Before anything else, some housekeeping, because a lot of you asked the same questions and I'd rather answer them once and properly than a dozen times badly.
Yes, I've considered sleepwalking. It was my second hypothesis, after the integrity test. It's still in my log with a question mark next to it. Sleepwalking explains a body getting up at night. It doesn't explain a lens forty centimeters inside an exterior wall, a file created three years before I'd have had any reason to make it, or a line of skin oil that runs behind a bookcase bolted flush to the plaster.
No, I'm not posting the hashes. Several of you offered to "verify" the files. I appreciate it. But a hash only proves a file hasn't changed. It doesn't prove what's in it is true. I've built my career on the difference between those two things, and I've started to think that difference is what this is about.
Yes, I've thought about calling someone. I'll get to that.
Yes, I know I should leave. Some of you said it gently and some of you said it in capitals. I'll get to that too. It's connected.
And to the person who messaged me privately to ask whether I turned around that night and looked at the corner: no. I didn't. I sat with my back to the wall until morning, exactly as I said I would. I'm telling you that first because what follows depends on it, and because I need at least one thing in this post to be something I'm sure of.
Saturday. 3:14 AM to 6:10 AM.
I didn't take the pill. I sat at my desk with every light in the apartment on, my back pressed against the living room wall, the chair turned so I could see the hallway, the front door, and the kitchen without moving my head. The corner where the hallway opens into the living room was up and to my left, at the edge of my vision. I kept it there. I didn't look at it directly. I know how that sounds.
I'd never been awake at that hour in this apartment. That surprised me when I thought about it. In three years and two months, the ring says I've been asleep between 11:52 PM and 6:10 AM nearly every night. I've never had insomnia, never had a fever that kept me up, never got up to pee at four and stood blinking in the kitchen light. That whole stretch of time in this apartment, about six hours a night, a thousand-some nights, had happened without me.
It turns out the apartment is different at night. I don't mean that in a supernatural way. I mean it in the way that matters to someone whose whole job is noise. The building's daytime sound is a broad, warm hum of people, elevators, and plumbing, and at night it thins out into individual sounds you can count. There's a pipe somewhere above me that ticks as it cools, roughly every forty seconds. The refrigerator compressor cycles on for eleven minutes and off for seventeen. The wind on the east face of the tower has a pitch, a low, steady note, and if you listen long enough you start to hear that it isn't steady at all, that it's breathing.
I kept the log open on my knee with a pen in my hand. I'd decided to write an entry every half hour, and whenever anything happened, because a log is what I have instead of courage. It turns the next thirty minutes into a unit of work, and I know how to do a unit of work.
At 4:02 AM, I heard the tapping.
It was very faint. If I hadn't spent Thursday listening to two and a half hours of it through headphones, I wouldn't have known what it was. It was a fingernail tapping on something hollow, steadily and gently, about once a second, like someone trying to find a stud in a wall, or someone who has been told to wait and is trying to be patient about it.
It came from the hallway, from the stretch of wall between the bathroom door and the linen closet, by the dead switch.
I didn't get up. I want credit for that, though I know I don't deserve it, because I didn't stay in the chair out of courage. I stayed there because some animal part of my brain had concluded that if I went into the hallway and stood in front of that wall and the tapping was coming from the other side of it, I'd have to accept that there was another side. If I stayed in the chair, the tapping could still be the pipes.
I counted the way I count anything too long to hold in my head. I kept the ones in my mouth, without sound, and every time I reached a hundred I made a short stroke in the margin of the log. When I looked at the margin afterward, I saw that I'd grouped the strokes the usual way, four upright and a fifth drawn across them. Everyone makes them that way. I've told myself that several times since.
Here are the entries, exactly as they appear:
3:40. All lights on. Back to wall, chair facing hallway. Hallway empty. Pipe ticking, ~40 s. Fridge 11 on / 17 off. Haven't looked at the corner.
4:02. Tapping. Hallway, dead-switch wall. Fingernail on something hollow, ~1/s. Not getting up.
4:30. Still tapping. Steady. 15 in the margin. Hallway empty.
