Period Piece - § 3

The slip was on his desk when he came back with his coffee, face down on the laminate. His name typed at the top, and a time, and under that the word EXAMINATION, and under that, smaller, a line saying the appointment was routine, that all citizens were seen on a schedule, that there was nothing he needed to bring or do. Across the aisle the woman who watched the commercials had a slip of her own face down on her desk, and did not turn it over while he could see, and he did not turn his over again either. You learned the courtesy of it. You let a person be told a thing in private, even when it was the same thing told to everyone. He had been seen before. He was sure of it the way he was sure of the layout of his own apartment, without being able to find the day it had happened in. He set the coffee down and went.

He took the elevator he took every day and pressed the top button, which he had never once pressed, and the car rose past the floors he knew and went on past them, past numbers that climbed higher than the building had any business climbing, and let him out without a sound.

The clinic was a hall so white and so cool that it did not seem to smell of anything at all, behind doors that opened before he touched them. Others were ahead of him on a row of chairs that were not waiting-room chairs, sitting the way you sit when you have been told to, hands flat on their knees, faces aimed at nothing. A man came out through a door at the far end while Alan stood there, walking easy and well, and Alan knew the face from the bus shelter and lifted a hand to him. The man looked back with a pleasant nothing, and did not place him, and went on out. No one in the row watched him go. Alan's hand came down, and his thumb found the coins in his pocket and started in on them before he had told it to.

A woman in pale clothes that were not quite a nurse's took Alan's name and did not write it down, and walked him to a room with a chair in it that was more than a chair, and told him to sit, and he sat. The chair held him a degree too well, fitting itself to his back and the backs of his legs as though it had been measured to him, or he to it. The walls held no pictures and no calendar, and the only clock was the one on her panel. Somewhere a machine ran at a pitch just under hearing, more a pressure in the room than a sound.

She put a band around his arm that tightened on its own and let go, and a smaller one at his temple that he stopped feeling after the first moment, and she stood at a panel where small lights moved and watched the lights and not him. The room was very quiet. No needle. No cold disc of a stethoscope on his back. None of the things a doctor used to do. Only the lights moving, and her eyes going over them as the man at the Wall had gone over his clock.

"Tell me the last thing you remember clearly," she said, "from before this."

He opened his mouth to answer and found the place she was pointing him toward, and there was the wall again, the smooth close wall in the dark with no switch on it, the same one behind Robin, the same one behind Carol. He said a thing about a house and a porch and a long summer, because those were the shapes a person reached for, and even saying it he knew he was handing her the shapes and not the thing, and that she knew it too, and was not troubled by it, and made a small mark on her panel and went on.

"And your daughter," she said. "When was she born."

He gave her a year. It came out of him smooth and certain, and he had no idea where it had come from, whether it was true, whether he had ever in his life known it. She made her mark. She did not ask him how he knew.

She turned the panel toward him then and showed him pictures, one after another, and asked him only to look. A kitchen he had never stood in. He felt nothing, and his thumb moved on his knee in the pattern it ran all day at the console, the jump, the climb, before he caught it and stilled it. Then a car he had never driven. Then a woman's face he did not know and could not stop looking at, that pulled at something low in him the way the back of Robin's head pulled at him, and was gone before he found the reason for it. A dog after that. A road at dusk. Then the screen went dark. She had not watched the pictures. She had watched the lights, reading off him whatever the pictures did to him and writing it down, as he wrote down what the figure's drowning did to him on the form three floors below. Up here he was the form, and she was the one filling in the box.

Then there came a part he could not afterward account for. The band at his temple, the lights, her voice going low and even somewhere he did not have to follow, and then she was saying that he was in fine health, that he was doing very well, that he could go back to his work now. The clock on her panel said an hour where it felt to him a handful of minutes had gone. His mouth tasted faintly of metal. The back of his head was warm.

"Will I remember this," he said, before he could stop the words.

She looked at him then, full on, for the first time, with the kindness they all had, the kindness that took a measurement while it smiled. "You'll remember exactly what you should," she said, and held the door.

He rode the elevator down. In the brushed steel of the doors his face looked the way the bus-shelter man's face had looked, easy and well and a little emptied, a man who had been seen to and put back, and he watched it and could not have said how long he had been in that room, or what the metal taste was, or why, when he tried to walk his memory back to the chair, it set him down gently a few minutes short of it and would go no nearer.

He went back down to the long room and the console and the figure, and he ran it and drowned it, and when he came to the form he did not leave the last box empty. He wrote nominal. He looked at the word the magazine man had given him, the safe one, and he let it stand, and something in him that had kept that one box honest for as long as he could find lay down without a sound and did not get up again.

