Chapter 20: Nineteen
I had never done what I did next. It had never occurred to me. It took ninety minutes.
I had a torch, the blue notebook, and four sheets of paper from the housekeeper’s printer.
I ruled the first sheet into five columns with the edge of the notebook.
DATE. ONSET. DURATION. WHAT I DID. RECOVERY.
Then I went through the book from the front and copied every episode out onto one page, in order, in a line each.
I had never seen them next to each other. Not once in six months.
I want to say why that is not as strange as it sounds, and then why it is exactly as bad as it sounds.
Each of those pages was written in the dark at three in the morning by a person who was shaking.
You close the book. You put it back under the sheets. The next one is eight days away and it might as well be a year.
A log is a thing you write into. It is not a thing you read.
Somebody has to read it, and I had decided six months earlier that the somebody was a man in Evanston with a license.
This is what came off the four sheets and onto the one.
9 March. 02:40. Nineteen seconds. Turned him, sternal rub. Breath on nine. Colour back in twenty.
11 March. 03:05. Twenty-four seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Colour back in thirty.
17 March. 02:20. Sixteen seconds. Turned, rub. Woke briefly. Colour back in fifteen.
31 March. 02:47. Twenty-two seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Did not wake.
7 April. 03:11. Twenty-eight seconds. Turned, rub, lifted, walked him. Did not wake.
14 April. 02:05. Eighteen seconds. Turned, rub. Did not wake.
21 April. 02:52. Thirty-five seconds. Turned, rub, lifted, walked. Colour back in fifty.
28 April. 03:19. Twenty seconds. Turned, rub. Did not wake.
5 May. 02:33. Twenty-six seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Did not wake.
19 May. 02:09. Forty-one seconds. Turned, rub, lifted, walked, cold cloth. Colour back in seventy.
2 June. 02:44. Twenty-three seconds. Turned, rub. Did not wake.
9 June. 03:22. Twenty-nine seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Did not wake.
16 June. 03:02. Thirty seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Colour back in forty.
30 June. 02:16. Thirty-three seconds. Turned, rub, lifted, walked. Did not wake.
14 July. 02:58. Twenty-one seconds. Turned, rub. Did not wake.
28 July. 02:27. Thirty-eight seconds. Turned, rub, lifted, walked. Colour back in sixty.
11 August. 03:08. Twenty-five seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Did not wake.
25 August. 02:41. Thirty seconds. Turned, rub, lifted. Did not wake.
8 September. 02:12. Forty-four seconds. Turned, rub, lifted, walked, cold cloth. Colour back in eighty.
I finished the last line and I put the pen down on the floorboards.
Then I counted them, which took about four seconds, and I wrote the number at the bottom of the page.
Nineteen.
Six days earlier a detective had asked me how many there had been and I had said more than ten and less than thirty.
It was nineteen. It had been nineteen the whole time. It was nineteen while I stood in that corridor saying I did not know.
Nineteen is not a large number. That is what I keep coming back to.
You could hold nineteen in your head, if you had ever once tried.
I sat on the floor of that nursery with my back against the cot and I looked at the page.
I want to be exact about how long, because it is the only thing about that night I can be exact about.
I looked at it from four minutes past eleven until nineteen minutes past midnight.
Seventy-five minutes, on a floor, in the dark, with a torch, looking at one sheet of paper.
The cot was thirty centimetres from my head. He was breathing at twenty-six a minute and I could hear every one of them.
The room smelled of the cast, and of the ointment they had given us, and of nothing else at all.
And what I saw was the third column.
Nineteen seconds in March.
Forty-four seconds in September.
They were getting longer. Every month, on the average, they were getting longer.
Nothing about him had changed. Nothing about the room had changed. He had been on the inhaler since April and it had done nothing at all.
That is what I took off that page. That is the whole of what I took off it.
I circled the last figure with a pen. Forty-four. I wrote underneath it, in capitals: TRENDING.
That is a real word too. It is the word you use when you do not yet have a cause.
Then I folded the sheet in four and put it inside the back cover of the notebook and put the notebook under the cot sheets and shut the drawer.
I had the answer in my hand at twelve nineteen in the morning on the sixteenth of September.
It was in the first column, and I had written every word of it myself, and I looked straight through it.
It took me another six weeks to look at the first column.