Friday, October second.
Nightjar Audio lived in a box.
The pack-and-ship place on Clark sits between a nail salon and a store that fixes phones, and it smells of cardboard and hot laminate, and a bored young man behind the counter was weighing a lamp for a woman who wanted to mail it to Ohio. I stood in the doorway with my hood down. It was noon on a Friday, and I'd taken the Brown Line in daylight with my face bare, which I never do on a day that matters, because on a day that matters I want to be nobody.
The wall of boxes ran along the back: little brass doors in rows, each with a number and a window the size of a playing card. The suite number on the contract came with a pound sign. I walked the wall until I found it. Box two-twenty-six, third row from the floor.
I bent and looked in.
There was one thing in it. A white envelope lying on its face, and through the card-sized window I could see the back of it, and the flap I'd licked, and I knew the handwriting, because it was mine: the Clark Street address in the blue of the good pen, the stamp stuck on crooked. Two weeks, near enough, it had been in there. Not a flyer. Not a bill. My envelope in an empty brass box, like a coin at the bottom of a well.
"Can I help you find something?"
The young man had come out from behind the counter. He had earbuds around his neck and a name tag that said DEVON.
"I mailed something to a friend's box," I said, in my off-mic voice. "I wondered if it had been picked up."
"Can't say, ma'am. We don't discuss box holders. It's a federal thing."
"I don't need a name."
"Then I couldn't say anything about it." He was kind about it. "Folks come in once a month, once a week. Some folks never."
"Do they ever come in at night?"
"We close at six."
I thanked him. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the phone-repair window with my arms folded. Any attempt to identify the author voids this agreement. I had just attempted. I waited to feel the floor go. It didn't.
What I felt was stupider and colder. I'd signed that thing at the kitchen table in the good pen. I'd folded it in thirds and licked it. I'd stood it against the sugar bowl so I wouldn't forget it. I had honored every inch of that paper. And nobody had wanted it.
They didn't need my signature. They needed my voice.
On the sidewalk on Clark I decided something. From now on I would record each part the moment it arrived. Cold. Six in the morning, the email, the booth, no second look. I'd given part five a day on the kitchen counter, and it had read itself to me in my head forty times until it was worn smooth as a stair. A book you've read forty times in your head is a book you perform. I wasn't going to perform this one.
That night I recorded part five. I put it off until dark, because the booth's quiet is a different quiet at night. I turned the booth lamp off.
In eleven years I have never recorded in the dark. I need to see the page; I need to see my own hands; the lamp is a part of the instrument, like the pop filter. But part five was a dark room, and I turned the laptop's brightness down until the words were a faint gray on gray, a page floating in a box of foam, and my own breath came up in the headphones, close and enormous.
"Q, part five."
The breath and a half. Then: "Room six-fourteen keeps no light at all."
My voice went down into the whisper on its own. I let it. I read the cross to the nightstand with my fingertips trailing on the music stand. I read the pin from the hair and the groan of the chair and the man who said, softly, as one speaks to a horse or a flame, "Don't turn on the light." I did him low, and flat, in nobody's voice. I don't do accents. I do people. I did not know whose person to do.
Halfway down the page, at the plug and the pin from the hair, my body went back to Wabash without me. Last night. His shirt open under my fingers, a button at a time, and "Like that," broken in the middle. I read on, in the whisper, steady, and under the whisper my skin was lying in the dark on Wabash with his weight along the whole of me and a train coming. I have read a hundred love scenes with my body somewhere else. This was the first time my body had read one with my voice somewhere else.
When it was over my hands were wet. The silence after the last word was the most complete silence I have ever been paid to leave.
I played it back. A woman in the dark said no names, no faces, no telephones, and she sounded calm, and she sounded like she was lying.
I sent the file at three in the morning, three hours inside the clock.
Sunday night was a bad one. Sable on shuffle, some episode from two winters ago. "In for four." Then the line she says in every episode, the one I could recite with her: "When I'm frightened, I count. You can borrow mine." I borrowed it. "Hold for seven." I was gone by the hold.
Monday, six a.m. "Ms. Quill. Part six. N."
I didn't read it at the counter. I did what I'd said I'd do, in my socks, with the tea still too hot to drink: down the hall, into the booth, the door sealing behind me like a refrigerator's, the laptop on the stand and the first page up and my eyes on nothing yet. Six-thirty-one by the little clock in the corner. I put on the headphones. The closet went away.
"Q, part six."
A breath and a half for the razor. Then I read.