The young man at Carol's desk was watching commercials on her old machine now, writing down what they made him want, and he had her butterscotch drawer open and was eating one and did not know it had been hers. The room had closed over her the way the morning closed over the Wall. Alan ran the figure and drowned it and filled the boxes, all of them now, and did not look at the last one while he wrote in it.

Gil was over by the window, talking to the new one. Alan came up the row toward his chair and heard the start of it and knew it before the third word.

The man had stood up at some festival in the rain, Gil was saying, with the whole field gone quiet, and sung a song he had written for his mother, who had died that winter, and gotten through all of it but the last line, and stopped, and stood there with the rain coming down, and the whole field had finished the line for him. Gil came to the end and laughed his small laugh at the place where the field sang, and shook his head, and said they did not make them like that man anymore.

It was the same. Word for word, laugh for laugh, the same tip of the head at the close. And Alan stood in the aisle and could not trust what he had heard, because he had come straight down from a room where an hour had gone missing and his own memory had been handed back to him with a mark on it, and a man who could not be sure he had heard a thing yesterday could not be sure of much. He needed it out where he could not have made it up. He needed it on paper.

The day's reports waited in the tray by the door before Carmody carried them up, each in its folder with its typed label. Alan went to the tray as if to drop off his form, which he did, laying it on top, and under the cover of setting it down he turned back the flap of the folder with Gil's name typed on the tab.

Gil's report on the singer ran three pages, and the story was in it. The festival, the rain, the song for the mother who died that winter, the last line he could not finish, the field that finished it for him. The same words Gil had just spoken by the window. The same words, Alan was all but certain, that Gil had spoken the day before. And in the corner of the first page, in the small print where the form kept its own record, there was a date, and the date was three weeks gone. The warm easy story, the one Gil laughed at in the same place every single time, had been typed out three weeks ago and filed, and had been read aloud ever since, word for word, as a thing a man remembered.

Down the row a chair scraped. Carmody had come back in and was walking the aisle toward the tray with his hands behind his back, his eyes going desk to desk. The warm place at the back of Alan's head climbed up into his pulse. He let the flap fall and squared his own form down flat on top of the folder, an ordinary man who had dropped off his report and was going back to his chair. Carmody reached the tray and looked at it and looked at Alan and did not say Good. He had said it the day before. He said nothing now. He gave Alan only the long checking look they all gave, and then he went on past the tray and down the row and out through the door at the end.

His own form sat on top of the folder with nominal in the last box. A cold went down from the warm place at the back of his head. He had said the expected word and it had cost him nothing, and the not-costing was the cold part.

And if Gil was a script, if the warmest and most particular thing about a man could be typed and filed and played back, then Alan stood very still and the rest of it came whether he wanted it or not. The year he had handed the examiner for Robin's birth, smooth and certain and out of nowhere. The wall in the dark behind her with no switch on it. And everything plain and real about her, the forward lean, the ocean dream, all of it as solid to him as Gil's rain and Gil's field, and Gil's rain had been typed three weeks ago in a folder.

He thought of her at the table that morning, catching him in the small lie about being late, looking at him and letting it go and eating faster. It had let his own face go easy for a moment, the quickness of her, how she had seen the seam and stepped over it to spare him; his shoulders had come down off his ears for the length of a breakfast. He did not let himself think the next thing, and thought it: that stepping over a seam to spare a person was the most practiced thing anyone in here ever did, and that a girl who had already learned it at eight had either learned it from watching him, or had come to him already knowing how.

He had no way to test her. No folder with her name on the tab, no date in a corner to turn up and read. Only a girl four blocks off who would run to him at the gate, and the question of whether to keep looking at her until he knew, or to teach himself not to look that hard again.

He left at the end of the day with the others and walked to the school and stood in the thin crowd at the gate and watched the doors. When she came out she came the way she always came, fast, the backpack knocking against her, her eyes finding him before they found anyone, and his chest did the thing it did when she found him. And under it, in the same breath, in the place where the memory of her small should have been and was not, a second thing had come to sit and watch her cross the yard. The same tilt of the backpack as the day before. The same number of steps to the curb. Her face doing its gladness with no flaw in it, the gladness running clean, no skip, no catch in it anywhere he could put a finger on and call wrong. That was what he watched. Not whether she was glad. Whether the gladness ever once stuttered. It did not.

She reached him and took his hand. "You're early," she said.

He could not find a day in his life he had been early. "Came straight from work," he said, smooth and certain, out of nowhere, and felt his thumb start up in his pocket on the coins, counting them down, getting a different number every time.  

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