of the cup, closer now than the question needed him to be. “Nine lucid hours. No dose. No lid. You felt all of it. So tell me, Amber. Which do you prefer?”
It was not a question. It was a scale, and he was setting me on it.
If I said the dose, I was asking him for the lid.
If I said the night, I was telling him I preferred nine hours on the floor, listening for a lock to decide what it was going to do.
He waited like a man who already had the answer in a column and wanted it from my mouth anyway.
“I prefer the version where I choose,” I said.
He reached over and turned my wrist so the band faced him, slow, the same two fingers, the same exact spot.
He didn’t check the number; he’d already read it off my face.
The wrist stayed in his hand a beat past where reading anything required, his thumb resting where his fingers had been my first morning here, and let me feel exactly how little my preference had changed what he could still do with my arm.
Something moved through his shoulders. A half-inch settle and release. I noticed the settle. I noticed I noticed.
“Good,” he said. “That’s the first true thing you’ve said since I came in.”
“Everything I’ve said since you came in is true.”
“Everything you’ve said is accurate.” He stood the distinction up between us and left it there. “You moved the tablet.”
“No. You did. It wasn’t here at midnight. It was here at one. I left it where it was put.”
“Penelope has the tablets brought up for new residents around half past twelve. I should have told you.”
“You said the building is quiet from eleven to six. So residents may rest.”
“That’s the rule for residents. Penelope is staff.”
The distinction sat on the marble with the other one. Rules for me. Rules for the people who manage me. Two buildings, one address.
“What came under your door last night?”
He already knew. The question was a protocol. He was running it to see which version of me would answer.
I’d been doing the math since three. The schedule card cost nothing to surrender. The other card had not come under any door. It had come from a hand at the clinic, into a fist the cameras could not read. He had not asked about that card. He had asked about the door.
“A schedule card,” I said. “From the desk. The pool opens at five, the salon at eight, the laundry at seven. Quiet hours eleven to six. It was signed P.”
“Penelope signs everything P. She’d call it a signature. I’d call it affectation.” He smiled. The elevator smile, brought indoors. “I asked because I wanted to see if you would tell me.”
“I told you.”
“You told me what came under the door.”
Distance came back into it first, the same care he’d used closing it now spent taking it back, an inch at a time, like something only ever lent.
He stood. He picked up the tray. The toast was untouched. He left the orange juice. He didn’t say what he meant, and he didn’t have to. The not-saying was the point.
He paused at the door.
“There should have been a second thing last night,” he said. “Penelope leaves new residents a welcome card and a sleep aid. Sealed packet. White paper. It didn’t come, did it.”
That was not a question either. The sealed packet was the dose, dressed for home.
At the clinic they had put it in me. Here I would be expected to put it in myself.
And it had not come because he had kept it.
The night was his prescription; he had written it and signed nothing.
Now he was handing me the error to carry downstairs in my own mouth.
“It didn’t,” I said.
“Tell her at the desk. She likes to know when she’s been sloppy.”
He closed the door. The lock engaged. The quiet one. My pulse did what it now did for that sound, and somewhere a column filled in.
I heard him all the way to the elevator, unhurried, a man who had never once needed to walk fast in a building that answered to him. I stood in a room that answered to him too, and stayed exactly where he’d left me.
The orange juice glass was still in my hand. I hadn’t noticed I was holding it.
Adherence: 94 → 91.
Three points. The band didn’t read words. It read the body the words came from, and my body had been holding Dr. Callow’s card the whole time his question was in the air. Three points was not punishment. It was a readout.
The orange juice went down anyway.
Adherence: 91 → 92.
The watch pocket had been the plan. The watch pocket was a flaw. The jeans would go down a chute into hands paid to go through pockets. I needed somewhere that was not my body.
The book I chose was third from the left, one he’d ordered before I arrived, for the woman he was building. A camera reads a resident taking a book as a resident reading. I noted the spine, lower edge two finger-widths from the shelf’s lip, and carried it to the bathroom.
On the closed lid I took the matchbook from the watch pocket for the last time and opened the green foil cover.
On the first night I had taken the matches out and put the card inside.
An empty matchbook is a small cardboard envelope.
Dr. Callow’s card was folded inside. Four to six weeks.
Do not tell him. I had not told him. Under the pencil number from The Greenroom, in the smallest hand I owned, I wrote one line:
He is reading me faster than I am reading myself. Change the ratio.
Card and matchbook went against the spine where the binding was tightest, and the book closed over them. Thickness is not a thing a camera reads across a room. I returned the book. Third from the left. Two finger-widths. If the measurement was wrong when I came back, I would know.
He would never search a thing he had chosen for me. That was his flaw. I was going to live in it.
Then I went down to the desk and made myself useful.
Be good was the first lie I had ever been taught. It meant: say what they need you to say. Cost the room nothing. The building thought it was installing something new. It had only found the door already open.
In the elevator I practiced the line twice. The panel held numbers one through six and blank circles above them, buttons for floors the building didn’t want named. I touched nothing and the car carried me to the lobby anyway.
Penelope was there, in the same lipstick, reading her own tablet, its case the color of butter.
“Ms. Vale. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Penelope. Dr. Caldren asked me to tell you the sleep aid didn’t come with the welcome card last night. He said you’d want to know.”
Her face held. Her eyes moved. Whatever crossed them was filed before it finished.
“Thank you, Ms. Vale,” she said. “I appreciate you telling me.”
“Of course.”
“Ms. Vale.” I had made it three steps. “There’s a residents’ lunch at noon in the Garden Room. Just the women of Floor Six. Adherence above eighty-eight only.” The smile arrived on schedule. “I think you’ll meet some friends.”
“I’ll be there.”
At 6B I put my wrist near the plate and the door read the band and let me in.
I didn’t have a key. I was the key, as long as the number said I was.
The tablet had moved again. Two inches left.
The building had been in the room while I was not, and whoever had done it had known I couldn’t prove it.
I noted the distance. I didn’t touch it.
Adherence: 92 → 95.
Arrival number. I had carried his error downstairs and handed it to the woman who would wear it.
The system had paid me three points for the errand.
It paid for the reporting. Somewhere a record now said Penelope had been careless.
The building could be made to lie. I’d just watched myself do it with the true thing, aimed.
Be good.
The tablet stayed where it was. I noticed, late, what I had missed at the desk. Penelope’s tablet case had no maker’s mark. Neither had the plate the toast came on. The only mark anywhere near him was the thin green seam in the ring’s band, and that one he had chosen to wear.
At noon there would be a room of women above eighty-eight, and every one of them had answered his question once. Which do you prefer. Every one of them was an answer, walking around in good shoes.
I was the only one, as far as I knew, he had ever kept awake to hear the answer live.
The orange juice glass got rinsed and set upside-down on the rack. The system would log a woman cleaning up after herself. It would not log what the body was deciding underneath. Not the card. Not the phone number. The seam. The small true thing.
Four to six weeks. That was what I had.
I was going to need less.