5:00. Still tapping. 32. I can see the whole hallway. Hallway empty.
5:51. Stopped. 60, and 37 over.
6:10. Ring. Awake. I was awake.
That's about six thousand taps. When it stopped, the silence afterward was worse, the way the silence after a dog stops barking is worse, because now you don't know where it is.
At 6:10 AM my ring vibrated on my finger, gently, twice. That's the wake-up haptic. I've felt it every morning for three years. I'd never thought about the fact that I've never once felt it while I was already awake.
I opened the app.
Good morning! Sleep score: 100. Asleep: 11:52 PM. Awake: 6:10 AM. Deep sleep: 2h 41m. REM: 0m.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I exported my raw history, a spreadsheet with a little over eleven hundred rows, one for every night since I started wearing the ring, and sorted the REM column both ways.
It was zero at the top and zero at the bottom. And it isn't missing data. Missing data is a blank cell. These cells aren't blank. Something entered a zero in every one, every night, the way you fill in a field on a form when you've been told it can't be left empty.
REM is when you dream. I've told myself for years, with a little pride, that I don't dream. I thought I was just someone who didn't remember.
It isn't recording you sleeping. It's recording someone else sleeping, and you've been wearing it on your finger.
I took the ring off and put it in a drawer. Then I took it back out and put it on again, because the data is the data. You don't stop collecting evidence because you don't like what it says.
Saturday afternoon. File 213.
I opened it at 1:30 PM, in daylight, with the blinds all the way up. I made a working copy, hashed it, and logged it. Its creation timestamp is 3:09 AM Saturday, which I've already told you. What I didn't know until I loaded it was its length.
It runs until 6:09 AM.
The file was created at 3:09, and I saw it in the directory at 3:14. At 3:14 it already contained three hours of footage that hadn't happened yet.
It's the living room, from the corner where the hallway opens into it, high up, in that flat, sourceless grey. The desk is in frame, along with both monitors, the amber pill bottle, and the back of the chair. Someone is sitting in the chair, wearing my grey sweatshirt. The frayed left cuff is visible where the arm rests on the armrest.
The person's hands are folded in their lap. They're perfectly still. Not one finger moves for the first five minutes of the file.
And on the left monitor, words appear.
It took me a minute to understand what I was looking at, because the text is small. When I enlarged it and ran a sharpening pass on it, I could read it. It's the post. It's the end of Part 1, the part you read, the part I wrote. "I keep looking at the thumbnail and then at my own hands. My hands are on the keyboard. They're typing this sentence." The words appear on the screen one at a time at a normal typing speed, with the occasional backspace and correction. I recognize every correction. I remember making them. And in the chair, the hands stay folded.
At 3:14 by the file's clock, the post is submitted. You can see the page change.
Then the person in the chair turns their head slowly to the right, toward the hallway, and tilts it, the way you'd tilt your head to listen to something in another room.
At 3:19 they stand up. They don't do it the way you'd stand up from a desk chair. It's the hinge again: the body straightens and the arms follow, informed late. They walk out of frame toward the hallway. The angle switches to the corner above the linen closet. The figure walks down the hallway and stops in front of the stretch of wall by the dead switch, facing it at a normal conversational distance, as though they're waiting for someone to open a door.
At 3:40 by the file's clock, it's still standing there, a foot and a half from the wall, hands at its sides. At 3:40 by mine, I wrote Hallway empty in my log. I was looking straight down that hallway, lit by every light I own. There was nobody standing in front of that wall. I'd have seen a fly land on it.
At 4:02, the figure raises one hand and starts tapping on the wall with the nail of its index finger.
It does that until 5:51. Then it lowers its hand. It stands there for eighteen minutes longer, then walks back to the living room, sits down in my chair, and folds its hands in its lap. At 6:09 the file ends.
Here's what I need you to understand: I was in that chair. From 3:14 to 6:10 I sat at my desk with my back against the wall and every light on. I heard the tapping, I counted it, and I didn't get up. I have a log with entries in my handwriting at 3:40, 4:02, 4:30, 5:00, 5:51, and 6:10. I remember writing every one of them. I remember the pen.
