The Library

Elspeth

A library tells you who built a house.

Not what they read. What they were afraid of. The books a man keeps near the door are the ones he wants you to see; the books he keeps in the corners are the ones he's actually used. By the third night in the Aldenmoor library I have read the building like a balance sheet, and what it says is: a man who needs to understand how minds can be changed, and doesn't want anybody to ask why.

It is on the first floor of the east wing, up a short flight of oak steps, behind double doors with brass handles gone brown from the hands of patients long since discharged or dead. A long room with a ceiling of plaster roses and a gallery that runs around three sides. Ladders on brass rails. Green-shaded lamps on the reading tables. The air smells of leather and dust and old pipe tobacco, a smell so dense with stored time that I stop in the doorway the first night and nearly turn around.

It is the first room in Aldenmoor that smells like a place I have been happy.

Dennis's office had a library like this. Not so grand. A hundred and twelve books, a Persian rug that someone had spilled coffee on in 1994, a leather couch with a hole in the arm where he'd stubbed out a cigarette in a fit of rage over a client's footnotes. He used to say a lawyer reads to win, a doctor reads to be afraid, and an accountant reads to find out who's lying. I sit on the rug between two shelves in Aldenmoor and feel the shape of the absence beside me, as one feels a tooth that's been drawn.

I am allowed here from nine until one. That was the arrangement. Dahlia Reeve complained of insomnia on the fourth night in the Lantern Wing, in the soft apologetic voice of a woman afraid to be a burden, and Dr. Kestrel solved it in a quarter of an hour with a key, and a night orderly named Mr. Teague, who sits in the corridor outside on a folding chair with a crossword and a hearing aid he doesn't wear.

There's one camera in the room. Over the double doors, aimed down the long table. It does not see the corners.

A woman who has studied the geometry of a ward for six weeks can find the corners of a library in her sleep.

…

I do not read the novels. I do not read the poetry or the leather-bound sets of Dickens. Those are for the doctor's guests, for the board members and their wives who come on tours and run a finger along the spines.

I read what is behind them.

Eleven shelves of the east gallery are given over to the psychology of persuasion, a collection so complete that it would make a university library blush. The Psychology of Conditioned Response. Hypnosis and the Suggestible Subject. The Conditioning of Sergeant Voss. Monographs on sleep. On trauma. On what the literature calls state-dependent memory. A shelf of Milton Erickson in first editions. Another of Pavlov, in Russian, with pencil notes in the margins.

And everywhere the same small, upright handwriting. Black ink, a fountain pen. Notes in the margins, tiny queries, underlinings with a ruler.

I take down a book called Conditioned Reflexes and the Architecture of Trust. It has a worn blue cloth spine and a bookmark of red silk ribbon, a third of the way in.

The ribbon marks a chapter headed Anchoring.

I sit on the floor in the corner and I read it from the first line.

An anchor is a stimulus paired, by repetition, with a state. Presented alone, it recalls the state. Hypnotic induction, properly understood, is the establishment of such a pairing between a sensory event and the condition of suggestibility.

I know this. I have watched it done to me. A watch at half a hertz. A voice at a hundred and twenty. Two taps on the back of the hand.

I read on.

The most durable anchors are not single. A single cue, however strong, can arise by accident. A smell, a phrase, a tune may reach the subject in a context that has nothing to do with the original pairing, and produce a partial or aberrant response. A second cue, however, introduced at the same moment, in the same state, creates what the older literature calls a conjunction. The two must be presented together. Either alone is noise. Together, they are a key.

In the margin, at the level of the word conjunction, the small upright handwriting has written, in black ink:

Phrase + melody. Never one without the other. See C.M.? (No, unsafe.) See R.

My heart is quite quiet.

It is the particular quiet of an auditor who has turned a page and found, among a hundred pages of ordinary figures, one line that does not belong to the series.

Phrase + melody.

The Glass Orchard. The words that hum on my tongue like a half-remembered refrain. A phrase I have never heard anyone say aloud.

And a melody.

I close my eyes. For half a breath, I hear it. Not Satie. Not the pendulum. Three-quarter time, a plain tune, tender as a thumb on a cheek.

