Chapter 70: Five Milliliters
Ms. Pryor put me through in forty seconds, which had happened twice in seven months.
He was between patients and had eleven minutes, and he told me so first, which is his way of giving you all eleven.
I gave him the eleven pages in four minutes.
The corridor. The pass. The forty to ninety seconds out of frame. The clock correction and the residual under four minutes.
Eleven intervals in a band ten minutes wide.
And the two nights in June when a woman walked that corridor and did not stop, because there was nothing in the room to stop at.
He did not say anything for eight seconds and I could hear a pen.
“Say the June nights again.”
I said them again.
“Those two are worth more than the eleven,” he said. “I want you to understand why, and then stop talking for a minute.”
“When the tank was out of that room, the same thing happened in that corridor and nothing happened to that child.”
“That is the only thing in this document that speaks to a mechanism rather than a person.”
Then he told me the thing he had refused to say on a telephone on Tuesday.
“An ultrasonic humidifier does not boil water. There is no heat in it and no filter between the tank and the room.”
“There is a disc under a grille that vibrates at a frequency you cannot hear, and it shears the water into droplets.”
“Whatever is dissolved in that water leaves the tank with the water and goes into the air of the room.”
“That is not my theory. That is what the machine is built to do.”
“It is why the instruction leaflet tells you to use distilled water.”
“If you do not, you get a fine white dust on the furniture, and that dust is what used to be in the tank.”
I said I had wiped that dust off a chest of drawers two hundred times.
“Yes,” he said. “So has every parent in this city.”
“A closed room. Two and a half meters. Eleven hours a night. A child of ten kilos breathing twenty-eight times a minute.”
Then he stopped.
“Say the next sentence,” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I will write it once, in a report, when I have five milliliters of that water and a number from a laboratory.”
“Not before it, and not to a woman standing in a courtyard, and not on a telephone.”
I asked what he needed, exactly, and I wrote it down as he said it.
Five to ten milliliters, drawn from the tank, not the base.
Into a sterile container with a sealed cap. Not a jar, not a bottle, not a cup.
Collected by a person with standing, in front of one other adult, both of whom sign.
Time, date, location, and every person who touches it, from the tank to the courier.
“And I will write the requisition this morning and fax it to the house, so that a physician’s request exists before anybody collects anything.”
“Who has standing?”
“The father. He owns the house, the appliance, the water and the parental responsibility. All four.”
“He can hand water from his own tap to his son’s doctor and no lawyer on earth can stop him.”
I said I would go and ask him now.
“Miss Carter. Listen to the next part properly, because you are going to want to skip it.”
“If you ask him and he tells you he will speak to Ellis, you have lost.”
“He will say that. He has said it to you every time since September.”
“Then what do I say?”
“Do not ask him to believe you. He cannot do that this morning and neither can I.”
“Ask him for one thing that takes four minutes and does not require anybody’s permission but his own.”
“A jug of water out of a machine in his own house, into a sealed pot, in front of two people, before ten o’clock.”
“That is not an accusation. It is not a legal step. It is a father getting a glass of water tested.”
I read it back to him twice.
“One more thing,” he said. “Do not tell him what you think is in it.”
“He is a decent man and a slow one, and the moment you say a word like that he will do the correct thing, which is to telephone his lawyer.”
“You are asking for water. Nothing else. Keep saying water.”
I said I would.
“Then go now,” he said, “and do not stop to be sure of yourself on the way.”
At 08:47 I put the phone down.
I took the sleeve of ten containers out of the drawer with the receipt still taped to the front of it.
I did not open it. I put the whole sleeve, sealed, in my coat pocket, so that somebody else could break it.
Then I put the eleven pages in a folder with the tank log and the nine numbers, and did up my coat.
Two hundred and eight paces. Four doors.