> The pager goes off in the dark, three times, from the pocket of Jude's coat on the chair, and it chirps like a small bird trapped in his coat, beating its brief wings against the wool. He does not move. I lie against his shoulder and count the chirps, and I think of all the rooms in the city where that small bird has sung, and a stranger has woken, or has not woken, because of it. He puts people under for a living, and he has never once been afraid of the dark. I ask him what it is like, that moment before they let go of the world, and he answers with a silence I can still hear. Outside, the train goes over the river of the night, and the room trembles like a held note, and betwixt one breath and the next I understand that I am in love with a man who can make anyone sleep. I wait for the bird to stop. It stops. Neither of us says a word.
I laughed, right in the middle of "trapped in his coat," before I'd approved it. A pager doesn't chirp. A pager rattles like an insect with a grudge; I know, because my father carried one for twenty years. And somebody had put a bird in the man's coat. A small white bird, beating its wings. The author's own mascot, trapped in the wool.
I stopped talking. I did not stop the recording. The contract says one continuous take. So I sat there in the foam with my mouth shut and the file running and listened to nine seconds of my own silence, which is a long time to listen to yourself. Then I took a breath and a half, and began again at the first word of the part, and read it straight through to the end. I didn't laugh the second time.
The laugh is in the file. Flubs stay.
I took the headphones off and sat on the stool.
The pager. I'd lain in that room on the first night of the cold and heard it go three times in the pocket of a coat on the armchair, and I'd heard a man say, "Northside. I'm not on." I had told no one. I hadn't written it down. It was in my ear, and in his, and now it was in a book, with a bird on it.
Northside General is a hospital. Green soap. A man who puts people under for a living. I said it out loud to the foam. "Anesthesia."
He'd never said what he did, and I'd never asked, and I had called that a kindness for months.
Only he could have written his own pager into my mouth, or someone who knew him very well.
I walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle and said to it, "Delphine, honey. A bird?" The kettle, which has heard everything, said nothing.
Then I picked up the phone.
A patient is easy. You drop the pitch a third and put a small quaver at the end of each phrase, like a spoon in a cup, and you apologize to whoever answers for the crime of being ill. I took a little Rockford out of my vowels and put in a hundred years. I held the phone against my ear and the voice that came out of me was seventy-four and grateful and had a husband who'd died.
The main line of Northside General rang four times.
"Northside General, how may I direct your call?"
"Oh, hello, dear. I hope I'm not troubling you." The quaver. "I had my surgery with you in the spring, and the anesthesia doctor was so kind to me, such a lovely man, and I'd like to send a little note. I'm afraid I only know his first name. Jonah."
Keys. I listened to them. Four months of listening to a man's breath teaches you something about listening to a stranger's keys; these were quick and bored and entirely unsuspicious.
"Dr. Merrick?" she said. "He's in the O.R. this morning. Can I take a message?"
I hung up.
I stood there in the kitchen with the name sitting in the room, a plain name, two syllables, like a man you would pass on the street. Merrick. And he was at that moment in the O.R. putting a stranger under, with the same hands.
The staff page would have a photograph.
I know exactly how it works. A hospital puts its doctors on a web page, a row of faces and a line about residency. I opened the laptop on the kitchen table. I typed the name and the word Northside into the search bar with two fingers and did not press the key. I wanted to look so badly my eyes hurt. His face was one keystroke away, and it was my rule, the first one I'd set on a sidewalk on Randolph, and it was the last thing in that room that was still mine.
I closed the laptop.
I sat with my hand flat on the lid, which was warm from the battery, as if something under it might move. Then I put the laptop in the booth and shut the booth door on it, which is a ridiculous thing to do to a laptop, and went to take out the garbage.
On the landing, with the garbage in my hand, I ran into Leonard Szabo and his Monday paper.
He looked at me over my shoulder first, as he does, down the line, and then at me.
"Heard you through the wall this morning," he said. "Who's Delphine?"
"A character," I said. "I'm working."
"She sounded real."
"That's the job."
"Thin wall," Leonard said, not unkindly, and went in, and I heard his three locks go.
I carried the garbage down three flights and thought about the wall. He knows my Thursdays; he's said so before. If the wall leaked, it had my kitchen, my kettle, a woman who talks to appliances. It didn't have a room on Wabash or a pager in a coat.
I stapled two layers of gray foam to my side of the kitchen wall that afternoon anyway, behind the Jewel calendar, until the kitchen looked like a recording studio for very shy cooks.
On Thursday I would walk into a dark room and lie down next to a man whose whole name I knew. And he had no idea I knew it.