Thursday, October first.
At four I gave up and put Sable on the pillow. "In for four." I breathed in for four. "Hold for seven." Somewhere in the hold the ceiling went out like a pilot light, and the next thing was the email chime and the clock saying six.
"Ms. Quill. Part five. N."
I read it at the counter in my socks, with the kettle not yet on. Thursday is the one day I don't work. Thursday's first act was to hand me work.
Part five began:
> Room six-fourteen keeps no light at all. It has kept none since the first night in May. The drapes are taped at the seam, the lamp is a shape and nothing more, and the dark is the kind that has weight, a warm coin laid on each eyelid. No names, I say, that first spring night. No faces. No telephones. These are the rules I wear into that room instead of a name, and he keeps them as a monk keeps the hours. Every Thursday I cross to the nightstand with my fingertips trailing on the blanket and find the small speaker with its covered eye, and I draw its plug the way a careful woman draws a pin from her hair, slowly, so that nothing falls. A train goes over the world. The window shivers in its frame. And on the first night, when the old chair groans behind me, ere I can turn Jude speaks, softly, as one speaks to a horse or a flame. "Don't turn on the light."
I didn't read it twice. I read the first sentence again, which is different, and then I stood there. He never said that, on the first night or any other. He never had to.
Jude. In four parts he had been "he," and in the fifth he got a name, and the name began with a J. I noticed, and kept it. And a monk: nobody who has been in a bed with Jonah has ever called him a monk. The lamp wasn't a shape, either; the lamp is a lamp, on the nightstand, with a paper shade, and I know it by touch. The author was wrong about the furniture and right about everything that matters.
Room six-fourteen. No last names, no faces, no phones, in my order, the order I said them on a sidewalk on Randolph with my back to him. The speaker with its covered eye. The plug. I have never written those rules down. I have never said them to anyone but one man. And the one detail the author had gotten exactly right was the one I do with my hand.
Only one other person has ever stood in that room and listened to me pull the plug. He lies in the dark every Thursday and hears it come out of the wall.
I read the rest of part five, which was short and mostly weather, and I did not record it. That's against my own rule. I had a reason. The reason was Thursday. I don't work on Thursdays, and the take could keep until Friday, when I'd be a woman with a clear head and a hot cup of something. I noticed it was a good one, and I noticed I didn't believe it.
His email came at noon, as it does, from the string of letters with no capitals. "thursday?"
I left it sitting. I carried laundry up from the basement and folded it and matched two socks that weren't a pair. At one o'clock I wrote back "yes," which took me an hour, for one word. I'd like that noted somewhere.
I could have stayed home. A woman who reads that page at six in the morning and then stays home on Thursday isn't a coward; she's sensible, and I have been sensible for thirty-six years whenever it was cheap. But I know people by their breath. It's the one thing I do better than the people who pay me to do things better. A man can write a sentence with a steady hand and a cold heart. He can't lie in the dark beside you and have his breath go past that sentence unchanged. If he'd written it, I would hear it in him. And if I heard nothing, then I'd been wrong, and I wanted very badly to be wrong, at close range.
So: the long shower, the plain lotion, the gray hoodie. On the Brown Line I counted the stops in fours, which is not a thing I do on trains.
"Evening, Q."
"Thanks, Arturo."
My phone went dead under my thumb halfway down the hall. I stood outside the door for as long as it takes to say the rules. The door was on the latch. He was first.
I shut it behind me and the dark came down.
The short hall, the cold of the bathroom tile on my right. And him, on the bed tonight, not the chair: the quiet was thickest low and to the left, where the headboard is. His coat lay across the armchair in the far corner. I smelled cold wool.
I let my own coat fall, and my bag on top of it, by the door. He said nothing, and I gave him nothing else for a moment, only stood in the hall and listened to his breath.
I went around the foot of the bed with my hand trailing on the blanket, and found the nightstand on the window side, and the clock on it, and the strip of surgical tape over its glow. My fingers went down the back of it to the cord.
And I stopped.
Four months of Thursdays, and I had pulled that plug every time, and every time he had said, low, amused: "Every week." As if the room were mine and he were the guest who knew where I kept things. But he had never once reached for it himself. I stood with the cord between two fingers and thought that anyone who truly believed a speaker was a microphone would have pulled it himself, and anyone who wanted it live would leave the pulling to me.
So I waited. I counted twenty, in fours, the old way. He lay on the bed and breathed. A cab honked down on Wabash and he did not move. He did not say "Every week."
At twenty I pulled the plug.
"A microphone," I whispered, "is a microphone."
Nothing. Then, low, from the bed: "I know."
That was not what he said last time. I put it with the others.
I sat on the window edge of the mattress. I felt the bed lean as he sat up toward me, and then nothing; he waited, as he does, for a permission he has never needed twice.
"Yes," I whispered.
His hand came to my jaw, his thumb under my ear, and he kissed me, and the kiss was the same kiss, slow and unhurried. Cold from outdoors still on his mouth. I put my hands flat on his chest and felt him breathe into them.
Then I did something I'd never done in that room. I touched him on purpose.
