When the story revises you, you become a draft nobody saved. Your appointment disappears from a calendar you remember confirming twice. A nurse's badge number matches your notes, but her face is wrong by a degree only you can feel. The recorder plays back a room breathing. You are still writing, but the page is now a surface the building can wipe with one slow hand.
------------------------------------
He brought the physical folder this time. He said to himself that paper was a primitive technology precisely because the world or the god that made it could not revise pulp as easily as it could revise electrons. He said that line in his head, smiling at how it sounded like he was interviewing paper. He placed the folder on the editor's desk like an offering and tried to map his posture to the posture of a person who is not about to ask someone to admit the most banal thing in the world: that a meeting happened.
"We don't have you slotted," the editor said, unreadable behind the rim of a secondhand mug. Her office still had the cheap supply cabinet with the sticky door; the sticky door still caught her sleeve as she sat. All the static things were still static. Only the moving one wasn't.
"The feature—Black—" He stopped, not because the word was difficult, but because he suddenly cared which syllable he would deliver to the room first, as if saying "Black-stone" was a triage decision. The building will edit the wrong one first. "The asylum piece."
"You're not on-record for any of that," she said. She lifted her phone and made the choreographed gesture of someone looking for a calendar entry she knows is there. She scrolled, scrolled, scrolled. "Alex. We met last Tuesday, but not about this. We talked alumni profiles. I have you down for Dean's List fluff and the county real-estate tax story. There's nothing about an asylum."
"We ate pizza."
"We did not." A softness came over her face—pity she would not enjoy feeling for someone she considered to be one of her better freelancers. "Are you okay?"
He inhaled to the bottom where breaths become promises. He opened the folder and slid a single printout forward: the old Blackstone article with the circled line—Some horrors are better left unspoken—under which Alex had written in pencil in smaller handwriting: publish anyway. Her gaze landed on the circle and did not leave it.
"Is this really your line?" she asked. "Feels, I don't know." She let the sentence hang. He knew which words she was refusing: melodramatic, undergraduate, urban-legend bait.
"It's a quote," he said. "From my own—" He caught it. Who quotes himself and keeps their job. "It's a line I wrote for myself. A reminder of what happens when the silence looks like safety."
Her phone vibrated. She flinched as if she had been waiting to be rescued by something mechanical. "I have to take this," she said, which he recognized as a form of mercy. He watched her shoulder the call, nod twice, and hang up. "Alex, if you need to talk to someone, the campus counseling center takes walk-ins."
He laughed once. The bark of a fox surprising itself. "I'm not crazy," he said, because all sane people say that when they need someone else to look at a scar and agree it is not a mouth. "I met with a nurse. Lucy's nurse." He paused. "A nurse."
"Where?" she asked gently.
He told her. He watched her write it down. He walked out with the relief of having left a record.
The hospital's fluorescent corridor had its own weather system. You could feel a membrane as you crossed the threshold from October into seasonless. He went to Visitor Check-In; he handed over his ID; he said he had an appointment with Nurse Reeves—and heard himself say Dr. Reeves—and corrected—Nurse, Harriet—and the receptionist nodded as if apologizing for their shared mouths.
"Third floor," the receptionist said. "Nursing station."
He had done this a dozen times. He took the stairs. He liked the stairs because there are fewer moments on a stairwell where you have to agree about reality with the other bodies present. Up on three, a woman in scrubs the color of toothpaste looked up with the polite dread of someone who fields deliveries and complaints.
"Reeves?" he asked, then added, "Harriet." He spoke the name like he was setting down a glass of water the way you set down a glass of water for someone who has been sitting with bad news.
"Badge?" she said automatically, and he showed it, and her eyes did not move from the name on his badge to his face and back, because the face did not matter as much as the fact that the letters correspond. People here were the names on their rectangles. She looked at his face then in the way you look at ice to test if it will hold your weight. "Reeves is on lunch," she said. "Can I help you?"
"I interviewed her last month," he said. "Alex Winters. University paper. I wanted to verify a detail."
She blinked politely at the middle distance. "You'll need to check with Public Affairs for interviews."
"We did that," he lied. "They granted permission. Would you—" He realized he had wanted her to say, of course, Alex, you came with the recorder, you drank the bitter coffee, you told me you had a sister once who didn't make it past two years and didn't I ever feel like I wanted to nail the door of the world shut so nothing could get out.
"What detail?" she asked, to help him leave.
"The lullaby," he said before he could select another safer word. He waited for her eyes to give away a private history of hearing something when the machine should have slept.
She looked at him as if he had asked about her slippers. Someone called from down the corridor. "Nurse," the someone said.
He looked at her badge out of habit. The hospital's ID format was memorized by now; his notes contained the number as proof that he'd been where he had been when he said he had. The badge read REEVES, H.—the same letters as his notes—and a number he recognized. The face did not belong to the name. He knew faces by gesture, the muscle-memory of grief. This one's smile had too much in it like a person showing you they know how to smile.
He left because apology was a way to leave without leaving pieces. In the stairwell, he put his forehead to the cool wall and listened to the building's variable sigh. He took his recorder from his pocket and pressed play on the file he had labeled REEVES_1. The display told him the length: 42:19. He pressed play and the room tone filled the stairwell. The same note the HVAC had picked in his dorm. A thump at 3:17 on the timeline as if pipes sometimes knock like knuckles.
He scrubbed forward: 12:03, room tone; 26:18, room tone; 41:10, room tone. He tried to remember which question he had asked there—the one about the doors. He tried to summon the reply she had given when she made the eye contact you make with a person when you are teaching them to hold something you should not be making them hold.
The recorder hissed like a held breath.
