Friday, September twenty-fifth.
I got home from the Lockhart at a quarter to midnight and went straight into the booth with my coat still on. That's a rule I made in the first year: if you're afraid of a script, record it before you can think of a reason not to.
"Q, part three."
The breath and a half for the razor. Then the page, and my eyes running ahead, and my mouth following.
I had told myself I'd do it clean, the way I'd do any other job, and for nine pages I did. Delphine in her dark rooms. A stranger's hand moving over her slow and certain as weather crossing a field. The author's brackets, each one a full breath, honored. Then my eyes got to the line a phrase before my mouth did, and for one half-second my mouth didn't want to follow.
"A comma of scar," I read, "under my left ribs." Under my shirt my own skin answered, as if his fingertip were resting there in the dark of the booth, exactly where it rests every week.
I didn't stop. You don't stop; flubs stay. I read the rest of it, his fingertip and his not asking and the city going by like a long gray river, and at the line about wanting someone, once, to ask me how it ends, my voice went down into the whisper without my permission, and I let it.
Forty-one minutes. No stumbles. It was one of the cleanest takes I've ever done, and clean matters to me more than it should. The spring I had laryngitis, Harlow patched four lines of Velvet Hours book two with a pickup voice while I was on steroids. I've listened for the seams ever since. I've never found them.
I played it back, and I listened to a woman describe my scar to me in my own voice, and she sounded calm, and warm, and completely sure of herself. That's my job. I'm very good at it.
I slept from four until noon, and when I woke up I lay there and couldn't remember for a full minute whose ribs we'd been talking about. I sent the file at one. The money came at two.
Monday, six a.m. "Ms. Quill. Part four. N."
I'd spent the weekend being sensible. I cleaned the booth's foam with a lint roller, which is a thing you can do for two hours if you need to. I walked to Montrose Harbor on Sunday and watched the lake throw itself at the rocks, and a man with a metal detector held up a bottle cap to show me, and I gave him a thumbs-up like a person with nothing on her mind. I didn't open part three again. I didn't think about the comma more than once an hour.
By Monday I'd been at the counter since five-thirty. I opened the email like a woman pulling a bandage.
Part four began:
> When I cannot sleep I do what my mother taught me: I breathe in four, hold seven, and let it go on eight, and the night loosens like a sash. Then I dress in the dark and go downtown. There is a hotel in the Loop, old and handsome and a little vain, where a brass mail chute swallows letters on every floor, and every letter falls past every door on its way down, carrying its secrets through the whole sleeping building like a rumor. I love that chute. I stand beside it and listen to the letters fall. But I do not meet him there. I meet him at a dinner served in a darkness so complete that only the blind can wait on it, a darkness thick as velvet and twice as soft, in which a woman can be anyone at all. He speaks to me for three hours. I never see his face. Upon the sidewalk afterward, with the city bright and indifferent at my back, I give him rules instead of my name, and he takes them as a man takes a key.
I read it standing up. Then I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet door and read it again.
The count, first. Half of America uses that trick. It's older than me. Nurses teach it to women in labor. I let it go.
The chute I couldn't let go. There are maybe three hotels in the Loop old enough to still have a working brass mail chute, and I walk past one every Thursday with my hood up and my eyes on the marble, past the little bench beside it where nobody sits. The Lockhart. You could stand beside it.
And the dinner. May, on Randolph, three hours of talk with a stranger in the dark, waited on by blind men and women who would never see any of us. Only Jonah was at that table.
I sat on the floor with the cabinet handle in my back and counted on my fingers like a child: the scar, the sentence about a voice in my ear, the dinner, the hotel. If it was him, why? Money, maybe. Or a man who wanted to hear me say it all back to him in his headphones, every Monday and Thursday.
At six-twenty I wrote to N. I wrote it four times and deleted it three. The one I sent said:
"Who is the author? I need to speak with them before I record another word."
I knew the clause. Fine. Let it void. I'd go back to royalty statements and a door I was still paying for, and I'd be glad.
The answer came at six-forty-four. N. had taken twenty-four minutes to be brief.
From N. Subject, part four. Body: "The terms are the terms. If you withdraw, the book will be recorded by another voice. It will still be released. N."
