13. Thomas #2
"The staff say he's no trouble," Gault said, looking out the window.
"He eats if you start him. He walks if you walk him.
He sleeps when the lights go off. In six months the only thing on his chart, the only behavior, is this: at ten to four, every afternoon, he turns his face to the door of the day room.
Staff could set clocks by it, and one of them told me they check the corridor sometimes, that's how sure his face is.
Ten minutes. Then it stops." He turned his cup handle to three o'clock.
"His mother says it's the last of him. She says it like it's a comfort, and then she says it like it isn't. Like something in him remembers an appointment. "
Ten to four is when you arrive for a four o'clock.
It's the time you stand outside a door you trust, a few minutes early, out of respect.
I have a four o'clock every Tuesday. I sat in that booth and did the sum anyway because my head does sums when it can't do anything else, and the sum came out to: whatever was done to Micah Vane, he showed up early for it, once a week, politely, the way you show up early for someone who has been kind to you.
And then one week the appointment took everything there was, and the body kept the habit, because habit is stored somewhere deeper than the person, and the person is gone, and the habit walks to the door alone.
"What do you want from me?" I said. Not hostile. I genuinely needed the shape of it.
"I don't know what I'm asking for," Gault said.
"Anything. A date. A name. A man who'll say in a deposition that the college's records have a hole in them.
I've got a mother upstate who's allowed twelve hours a year with her son and a trust with no people in it, and every road I take ends in paper that was filed correctly.
" He looked at me then, and six months of tired looked with him.
"You called. Nobody calls. So: anything at all. "
I gave him what I could say out loud without ending up in a different kind of facility myself.
That nobody at the college will speak the name, not out of coldness, and I told him about the desk, the crosshatched strokes, dozens of them, all the same angle.
That the registrar's file is closed and says "transferred" with no destination, which he knew.
That a page is missing from a gatehouse ledger for a night I have reason to care about, razored at the spine, and that I'd testify to the stub.
And I gave him the folded printout of the spring reading list, Micah's last seminar, which I have carried since September without knowing who it was for.
He took it in both hands. A reading list. He handled it like a relic, and that's when I had to look at the menu board for a while.
We sat for a minute with the dead coffee, scorched and gone shiny with milk, the laminate tacky under my forearms. Then he said, "Are you all right up there?
" and I looked up from the folder, because I didn't understand the question.
"At the college," he said. "You look like my clients look.
I've only got the one kind." And I want it in the record that a stranger in a diner in Denbridge is the first person in this county to ask me that with the meter off, and that I said "I don't know" before I could dress it in anything, and he nodded like a man filing an honest answer with the rest of them.
He tried to give me gas money, which tells you everything left to know about Gault. I didn't take it. He did make me take one thing.
"Keep the photograph," he said. "I have others; she takes one every month, remember.
" He pressed it flat to the table a second before he pushed it over, a man taking his own pulse.
"I've been carrying this case alone since May, on the outside of those walls.
You're inside them. I'd like there to be a copy of his face inside the walls, in the pocket of somebody who minds. "
* * *
I pulled over eleven minutes short of the gates.
There's a lay-by there, a farm gate and a verge, and the fog was already visible ahead, sitting across the road at its own height, right where it had left off, and I stopped the car because the steering wheel had started making that mistake where it swims. Engine ticking.
The photograph face up on the passenger seat, because I'd tried it face down at the diner and face down was worse; face down it was Adrian's desk, though I didn't have those words for it yet, I just knew face down was worse.
There's a joke somewhere in all of it. There always is; that's been my trade since I was nine years old and learned that a fast mouth can stand in front of almost anything.
A joke about the Kitchen Sink. A joke about borrowing a car that pulls left to go visit a trust with no people in it.
I looked straight at the place where the jokes live.
Nothing came out. That's what the photograph does. It stands where the jokes were, with its hands folded.
I sat there until a tractor went by and the driver slowed to see if I needed help, and I waved him on, and the wave used up everything I had, and then I drove through the fog line and back into my college, and the hedges went gray, and I noticed I'd stopped breathing through my nose the way you do at the door of a hospital room.
I left the keys and a full tank with the porter for Ballard.
After I parked the Rover, Croft came out of the gatehouse and tucked a note under its wiper, his broad, right-slanting hand, the final strokes falling clean away from the words: Hope she behaved.
Coffee in the record room Monday, if you're back in time.
I stood in the north lot in the dark with my eyes caught on the last line, and I am not ashamed to log that a man saying if you're back in time, like my time was mine, nearly took my knees.
Then I climbed to my rooms and opened the notebook to a fresh page, past the anomalies, past the things that are actually happening, and I gave the page a new heading, and my hand was shaking and I let it shake, because a steady hand would have been a lie in the record.
What it costs.
Entry one: Micah Vane, twenty-six. Everything he was is gone, and the body keeps going, and someone folds his hands, and at ten to four his face still keeps the appointment. The college files this under "transferred."
I used to keep two lists. Anomalies, for the puzzle. Things that are actually happening, for the truth. Tonight there are three, and the third one isn't a puzzle and isn't a mystery; it's a bill, and somebody is running it up, and the page has one entry and room underneath.
The room underneath is what scares me.