There's something else, which I didn't notice until my third viewing. It's the thing that made me put my hand over my mouth.
The chair in the video is turned to face the desk. My chair was turned to face the hallway, because I had my back against the wall. There are five clean ovals in the dust under my desk where the casters stood for three hours, and they're the ovals of a chair facing the hallway. I photographed them with a scale bar.
On the desk in the video there's no log, no pen, and no notebook.
So either I wasn't in that chair, or that wasn't the chair. Or there's a version of this apartment where I didn't write anything down, and the person in the sweatshirt had nothing to stop it from walking into the hallway.
Saturday, 4:50 PM. The taps.
The audio track on 213 has the tapping on it, from 4:02 to 5:51, closer and cleaner than I heard it from the desk, the way you'd hear it with your ear against the wall.
I ran it through a transient detector. It's a tool that finds short, sharp sounds in a recording and logs each one with a time and a level. I use it to count footsteps in corridor audio for insurance cases.
It found six thousand and thirty-seven taps. That's my number: sixty strokes in my margin and thirty-seven over. The taps I heard through the wall and the taps the file heard from the other side of it are the same taps, one for one, and I haven't decided yet what that says about where I was sitting.
The detector logs the level of each tap, too, and the levels aren't even.
Every fifth tap is slightly louder than the four before it, and it comes a little late, about a tenth of a second behind the rhythm, the way a stroke comes late when you have to reach across the ones you've already drawn. It's four, and then one across. Four, and then one across. It goes on like that from 4:02 to 5:51 without a single break.
I ran the same detector over the audio file from the batch that was nothing but tapping, file 141, from about three months ago. It was four, and then one across, for two and a half hours.
It isn't tapping. It's keeping a tally. It's marking the wall in the only way a fingernail can mark a wall without leaving anything behind, and it's been doing it for at least three months, and on Saturday morning I sat in my chair and hoped it was the pipes.
Saturday night into Sunday.
I didn't take the pill again.
I hadn't missed a dose in three years. I don't know what the medication is. I spent part of Saturday evening shining a flashlight across the rubbed-off part of the label, trying to read the impression the printer had pressed into the paper. I got three letters, maybe four, not enough to search. The pills themselves are small, white, and round, with no imprint code. Every pill in this country is legally required to have an imprint code. These don't. There are sixteen left. I counted them by the edges, the way I'd handle a client's property, as though I'd be asked to account for each one.
The best word I've found for what happened when I stopped is resolution. I mean it in the technical sense, the way a screen has resolution. It was as though somebody had raised the pixel count of the world without asking me.
By Saturday evening, the apartment had too much detail.
I noticed the grain of the parquet. I've been walking on that floor for three years and I'd always thought of it as "wood floor," a single texture, a fill pattern. On Saturday night I could see that every board has its own grain and its own fine dark seams where it meets the next one. I could see that in the hallway, and only the hallway, the boards run perpendicular to the boards in every other room, which they don't in the floor plan. I could see that the eggshell paint has a faint orange-peel texture, and that the texture is subtly different on the thirty inches of wall by the dead switch. It's smoother there, like that stretch was painted later, or more carefully, or by someone else.
I counted the hallway boards that evening, crouched, moving backward from the living room threshold to the bedroom door with a fingertip on each seam. There are fifty-eight, each a little under three inches wide, running across the hallway like the rungs of a ladder laid flat. I wrote the number down. I'll come back to it.
And I couldn't stop remembering, which was the worst part. I don't mean flashbacks. It was more like the archive had been left unlocked and things kept falling off the shelves.
At about 9 PM I was standing at the kitchen counter eating crackers, because I couldn't face cooking, and I thought about my mother. That's normal. People think about their mothers. But I realized I was thinking about her name, and it came to me the way a name comes to you off a form. It came with no voice attached, no memory of anyone saying it, only the letters, typed. I tried to remember her face and got an impression of warmth and a bright kitchen, the stock photo again. I tried to remember her voice and got nothing. I tried to remember a single specific thing she'd said to me, ever, in my entire life.
