Chapter 66: Nineteen Dates
He went on shift at ten o’clock on Thursday night and I did not sleep at all.
I want to set down what I did with those six hours, because I have always answered that badly.
I made a column.
One sheet, ruled, nineteen rows, and one heading: ONSET.
I copied the nineteen times out of my own log in date order and wrote nothing else on the page.
Not a name. Not a note. Not the two June dates.
Because he was working blind at his end and the sheet was only worth anything if I was blind at mine.
Two lists made in two buildings by two people who could not see each other’s paper.
If they lined up, that meant something. If I had helped them line up, it meant nothing.
I finished it at twenty past eleven and then I had four hours and nothing to do with them.
I cleaned the coach-house window. I ate a piece of bread standing up.
At one o’clock I turned the light off and sat in the chair by the window with a blanket, looking at the house.
Second window from the left on the first floor. The curtain was drawn and the room was dark.
I have sat in a lot of rooms at that hour. That was the first time I had ever done it outside the building.
At twenty past two I started listing everything that could go wrong, which is a thing I do instead of praying.
The export has gaps. The camera was moved. The corridor light is on a plate and infrared does not care.
He finds nothing at all and I have to write that down and give it to Dr. Moreno, as I said I would.
Or he finds something on the wrong nights, which is worse, because then I have to believe it.
Or somebody in that building notices a light on in the security office at three in the morning.
At ten to four I put the kettle on and did not make anything with it.
He knocked at 04:22.
I looked at the clock before I opened the door, which is either training or damage.
He had his coat on and the collar up, and he had been in a windowless room for six hours.
He did not say hello. He held up a bundle of paper folded once down the middle.
“Eleven pages,” he said. “Handwriting. Nothing else left that room.”
Then he said the sentence I have never forgotten, and he said it before he sat down.
“I’m going to give you all of it, including the parts you’re not going to like, and I want you to read those first.”
He put the pages on the table and turned them so they faced me and took his hands off them.
I did the same with mine.
Two sheets, side by side, on a table in a coach house, at twenty-five past four in the morning.
He looked at the top of my page.
“Onset. That’s your column.”
“Nineteen times. Nothing else on it. I wrote it before you started.”
“Good,” he said. “Then don’t put them next to each other yet.”
I said I did not understand.
“Read mine first. All of it. Every night, in order, including the eight where there’s nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because if you see your times first, you’ll read mine looking for them.”
So I read eleven pages of another man’s handwriting for twenty minutes before I let myself look at my own sheet.
He drank a cup of tea and did not talk while I did it.
Here is how he had set it out, and I have never seen anybody do it better.
One page per date. The date at the top, underlined. Then a plain time column, in the DVR’s own clock, uncorrected.
Every human being who appeared in that frame between nine at night and six in the morning.
Time. Direction. What they were carrying. How long they were in frame.
Not a single word of interpretation on any of the eleven pages.
He had written NO PERSON in capitals on the nights when there was nobody, and left the rest of the page blank.
Twice he had written CANNOT SEE and given the reason, and the reason was different both times.
At the foot of every page, in the same hand: Reviewed by M. Ruiz. Time started. Time finished. Length of recording examined.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
“I’ve written statements for nine years. Nobody ever reads them. You write them properly anyway.”
Then he took the two June dates out of the bundle and put them face down beside the others.
“Those two are separate,” he said. “You wouldn’t tell me why you wanted them.”
“No.”
“Then I’m not going to ask you now, at half past four, when you’ve been up all night.”
He turned his cup round on the table.
“But I’ve been doing this since ten o’clock and I’ve had six hours to think about why a woman asks for two nights when nothing happened.”