I read it out loud, to be sure. In my good voice, the one for dukes, because I wanted to hear it said properly.
It will still be released.
Another voice. Somebody else in somebody else's closet saying "my left ribs" in the first person. If I quit, I'd lose the money and keep the book. It would go out on that app on the twenty-ninth of October regardless, with a stranger's mouth on my life, and I'd have no say in a single breath of it.
If I stayed, at least it would be my voice. At least I'd see every part before anyone else did, and learn exactly how much the author knew.
I went to the Jewel calendar on the fridge. September twenty-eighth to October twenty-ninth. I counted the squares with my finger, the tuna casserole presiding.
Thirty-one days, eight more parts, each one arriving at six in the morning with a clock attached. I could do thirty-one days. I'd once spent six years reading a man's sentences back to him in the dark, and nobody had paid me triple for that.
I didn't write back. The terms are the terms.
Who could I tell? The police, with what? A purple novel about a woman with a scar, delivered on time, paid on time, in which nobody had done anything to anybody yet. And the man in six-fourteen I couldn't ask, because asking would tell him exactly how much I'd guessed.
Bettina called at noon, my noon. I told her I'd emailed them. I didn't tell her why.
"Oh, darling, you didn't. What did you ask?"
"Who wrote it."
"And they said?"
"They said the terms are the terms."
"Well, they are." I heard her set down a cup. "Look, I've asked around. Nobody knows them. They're small, rich, weird. That's all anyone can tell me. The wire comes, the wire clears, they don't call me at night with notes. Do you know how rare that is?" A pause, a different breath, the gossip one. "Darling, are you seeing someone?"
"What?"
"You sound rested on Fridays."
I stood at the window over the courtyard with the phone against my ear. The sheets were gone from the line.
"I sleep on Thursdays," I said.
It was true. After the room, and after the booth, I sleep from four in the morning until noon like a woman who's been carried somewhere. It was also not an answer, and she heard that it wasn't, and let it go, which is the kindest thing Bettina knows how to do.
"Well, keep sleeping," she said. "Listen, you'll like this. Somebody on one of the forums, the big romance one, the one with the pink banner. I have a girl who reads them for me. Somebody posted last night: 'I fall asleep to Iris Quill every night.' Seventeen hundred hearts. Seventeen hundred, darling. You're in seventeen hundred beds."
"That's nice," I said.
"That's money," she said, and hung up.
I stood at the window. Seventeen hundred hearts. A woman in a bed somewhere, a phone on her pillow, my voice in her ear until she went under. I know that woman. I am that woman. And at the end of October, the same women, the same pillows, and my voice in their ears saying "my left ribs," saying "a brass mail chute," saying "I dress in the dark and go downtown." All of it in my own voice, and none of it in my own words.
I recorded part four that night. In the small hours, in the booth, with the door sealed and the Metra asleep.
"Q, part four."
The count, the chute, the dinner, the rules on the sidewalk. My voice did all of it beautifully. I've never sounded so calm about anything. When I got to "he takes them as a man takes a key," I heard my mouth go soft on the word "key," and I left it.
Then I made the mistake of closing my eyes.
In the booth, in the dark of my own eyelids, the key turned. I was on Randolph again with my back to him and his silence behind me like heat off a stove. Then I was in six-fourteen, in May, the first night, when neither of us knew yet what our hands were allowed to do and we found out one inch at a time. The sound he makes, low in his chest, when I put my hand flat on his stomach and leave it there. My body recited all of it to me, in order, on a stool in a padded closet at two in the morning, with the file running.
I opened my eyes and read the last paragraph to the end, in a voice that gave away nothing. The take would show a long breath before the final line. Flubs stay.
I played it back. Then I went back through the contract on the laptop, slowly, every clause, the way I should have read it the first morning instead of performing it to my refrigerator.
Recorded alone. Within forty-eight hours. Exactly as written. No edits, no director, no proofer. First person. Return a signed original. Any attempt to identify the author. Release date.
It said what I had to do. It said how fast I had to do it. It said what would happen if I didn't.
There wasn't a single clause in it about what the book was allowed to say.
Part five would arrive at six on Thursday morning. And Thursday was the room.