I couldn't. I stood there with a cracker in my hand for, I think, twenty minutes.
Afterward I sat at the desk and tried to do it on paper, the way I'd take a statement from a witness who was struggling. At the top of a clean page I wrote: Three things you could only know about her by being her child. Under it I wrote her name, the letters exactly as they'd come. I wrote her birthday, and I knew it the way I know my employee number, as something I'd been issued. Then I held the pen on the paper for the third thing until the ink had soaked a small blue well into the page. The page still says that. Two lines and a dot.
I told myself that withdrawal does strange things to memory. I don't know whether that's true. I don't know what I'm withdrawing from.
Sunday. 3:03 AM.
I'd been sitting at my desk again, back to the wall, but the second night is different from the first. On the second night, your body stops treating staying up as an adventure and starts treating it as an injury. My eyes hurt. My jaw hurt. The light from the monitors had a texture, a fine flicker I'd never noticed, and I couldn't stop seeing it.
At 3:03, the time when, in file 212, the figure went into the bathroom and ran the tap, I got up and went into the hallway.
I want to tell you I'd decided to. I don't think I had. I think I'd been sitting and then I was standing in front of the stretch of wall by the dead switch, and the decision had happened somewhere in between, in a place I don't have access to.
The wall looked the way it always looks. It had the smoother paint, the baseboard, and the switch with its plate slightly cool to the touch. I'd flipped it a hundred times over three years and it had never done anything.
I flipped it.
There was a click, and it wasn't the usual one. That switch has always made the flat plastic snap of a switch connected to nothing. This time it clicked with resistance, the slight mechanical weight of a switch closing a circuit, of something on the other end taking the current.
Then, from behind the wall, I heard a faint ticking buzz, rising slowly, like a fluorescent tube warming up.
Along the bottom of the wall, at the seam where the baseboard meets the floor, a line of light appeared.
It was very thin, no wider than a sheet of paper. It wasn't warm or cold. It was that grey, the flat, sourceless grey, the color of the files. It ran along the floor for exactly the width of the smoother paint, about thirty inches, and stopped at both ends with hard edges, the way light stops under a door.
I don't know how long I stood there. That's the second time in this account I've failed to count something, and I've started to understand that every time it happens, it's because something has been taken.
Then I knelt, very slowly. My knees cracked, and the sound was enormous in the hallway. I put my cheek against the floorboards, the boards that run the wrong way, and tried to look into the gap.
It was too thin to see anything, but I could feel air coming from it. It was cool and moving slowly, like breath. It smelled like my pillow. I'm being as precise as I can. It didn't smell like a pillow in general. It smelled like mine: the specific smell of my own head on my own pillowcase after a night's sleep, warm, a little sour, intimate in a way you never think about until it comes out of a wall.
I flipped the switch off. The light went out, and the buzz died down the way it had come up.
I tried to slide the edge of a sheet of printer paper into the seam where the light had been. It wouldn't go, not a millimeter. There's no gap there. There was only a gap there while the switch was on.
Then I went back to the desk and wrote it all down. My hand was shaking so badly that the entry for 3:03 is barely readable. I'm looking at it now and I can only make out the words light and mine.
Sunday, daytime.
I slept a little on Sunday, sitting up on the couch, in daylight, maybe forty minutes. The ring didn't record it. As far as it's concerned, I didn't sleep on Sunday.
There was a new file in Batch 0417 that morning, file 214, timestamped 11:52 PM Saturday and ending at 6:09 AM Sunday. Those are hours I spent at my desk, and on my knees in the hallway with my cheek on the floor. I hashed it, logged it, and didn't open it. I want to be honest about that, and about the fact that I'm going to have to be honest about it again.
When I woke, I got out the box.
Every archivist has one. Mine is a grey document box on the top shelf of the bedroom wardrobe, and it holds everything I have from before this apartment: my birth certificate, my degree, an expired passport, three notebooks from university, six letters, and three photographs. Not one of the letters is from a person. I've always thought of how little I keep as minimalism. I've lately started thinking of it as an inventory too small for a whole life.
