Chapter 62: The Sound a Lid Makes
The library on Lincoln has six machines with sockets on the front and a ninety-minute session limit.
Headphones cost six dollars at the drugstore two doors down.
I had the flash drive from the seventeenth. Three hundred and eleven files, and a printing card with two dollars left on it.
I went in at half past twelve and came out at five. Two sessions and one idea.
The idea was the lid.
A lid coming off a tank makes a sound. A jug pouring makes a sound. The lid going back makes a click.
And that recorder sat on a shelf by the nursery door, every night, from the eleventh of March.
If somebody opened that tank while I was recording, it is on a file, and I have three hundred and eleven of them.
I want to write down how long that hope lasted, because it is a measurement.
Fifty-one minutes.
I took three files from three episode nights and listened to the two hours either side of onset.
What is on them is a boiler, a truck on Lake Shore, a radiator ticking, a child breathing, and me.
Under all of it, the hum.
There is no lid on any of them. There is nothing that could be a lid.
So I did it properly instead of guessing, in the coach house, which is not the residence.
I put my phone on the table and ran the kitchen tap to make a steady noise.
Then I unscrewed the lid of a jar at one meter, at two, and at four, and recorded all three.
At one meter the lid is obvious.
At two you can hear it if you know it is there.
At four meters, over running water, there is nothing at all. I played it back eleven times.
The recorder sat about four meters from that humidifier, with the machine running.
So the sound is not on the files and never was going to be, and I had spent six dollars finding that out.
I wrote NEGATIVE at the top of the sheet and underlined it, because a negative is still a measurement.
Then I went back at half past two for the second session, and that is where the day turned over.
Because there is one thing on those files that I had heard ten thousand times and never once listened to.
The hum starts at six o’clock.
And at some point in the small hours, it stops.
It stops because the tank runs dry.
I did not know that in March. I knew it because I had read a card in a linen room on Tuesday.
The files carry a start time in the name.
The player shows elapsed time to the second.
Add one to the other and you get a clock time, on paper, in about forty seconds.
I did five files from nights when nothing happened at all.
The hum stops at 04:41. 04:55. 04:38. 05:02. 04:49.
Mean, near enough, ten minutes to five in the morning.
Then I did four files from nights that are in the log.
06:11. 06:28. 06:02. 06:19.
An hour and a half longer. Every one of the four.
I sat in a public library with a pencil and my ears full of a boiler and did the last piece of arithmetic.
Four and a half liters in about eleven hours is around four hundred milliliters an hour.
Ninety extra minutes of running is something like six hundred milliliters of water that was not in that tank at six o’clock.
More than half a liter, going into a tank, in a room a child sleeps in, on nights when he stopped breathing properly.
I want to put the holes in this down here, because I have learned that lesson the hard way.
Four files is four files.
The machine has three settings and I do not know what it was on.
A fill to the line is not always a fill to the line. A closed door changes the humidity in a room.
And the drive in my pocket is a copy I made myself, from a recorder now in a safe with a receipt against it.
I know exactly what a lawyer does with that sentence.
But it is not a theory. It is nine numbers taken off nine files by one person with a pencil.
I telephoned Wabash at ten past five and got Ms. Pryor, and Dr. Moreno came on at twenty past.
I read him the nine numbers in the order I had them.
He did not say anything for a long time, and I could hear him writing.
“Do the other ten,” he said.
“That’s twenty hours of listening.”
“Then it is twenty hours.” Then, after a moment: “Miss Carter. Where is the recorder itself?”
I said it was in the estate office safe, on the middle shelf, with a receipt in the day book.
“Then whoever holds that safe holds the only original of this,” he said, “and I would like you to think about who that is.”