Outside, the air felt nastier than it should have. Weather should be an argument with an atmosphere indifferent to your need for a sign. He went to the coffee shop across from campus where they over-roasted to cover the water and opened his laptop to feed the RAW files through a different pipeline. He watched them load. He watched them render correctly, pixel by pixel, the way an image is supposed to earn itself. He clicked EXPORT. The progress bar moved to 100%. The image appeared as a flat gray rectangle. He exported again with different settings—the thing you do when you want to feel that you are a person who can change a parameter and therefore change an outcome. Gray. He exported one in sRGB and one in CMYK as if he were printing a magazine. Gray, gray. He made one tiny crop. The crop saved into a flat field the color of fogged glass.
He would not cry. He would not give the narrative that. He closed the laptop and wrote names on the yellow legal pad with a pen that had just begun to miss on the downstrokes: Elijah. Dr. Lee. Nurse Reeves. He put each name into a separate business envelope because dividing saved you from contagion. He sealed them and put them under the weight of the book about public records and five minutes later opened the one with Elijah in it. The square of paper was blank and smelled like the damp stone smell of a building where history sweats from walls. He rubbed his thumb across the fibers and felt the impression where his own pen had pressed a name into pulp. The ink had left. The weight of the letters remained like a flock's trace in the sky after the flock is gone.
He took a taxi to the county building to ask for incident reports. The clerk with the sympathetic mouth looked at him without anything in her eyes but the practice of politely declining. "Black—" he began, and stopped himself, and said, "the asylum," and her gaze tilted slightly away from him in that way people's eyes do when you introduce a story they privately believe has the power to earn them an enemy.
"Public Affairs," she said.
"I've been to Public Affairs," he said. "Their door is a fire exit that opens on a staircase that opens on another fire exit. Are there any open records requests on file for the asylum in the last year?"
Her fingers moved and stopped. "One," she said, and then the screen she looked at refreshed and she frowned and then she said, "None."
He gave up the day because the day wanted to be given up. He walked home quick like a dog who knows the way but has to pee. He sat on the floor in front of his corkboard and pinned photos and index cards and red string because he had seen the board in films and maybe, if you imitate a thing that contains order, order comes. He printed the words THE HOUSE KNOWS on a card and put a question mark after them and the question mark looked precious and wrong, like a curl in a son's hair after you've cut it.
He took a picture of the board to show someone, to show himself later when he decided he must be exaggerating, and when the flash dissolved he saw in the camera screen not his board, not his strings, but a set of clean cork squares ready to take whatever a sensible person wanted to put there. He didn't want to check the wall. He checked the wall. The pins he'd driven in lay on the floor, resurrected to their parts.
He needed a person who existed as proof that people existed who knew him. He texted Ben because Ben had read his draft and said, "This is better than your usual Old Weird America thing; this matters." He typed: you remember the black— (and corrected): the asylum story? He hit send. The phone screen unfroze into the word sending and then into a red exclamation point and then into the sentence Message Undeliverable. Two minutes later a new text arrived from Ben's number:
Who is this?
He stared at the text until the words blurred. He typed anyway: alex. He waited for the three dots dance. The dots danced. A sentence arrived: Wrong number, bud. He hit call. It rang and rang and the voicemail picked up and a voice that was box-voiced said, "The number you have dialed is not in service."
He went to the bathroom not to throw up but to put water on his face to cool the place behind the eyes where tears were waiting to be given a reason. The mirror clouded and he wrote with his finger the way he had when he was a kid: SOME HORRORS ARE BETTER LEFT UN. His hand stopped as if clipped. The steam retreated from the letters, taking the last syllables with it. He wrote the letters again under the disappearing and they came fainter, like the idea was tiring of him, like the phrase was not meant to be finished, like the building had rules for how much of itself it would allow to be named.
He went to the notebook and checked what he had written last night in the bottom margin. Some horrors are better left unspoken had become Some horrors are better left un. He touched the ink to see if perhaps someone had come in and cut out the rest with a blade. The fibers lifted, clean and damp.
He did the cheap magic trick he had seen a librarian do to rescue notes erased by a student: he shaded over the indentation with a soft pencil. The lead darkened the grooves and the word read itself back to him in the paler carbon: spoken. He smiled and the smile tasted like the end of a reprieve.
He slept and woke to a morning that had changed none of the furniture. He walked to campus and people nodded at him because the body broadcasts "do not" even before the mouth does. He decided he would send the file to three more people even if the file was an empty box; he would say in the body, "if you receive an empty document, tell me the emptiness looks like this." He wrote a long email to Maya that he knew his better self would never send because it asked for assurances no stranger should ever be asked to give: If the paper arrives blank, it is still a warning. Hold it to the light. Warm it with your breath. Something will write itself back.
He hit send. His email made the small pleased sound. He moved to the Sent folder. Its date changed to two days ago. He forwarded it to himself to catch the proof in flight. A minute later an email arrived with the subject: Untitled. The body contained a single sentence: Some horrors are better left—
He responded in fury, in playful fury because he could not admit the other kind: Than what? The email went. The email came back: Delivery Status Notification (Failure). He checked the address and found that he had sent it to postmaster@localhost.
He shut everything down and sat in the chair with his hands between his knees so that his body had an answer to what bodies should do. He said aloud, imperfect and noble: I mailed a letter. I wrote a story. I am a person who happens in time. I have parents. I have a lease. I have a toothbrush.
The HVAC clicked and the lullaby established itself in the vent with the small kindness of a nurse singing to distract a child while she measures out pain.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Alex tries to establish anchors: he carves into wood, tucks notes inside hollow spaces, leaves a recorder running by the post box overnight. Every morning brings a clean seam: the carvings become grain, the notes become glossy blanks, the recorder fills with a heartbeat that isn't his. When he attempts to call the asylum by its name, the dial tone returns his breath as static, and strangers begin to smile at him like they've already read the ending.