One of the photographs is a kitchen. It's bright and a little overexposed, with white cupboards and a window, and under the window there's an old cast-iron radiator with deep ribs. There's nobody in it. I looked for a long time at the corner of that radiator, at about the height a nine-year-old's eyebrow would be. I'd like to tell you I remembered. What happened instead was that the stock photo in my head got white cupboards in it, and a window, and a radiator with deep ribs, and I can't tell you anymore whether any of them were there before I looked.
But I'd taken the box down because I wanted to look at my handwriting. I wanted to see what it looked like when my hand was steady and I was a younger, less frightened person. I wanted a baseline.
The obvious baseline was my own first log, from the week I moved in. My logs live on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, filled notebooks in order, spines labeled. The first one is there. Its first page isn't. It's been torn out close to the stitching, cleanly, the way you'd do it if you wanted nobody to notice. I don't tear pages out of logs. You strike through and initial; you never remove. That page was where I wrote that the apartment felt like it had been waiting. I don't know where it is.
So I went to the box.
The notebooks are from my second and third years of university, lecture notes and reading notes, the usual. I opened the first one and looked at the first page.
It isn't my handwriting.
Let me be more careful, because that's what I'm for. It's recognizably related to my handwriting. The letterforms are mostly the same. But the slant is different. It leans right, and mine leans slightly left. The lowercase g has an open tail where mine is closed. The capital I is a single stroke where mine has serifs. The pressure is different. You can feel it on the back of the page, deep and confident, where mine is light. It's my handwriting the way a cover is a song.
There's more, once you start looking. I cross a t twice, a quick double stroke, a habit I can feel in my wrist as I write this. The notebooks cross it once, long and low, sometimes reaching over the next letter.
I photographed both, overlaid them, and measured the slant angles. Mine leans about six degrees left of vertical. The notebooks lean about eight degrees right. The difference is about fourteen degrees.
Then I opened the expired passport and looked at the signature.
It's the notebook handwriting. It leans right, with the open-tailed g.
I signed my lease three years and two months ago. I have a copy in the box. It's my handwriting, my current one, leaning slightly left, with serifs on the I.
Somewhere between the passport and the lease, my handwriting changed by fourteen degrees. I don't remember learning to write differently. You don't, do you? Handwriting isn't something you decide. It's something your hand knows. And the thought I had standing there, with the passport open in one hand and the lease in the other, was this, in italics, in the voice that isn't quite mine:
Your hand learned. Somebody else's hand didn't.
Monday. 8:40 AM.
On Sunday night I lay down in bed, without taking the pill, to see whether I'd sleep naturally. I lay facing the ceiling instead of the east wall, because I'd decided I wasn't going to lie in that posture again. At some point I closed my eyes. When I opened them, it was 6:10, the ring was buzzing, and I was on my side facing the east wall, knees drawn up, one arm under my head, the other hand on the mattress in front of my face with the fingers spread.
Score 100. REM 0.
There's a new file every morning now, timestamped 11:52 PM and ending at 6:09 AM. As of tonight there are 218. I hash each one when it arrives and log it, the way you'd sign for a package you've decided not to unwrap. I haven't opened any of them. I've told myself it's because I'm prioritizing, and I'm going to keep telling myself that a little longer.
At 8:40 AM on Monday I did what I should have done on Tuesday. I emailed my manager.
I wrote it carefully. I said I'd received Batch 0417 under my own employee ID with no client attached, that the content appeared to be personally sensitive, and that I wanted to confirm the ticket's origin before proceeding, per protocol. I didn't mention the corner, the hallway, or the line of light.
She replied in four minutes. In the two years she's managed me, she has never replied in under a day.
Hi,
Ticket 0417 was created by you. See attached audit log.
Also, a reminder that your quarterly continuity review is now overdue. Please schedule with Dr. Vosbrecht at your earliest convenience.
Thanks,
I opened the audit log. It showed that Batch 0417 was created from my account, authenticated with my credentials and my hardware key, at 6:11 AM last Tuesday, one minute after the ring says I woke up.