Little lantern, little light.

No.

I press the tips of my fingers to my eyelids, hard, until I see stars.

I am not going to think about that. I am going to read the line again, the way I'd read a footnote that might hold up a case: Phrase + melody. Never one without the other. Written, I think, years ago. Revised with a different pen. See R.

R.

I turn the page. There are two more pages of marginalia and then the chapter ends in an advertisement for a clinic in Basel that closed in 1971. I read them all. Then I put the blue book very carefully back on its shelf, with the red ribbon trailing exactly where I found it, and I move on to the corner.

…

The portrait hangs in the farthest corner of the west gallery, where the shelves run out and the wall becomes bare plaster.

I would not have seen it. It is draped. A dust sheet, gray linen, hung from a nail above the frame and falling to the baseboard. A picture covered with a cloth in a library is as conspicuous as a locked door in a hotel corridor.

I stand in front of it for a long time.

Don't.

Dahlia Reeve would not lift a cloth in a corner. She would wonder what was under it, vaguely, and move on. She would be afraid of what she was not meant to see.

But I am not here only for the books.

I take the hem of the linen between two fingers and draw it aside.

…

It's an oil painting, three feet by four. Dark. The frame is plain gilt, worn in places to the gesso, with a small brass plate screwed to the lower edge.

A girl.

She is perhaps fourteen or fifteen. She sits in a straight-backed chair against a dark green wall, with her hands folded in her lap. She wears a gray dress with a white collar, the plain dress of a school or a convent. Her face is narrow, pale, grave. The artist has given her a straight, direct gaze, and the mouth is a line.

And her hair is black.

It's black in the way that only the painters of an earlier age knew how to render: a deep, thick, blue-black, with highlights of cold light along the curve. It falls over one shoulder to her waist, in a rope as thick as my wrist. She might have sat on it.

I look at her. I do not lift a hand. Something in me has stopped, very quietly, the way a clock stops when one of its weights has been taken off.

I know the eyes.

Gray. Pale as the Hudson on a winter morning. A narrow, level gaze.

I've been looking into them for five weeks.

Of course.

I read the plate.

R.M.K.

And beneath, in smaller letters, engraved with the care that people reserve for things they intend to outlive them:

4 November.

I read it a second time. And a third.

Fourth of November.

It means nothing at first. A date. Then the blood goes out of my face, all at once, as if somebody had pulled a plug.

On the fourth of November I woke in a white room with sixty-four tiles on the ceiling. A man in an ash-gray chair said, Do you know where you are?

Three weeks after the fire, almost to the hour. A sedation protocol, he'd said. Medically calculated. The first possible waking.

It had been calculated, all right.

I stand in front of the painting of a dead girl whose hair is the exact black of mine, and a cold, clear understanding settles upon me, as heavy as a snowfall.

I was not chosen because I was a threat.

I was woken on her anniversary.

…

"You're not meant to be here."

The voice comes from the door, level, unhurried.

I do not jump. I wait four seconds, which is what a frightened woman would wait, before turning. I let the linen fall from my fingers. I turn slowly, with my hands against my breastbone.

Kestrel stands at the head of the room.

He's in shirtsleeves. A gray cashmere cardigan hangs open over a white shirt that has lost its collar stud. No tie. No waistcoat. His hair is not combed. There's a faint dark stubble along the jaw. It is the first time in five weeks that I've seen him look like a man who owns a bed.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. "I didn't mean to. It was covered. I thought... I thought the lady looked lonely."

He doesn't move.

"Mr. Teague should have..."

"He's asleep. He's very kind." I give a small, frightened glance at the door. "Please don't be angry with him."

"I'm not angry."

He crosses the room. He walks slowly, in his silent shoes, past the reading tables, past the ladder, until he is standing at the other side of the portrait, a yard from my shoulder. He does not look at me. He is looking up at the girl in the gray dress, and the lamplight falls across his face and makes it, for a moment, extremely young.

"I thought it was in a closet," he says. "I had it sent here, when my mother's house was sold. I didn't think... I thought nobody would."

"Who is she?"

I say it quite softly. A child's question.