I undid his shirt a button at a time, in the dark, by feel, with my mouth near his. The hollow at the base of his throat, and the pulse in it going fast. The ridge of collarbone. A wire has to live somewhere. It lives taped to the sternum, or under the left arm against the ribs, or at the small of the back where a belt would sit on it, and I looked for all those places with my palms and my mouth like a customs officer being very, very polite. A hard edge. A strip of tape. A battery's flat weight. I found a man: hot skin, hair that grew the wrong direction across his chest, a long muscle on each side of his spine that went tight under my hands and then, all at once, let go.
"Like that?" I whispered against his ribs.
"Yes." It came out of him broken in the middle. "Like that."
"Tell me if."
"Don't stop."
He let me. He lay back and gave me every place a microphone could hide, and said yes at each one, and never asked what I was doing. Then his hands were in my hair, and he rolled us over so smoothly that my head was on the pillow before I'd decided to be there, and my shirt went over my head in its one motion and into the dark. His mouth was at my throat. His weight came down warm along the whole of me, and the cool air found the skin his body didn't. His mouth went along my collarbone and lower, slow, and my back came up off the sheet to meet it, and somewhere in there I forgot I was a woman conducting an inquiry.
And his hands left me.
Hands leave like a coat leaving: you know by the cold that arrives where they were. The mattress came up. His feet went over the carpet, not toward the bathroom, toward the door, toward the hall, where my coat lay on the floor with my bag on top of it.
A zipper.
I knew it by its teeth. My bag's zipper, the long one across the top, drawn slowly, as you'd open a bag in a room where someone was sleeping. Then the soft heavy sounds of my things being moved by a hand that couldn't see them: my wallet, my keys, the little paper rustle of a receipt. Then wool. My coat being lifted, and its pockets turned, one, then the other.
I lay on my back with my shirt somewhere on the floor and my skin going cold and listened to a man go through my things in the dark. It felt like a hand in my mouth.
Then he came back into the room and didn't come to me. I heard him go along the lamp, under the nightstand, along the frame of the connecting door, a finger testing the bolt until it clicked in its housing and held, and down the seam of the drapes, quick and thorough, hunting keys he knew were somewhere in the room.
"Looking for something?" I whispered.
His hands stopped at the window.
"Making sure we're alone."
"We're alone."
"I know," he said, from the window. "I know."
I did not scream, and I did not run. Last Thursday he'd asked if I recorded. Tonight he'd gone through my bag to see what I carried.
He came back across the carpet. The bed took him. His hand found my face in the dark, and his thumb went along my cheekbone like a man checking a seal. I put my ear to his chest.
I knew his breath like a signature. Nobody breathes the same breath twice; a person on tape is never the same person two takes running, and I've cleaned up enough of my own to know. His is slow and level, each breath the length of the one before, and there's no count in it; I've listened for one. So I listened now, with my ear on his sternum, and what I heard was the breath I knew, slower than my own, and under it, once, a little hitch, the kind you hide at the top of a flight of stairs.
His mouth came to my ear. His hand closed on my wrist, not hard.
"Say something," he said. "Out loud, just once."
My whole body went cold, and then not cold.
"No."
"Why not?"
"In here I don't use it."
He didn't answer. His fingers on my wrist opened one at a time, and he laid my hand back on his chest like a thing he'd borrowed. He had decided not to push. I could hear him decide.
Everyone wants the voice. He wanted it too, and he let me keep it, and I could not make those two facts stand in the same room. I couldn't tell whether fear or wanting was making my hands shake.
So I took his hand and put it where I wanted it.
"This?" he breathed.
"Yes. There."
"Slower?" he asked.
"No. Yes. Like that." And he laughed once against my skin, low and unsteady, and then there was nothing in that room but his mouth, and my breath going ragged against it, and the weight of him, and a pair of hands that knew now exactly where to go and went there slowly, as if they had all night and meant to spend it. I said yes into the hollow of his shoulder and said it again, and felt his heart going hard under my palm, and I stopped keeping track of which of us was searching which.
After, he lay with his arm under my neck, and the room cooled around us.
"Are you working on anything?" he asked.
It was the kind of question you ask a woman at a party. We don't do daylight. We never have.
"Always," I whispered.
He went quiet. Not the quiet of sleep; the kind that has a person standing inside it. His breath changed by a hair: shorter in, the evenness gone. I could not read it, and reading it is the one thing I am supposed to be good at.
At eleven-thirty I found my shirt by feel and dressed in the hall, in the cold off the tile. I crouched for my bag. The zipper was closed again, end to end, neat. Inside, by feel, everything was where it lived, except one thing. I carry my keys and my lip balm in the little padded pouch my field recorder came in; the recorder itself lives in a drawer at home. The pouch was there. It was inside out, like a pocket a man empties to show a cop he has nothing in it. Somebody had put his fingers all the way into the corners of it, looking for the thing it was made to hold.
I turned it right side out in the dark, slowly, and put my keys back in it.
"Thursday," he said from the bed.
"Thursday," I whispered, and let myself out.
"Night, Q."
"Night, Arturo."
On the platform at Adams and Wabash I stood under the heater with my hood up. Part five was every Thursday since May, down to the plug in my hand, and I had until Saturday to read it aloud.