My hardware key won't authenticate anything until a finger touches the gold disc on its face. It exists to prove a person was physically present. At 6:11 last Tuesday morning, a finger touched it.
The files were uploaded from an IP address I recognized, because I'm the kind of person who knows their own IP address.
They came from this apartment.
I read the second paragraph about forty times.
Quarterly continuity review. I've worked at the firm for nine years. I've had nine annual reviews. I've never had a quarterly anything. I searched my email for "continuity review" and got nothing. I searched for "Vosbrecht" and got nothing at all. The only medical sender in my inbox is Kessler Pharmacy, which emails me a shipping notification every month, thirty-nine of them, each identical, none naming a doctor.
I wrote back. I asked, as neutrally as I could, what a continuity review was, and who Dr. Vosbrecht was, and where I'd find their contact details. I hit send at 9:02.
She hasn't replied. I followed up on Wednesday at 9:02, exactly forty-eight hours later. Nothing. The ticketing system shows her as active. She's been closing other people's tickets all week. I can watch them go past in the queue, closed at 9:14, closed at 9:31, closed at 10:06, her initials on each one.
Monday afternoon. The list.
I keep a hypothesis page at the front of the log for every matter. It's supposed to get shorter as the work goes on. That's how you know you're getting somewhere. Here's the page for 0417 as of Monday afternoon, copied exactly:
H1. Internal integrity test. Withdrawn, Mon 8:44. Ticket created from my account, my key, my IP.
H2. Sleepwalking (?). Open. Doesn't explain camera positions, timestamps, file 213, the line behind the bookcase.
H3. Someone else with access to 2914. Open. Nobody else has a key that I know of. Deadbolt set every night I've checked. Doesn't explain 213.
H4. I'm unwell. Open. Can't be tested from inside.
H5.
It's the first matter in nine years where the page has gotten longer. H5 is blank. I've started it four times this week, and each time I've lifted the pen before the first word was finished. I'll tell you it was going to start with a pronoun. I'm not going to tell you which one.
I said I'd talk about calling someone.
I thought about it on Monday, a lot. I thought about calling the police, or the building's management office, or a doctor. Any doctor. A real one, whose name I could look up.
The problem is that every one of those calls goes the same way in my head. I tell them there's footage of me in my apartment taken from inside the walls. They ask who took it, and I say I don't know. They ask whether anyone else has access to the apartment, and I say no. They ask whether I've had any changes in my medication, and I'm forced to say yes, I stopped taking it two days ago, I don't know what it is or who prescribed it, and since then I've started hearing tapping and seeing light under a wall.
I know exactly what happens next. I've recovered footage of what happens next. I've watched men in calm voices talk people out of doorways, and they're always kind about it. The person always ends up in the back of a car.
But that isn't the real reason. If I'm keeping an honest record, and that's the only kind worth keeping, the real reason is this: if I call someone, I have to speak out loud to another person, and the count resets. And I've started to think that something in this apartment is counting the same days I am, but started four days earlier, and that the count matters, and that it's going to reach a number, and I need to know what that number is.
That's also why I haven't left, for those of you who asked in capitals. Leaving means the lobby, the doorman, the café. Leaving means somebody says good morning and I say it back.
I've been avoiding the mirror. I've washed in cold water all week, standing at the sink with my eyes on the drain. Tonight I ran the hot tap, because I needed both numbers for this post.
It's forty-seven as of tonight. On the mirror, when it fogs, there are fifty-one.
The other one is still four days ahead.
Monday night. Tuesday morning. The phone.
On Monday night I took the pill.
I didn't want to. I'd been awake, more or less, for most of three days, and by Monday evening I could hear the individual cycles of the electricity in the walls, a sixty-hertz hum like a held note that never ended. I kept seeing motion in my peripheral vision, small and sideways, the way a gecko moves on a wall. I knew if I didn't sleep I'd stop being a reliable witness, and I'm the only witness I've got.
So I took it at 11:41. Before I did, I set up my phone.
