Chapter 60: Ten Sterile Containers
The pharmacy on Clark sells specimen containers in a plastic sleeve behind the counter.
Sixty milliliters. Sterile.
Screw cap with a white liner. Ten in a sleeve.
Ten dollars ninety-nine, and the boy did not ask me one question.
I carried them back on the bus in my coat pocket
and put them on the coach-house table at twenty past two.
Then I sat and looked at them for three hours and eleven minutes.
I know that because I wrote the start time and the end time down,
out of a habit that had by then stopped being a habit and become a condition.
I ruled the sheet in two columns.
WHAT I GET on the left. WHAT I LOSE on the right.
Left: five milliliters of water out of that tank, tonight, in a sterile container, in my hand.
Left: a number. An actual number, from an actual laboratory, for three hundred and eighty dollars I do not have.
Left: the end of not knowing, which I wanted more than I have ever wanted anything.
Right: it is theft.
Right: the laboratory reports it as a sample of unknown provenance and it proves nothing about that room.
Right: I become the only person alive who has been alone with that tank with a container in her hand.
Right: Marina Kessler asks me under oath whether I collected it, and I say yes,
and she asks whether anybody watched me, and I say no.
Right: and everything else I have ever written down goes out of the door behind it.
The last line on the right is the one that took me the three hours.
If I am wrong, that child stays in that room and there is nobody left to say anything about it.
I had already been wrong once, six days earlier, in a room with eight people in it.
At half past five I put the ten containers back in the sleeve, unopened,
and taped the receipt to the front of it.
Then I wrote the date on the tape in laundry marker and put the whole thing in the drawer under the sink.
I have that sleeve. It has never been opened.
The receipt is still on it and the ink has gone brown.
I kept it because I knew somebody would eventually ask me whether I had ever thought of taking a sample myself.
And I wanted to be able to say yes. On the twenty-seventh of October, for eleven dollars, and I did not.
That is not a virtue. It is arithmetic, and I have already put the arithmetic down.
Then I did the only thing left that I was entitled to do, which was to keep a record.
The tank log has a fixed format now and I settled it that evening and never changed it again.
Date. Time observed. Whether the lid handle was at eleven o’clock.
Water depth below the molded line,
measured against the second knuckle of my index finger, which is four centimeters.
Upper band present or absent. Position of the band relative to the current water level.
Anything on the shelf. Anything on the floor under the shelf.
Observed by. Present in the room.
Seven fields, one line a day, taken during one hour a day, in daylight, in front of a licensed nurse.
It is the weakest log I have ever kept and it is the only one I could keep lawfully.
Entry for the twenty-seventh: lid handle at eleven o’clock, unmoved. Water eleven centimeters down. Band present, unchanged.
I did not touch the tank on the twenty-seventh and I have never touched it since.
At six o’clock I telephoned Dr. Moreno and told him about the cartridge line with no initials.
He listened and asked me twice whether the card was typed or handwritten.
“Handwritten. Blue pen. Four lines the same, one blank.”
“Then write down that it is handwritten and blue,” he said, “and stop there.”
I asked him what he had read about ultrasonic units.
He was quiet for four seconds, which by then I had learned to count.
“I am not going to say it on a telephone to a person who is going to walk into that building at ten tomorrow morning.”
“Is it bad?”
“It is a mechanism,” he said. “That is all I am prepared to call it. A mechanism is not a finding.”
Then he asked whether I had taken anything out of that tank.
I said no, and I told him about the sleeve in the drawer and the receipt taped to the front of it.
There was a long silence, and then he said the kindest thing he ever said to me, and it does not sound kind.
“Good. Then you are still a witness.”
“Everybody else in this has a title. You have one asset and that is what it is.”