For a long moment he doesn't answer. The clock in the corner, a grandfather in black walnut, ticks off nine seconds.

"My sister," says Kestrel.

"She's beautiful."

"She was fifteen."

Was.

I wait. I keep my face turned to the painting. A man who is about to tell you a thing he hasn't told anyone must be allowed to arrive at it by himself.

"Her name was Rosalind," he says. "She died when I was ten."

"I'm so sorry."

I say it simply. It's the only true thing I have said to him in five weeks, and I hear it go into the dark of his silence like a stone into deep water, and he takes it, I think, and holds it.

"She had your hair," I say.

"Yes."

"I mean... I mean mine's like hers." I touch my own black strand, shyly, with my left hand. "Is it? Is that why...?"

I let the question drift.

It is the most dangerous sentence I have spoken since I woke, and I have spoken it in a voice calibrated to let him believe I do not understand what I'm asking.

His face doesn't change. But I feel the muscle in his forearm, beside my sleeve, go tight as wire.

"I did not choose it for her," Kestrel says.

The tone is very flat.

I wait for his hand to go to the cufflink. He has no cufflink. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow.

I have no instrument for this lie.

I have only my eyes, which are turned toward the painting. And I tell myself that I can feel it, in the set of his shoulder and the rigid, careful way he breathes: a man who has told himself something so many times that it has the texture of fact.

"I'm sorry," I say, and lay my hand on his sleeve.

I do it as a woman would who has never touched a man without being told to. A light, uncertain pressure of the fingers on the cashmere, just above the wrist. An apology. A comfort.

He looks down at it.

The pulse jumps. I can feel it through the wool. Seventy. Eighty.

"Dahlia," he says, and then, very quietly, as if the word were a thing he hadn't known he possessed: "In here. When we're here, and only here. You can call me Ambrose."

"Ambrose."

I try it like a coin. I turn it over on my tongue and set it down.

The name has a long first syllable and a short last one, a clock's beat, a drop and a click. It is warm in my mouth. It frightens me how easily it fits.

He closes his eyes.

I take my hand away. I watch him lose and recover the line of his own breathing.

When he opens his eyes again he is looking at me and not at the painting.

"Go to bed," he says gently. "It's late."

…

I lie in the dark of the Lantern Wing with my face to the ceiling and I do the sum.

Rosalind Kestrel. Fifteen. Black hair. Died on the fourth of November, when he was ten.

Callie. Patient Twelve. Black hair, dyed. C-104. The green room.

Me. Black hair, dyed. C-104. Woken on the fourth of November.

It is not a theory. It is a column of figures with a common factor.

He didn't take me because I was dangerous. He took me because the Marrows needed a woman locked away, and he said yes with an alacrity that I took for greed, and which was in fact something far more terrible. Hunger. A man given a body, a wound, a hair color, and three weeks of unconsciousness, and told: do what you like.

He took the opportunity to try again.

Phrase + melody. See R.

I turn on my side and press my hands between my knees.

He has been trying to resurrect his sister for thirty-one years. Twelve, I think, did not survive the attempt. The thing he does, with the voice and the watch and the stairs, is not the destruction of Elspeth Calder. It is the construction of someone else.

And the person he is trying to build has a name that is not mine.

I am not afraid.

That is what I tell myself, in the dark. I tell it carefully, in my ledger voice, with a double line drawn under.

But my left hand has found, without being told, the pale strip on my ring finger, and is pressing on it. Hard. Harder than I need to.

And in the silence of the Lantern Wing, a long way off, somewhere below the floor, a clock begins to strike.

I count the strokes. It is a habit older than any of this.

One.

One stroke only. One o'clock. I lie with my eyes open and the stroke dying out of the air, and I find, a minute later, that I am still counting. Two. Three. Four. The numbers go on by themselves, up through the twelves and thirteens, in a voice like mine, calm and even and entirely without my permission.

I cannot remember where I began.

I stop. I breathe. I go back to the start, to the single stroke and the silence after it, and I make the count come out right.

I make it come out right, and I lie there a long time afterward, unable to say whether I'm the one who is counting, or the one who is being counted.