I propped it on a stack of books on the floor of the bedroom doorway, the library books I never returned, facing out into the hallway, aimed at the thirty inches of smooth wall by the dead switch. I started a video recording on my way past it to bed and left it running with the phone plugged in. If something was going to happen in that hallway, I wanted it on a device I'd bought and could hold in my hand, in ordinary, honest light with a source and shadows, not from forty centimeters inside a wall.
I lay down. 11:52.
6:10.
The phone was where I'd left it, still plugged in. The recording was still running. I stopped it, and it was six hours and nineteen minutes long.
I want to tell you about the first three hours, because nothing happens in them, and I've come to value nothing. It's the hallway wall in the dim spill of the living room lamp I'd left on, with real light and real shadows. There's grain and noise and the honest ugliness of a phone camera in a dark room. Every forty seconds the pipe above ticks, and I can hear it on the audio. I sat with my coffee and watched three hours of nothing, and it felt like a hand on my back.
At 2:41 AM, I walk into the frame.
It's me. I'm in the T-shirt I went to bed in. I come from the bedroom, which means I step over the phone, and you can see my bare foot pass above the lens. Then I'm in the hallway, walking away from the camera toward the dead switch. I'm walking normally, not like a hinge or a puppet. It's how I walk.
2:41 is the minute the figure in file 117 sat up in bed like a hinge. I didn't notice that until Wednesday. When I did, I went back and checked both, and it's the same minute.
Halfway down the hallway I stop and turn around and look directly at the phone.
My face is in the lamplight, ordinary, with real shadows under the eyes. My expression is one I've never seen on my own face. It's pity. It's the way you'd look at a child who has built an elaborate trap for Santa Claus.
Then I walk back toward the phone, crouch down, look into the lens from about ten inches away, and say, very softly, in my own voice:
"Not this one."
Then my hand reaches out and turns the phone face down.
The video goes black. The audio keeps running.
I've listened to the next three and a half hours of black audio more times than I can count, and that's the third time in this account. I'll tell you what's on it, in order.
There are footsteps on the parquet, going away. There's a pause of about a minute.
Then there's a click with resistance in it.
There's the ticking buzz of something warming up behind the wall.
Then there's a sound I knew immediately, because every one of us has heard it ten thousand times. It's a door handle turning, the latch drawing back, a door opening inward over a floor, with the faint whisper of the bottom edge brushing against wood.
There's a long silence, nearly two hours.
Then the same sound in reverse: the door, the latch, the click.
And then, very close to the phone, close enough that I can hear breath on the microphone, comes my voice again. This time it doesn't sound like pity. It sounds the way I sound in the morning before I've said anything, rough and unused.
"Forty-five," it says.
It was forty-five days for me that night. And then, after a pause:
"Forty-nine."
At 6:09, the phone is turned face up. The video shows the hallway wall, smooth paint, the dead switch, with no door. It shows the empty hallway for one minute, until 6:10, when, according to the ring, I woke up in my bed facing the east wall.
There's no footage of me walking back to bed.
On Tuesday morning I recorded every door in the hallway from the same spot and laid the spectrograms side by side with the black audio, the way you'd lay out fingerprints. The door on the black audio has the same double rattle in its latch as my bathroom door. It's quieter by an amount that, when I do the arithmetic for distance, puts it almost exactly where the dead switch is.
There's no door there. I've stood in front of that wall. I've put my hand on it.
Tuesday. The ear.
I'm going to tell you about something small, because it's the small things that have been taking me apart.
On Tuesday afternoon, after the phone, I was sitting at my desk and I touched my right ear. It was just the absent, animal gesture of a hand checking on the body. The cartilage at the top of the ear, the curled rim, felt rough.
I went into the bathroom and looked, with the cabinet mirror and a hand mirror, angled, the way you'd check the back of a haircut. I've never really looked at my own ears. Nobody does.
The rim of my right ear was raw. It wasn't scraped like a fresh injury. It was worn, the way the knees of old jeans are worn. The skin there had a dull, polished look, like a callus but thinner, and at the very top it had cracked and flaked in places, leaving tiny pink fissures. My right cheekbone, just in front of the ear, had the same faint polish.
My left ear was perfect.
