30. CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY
Two-Forty
I was awake at two-forty because two-forty was where the body put me now. I had stopped calling it insomnia. Insomnia is a thing that happens to you. This was a schedule.
The apartment did what it did at that hour. The refrigerator cycled. Something settled a floor or four floors above me, a sound with no meaning in it that I had spent a year assigning meaning to anyway.
Then the lock turned.
Not the panel. The panel chimes, and it tells the floor below that it chimed, and a woman in an office knows before I do that my own door has opened. This was metal turning in metal, once, unhurried. The sound a brass key makes in a building where everything else is a number.
I had heard it before. Thirteen months ago, in a corridor on six, with my hand still in the crook of a stranger’s arm and my whole life in a bag somebody else had packed.
I didn’t get up.
I sat with my back against the couch and the seven-count running underneath everything, and I let the door do what it was going to do.
He came in and closed it behind him and didn’t turn on the light.
For a moment he was only a shape against the hall glow, and then he was not, and my body went hot and wanting before I had decided anything about it. It happened below the band. It happened below everything the band had ever been built to find.
He stood inside the door. He didn’t come further in.
“You didn’t come Wednesday,” I said.
He didn’t answer that.
The dark did what dark does in a room with lenses in it, which was nothing at all. There were three in this room. I knew where all three were. He had told me where two of them were himself, in another life, when telling me things was a currency he could still afford to spend.
“Are you still in the building.”
Nothing.
“Are they going to let you stay in it.”
Nothing.
I had read him for thirteen months off whatever he could not hold still.
The hand at his side. The half-second before an answer.
The one thing his face did when the room turned away from him.
I got up off the floor and crossed to where he was standing so I could read him properly, and there was nothing to read.
He had gone still all the way through. Not the trained stillness he wore into a session, which was a performance with a man underneath it. Something else. A stillness with the man already spent out of it.
“Say one thing,” I said. “Any of it. Say a thing that isn’t true if you have to.”
He looked at me for four seconds.
“I can’t.”
Two words, and they cost him something, and I could not tell what. That was the part I took to the floor with me afterward and could not put down. He had spent a year making sure I could always read the cost. Tonight he let me watch him pay and would not tell me for what.
“Then why come at all.”
“Because you would not have believed a message.”
I would not have. He knew that the way he knew everything about me, off a file and a year of Wednesdays and a hundred small readings I had handed him for free without ever deciding to.
“Believed what.”
He didn’t say.
Somewhere below us the building ran its night cycle, the hum coming up through the floor the way it had every night since the first one.
A machine that had never once needed him to be in the room to do what it did to me.
It had gone on doing it all week with the chair empty, and here he was standing in the dark in it, and it didn’t care that he had come either.
He raised his hand.
For thirteen months everywhere a camera reached, that hand had stopped a half-inch short of me.
I had learned that half-inch the way other women learn a husband’s step on a stair.
I had measured it at the collarbone and I had measured it at the throat, and it had never closed while anything was watching.
Three lenses in that room.
He closed it.
His palm came flat against the side of my neck, under the jaw, where a hand goes when it means to hold a head still or hold a person up and has not decided which. The skin of it was cold from outside. He had come in from somewhere.
I didn’t move. I had spent a year not moving. This was the first time it was not obedience.
The band warmed at my wrist.
I waited for the number, because there was always a number.
It printed nothing.
It sat warm against the bone and gave me a blank face, the way it had failed once before on the one thing in me it went looking for and could not hold.
Three seconds. I counted them. I count everything.
Then he took his hand back, and I heard him breathe out once through his nose, and that was the only sound either of us made that I would have called human.
He reached for the door.
“Matthew.”
He stopped with his hand on it, and he didn’t turn around, and he didn’t say my name back.
Then the brass key turned the other way from the corridor side, and the lock took, and the panel above the jamb stayed dark, because nothing about any of it was something this building knew how to write down.
I stood in the middle of my own foyer with my hand at my neck where his had been.
I didn’t know where he had come from, or whether he was inside the program or outside it, whether he had eight hours left in that building or eight weeks, whether Wednesday had been taken off him or handed back. I knew less than I had at midnight.
I had asked to be shown.