I thought about the oily line that runs clockwise around this apartment at ear height. I thought about how, if you walk clockwise around a room with your ear pressed to the wall, the ear you're pressing is always your right one.
Then I did a thing I'm not proud of. I got the fine tweezers and a flashlight and looked into the ear canal itself, as well as I could, which wasn't very well.
There were flecks in there. Most of it was the ordinary wax you'd expect. But caught in the wax, very small, were dry, pale flakes, like eggshell. I got one out with the tweezers and put it on a sheet of black paper under my desk lamp and looked at it with the loupe I use for reading drive labels.
It was paint, the same flat eggshell that's on every wall in this apartment. It had the orange-peel texture on one side.
I sat at my desk and looked at a flake of my own wall that had come out of my own head, and I tried to work out how many hours of pressing it takes to rub paint off a wall and into an ear. I couldn't do the arithmetic. It's the first time I've failed to do arithmetic in a very long time. The numbers kept sliding off each other like wet glass.
On Tuesday night I took the pill again. Before I did, I cut a square of gauze from the first-aid kit, folded it into a pad, and taped it over my right ear with surgical tape, four strips, crossed, pressed down hard. If my ear was going to the walls at night, I wanted the walls to meet gauze.
I woke at 6:10 on Wednesday, facing the east wall. The pad was still on. The tape hadn't lifted at a single corner.
I peeled it off over the sink. The inside of the gauze, the side against my skin, was clean. The outside was grey in a band across the middle, and under the loupe the grey was a fine powder of eggshell paint ground into the weave, with the orange-peel texture printed into it like a thumb in wax. The gauze hadn't protected anything. It had only collected.
Somewhere along a wall, sometime between 11:52 and 6:10, my head had pressed hard enough and long enough to sand paint into cotton. Afterward I went round the line with the flashlight flat to the wall, the whole circuit, looking for a fresh scuff. There isn't one. It's all the same line. Whatever I was listening for, I listened for it everywhere.
Thursday night. Now.
I said I'd come back to the floorboards.
Tonight, before I sat down to write this, I counted them again. Same method: crouched, backward from the living room threshold to the bedroom door, a fingertip on every seam.
There are sixty.
The two new ones are at the far end, just before the bedroom door. They're the same width as the others and they run the same wrong way. But they're paler, a clean honey color, the color of wood that hasn't been walked on. I pressed my thumbnail into one and it took the mark the way new wood does.
On Saturday morning the hallway was fourteen feet, two inches. Tonight the tape says fourteen feet, seven inches. It's eleven steps from my desk to the bathroom door. It's always been eleven. Tonight it was thirteen.
One last thing, and then I'm going to post this and take my pill.
About an hour ago, at 10:20, I flipped the dead switch. I wanted to see the light while I was awake and every lamp in the apartment was on. I wanted a witness's look at it.
It clicked with resistance. The buzz came up behind the wall. The line of grey light appeared along the bottom of the thirty inches, paper thin, hard-edged at both ends.
Except it wasn't one line this time. It was broken in two places, near the middle, by two narrow dark gaps a few inches apart.
You've seen light under a door with someone standing behind it. You know without thinking what it means.
They were the width of heels. They were about as far apart as mine are when I stand still.
I stood in the hallway with my hand on the switch and watched them, and they didn't move. I didn't count how long.
Then the right-hand shadow shifted, just slightly, toward the wall. It was the movement you'd make if you were standing at a door and leaned in to put your ear against it.
I turned the switch off.
I went back to my desk and wrote 22:20, switch, two shadows, right one leaned in in my log, and I made myself write it neatly. You can read every word. It leans slightly left, and the capital I has serifs.
The phone is on the books in the bedroom doorway again, recording. I don't expect to be allowed to see anything. I'm doing it anyway, because a record you don't keep is a record somebody else gets to keep for you.
Next week I'm going downstairs. I'm going to say "medium, black, thank you" out loud to another human being, and my count is going to reset, and I'm going to find out what happens to the other count when mine stops.
The hallway is fourteen feet, seven inches. My count is forty-seven. The mirror says fifty-one.
I'll update you next week.