Chapter 77: Two Hundred Hours
I listened to the autumn of 2025 between the twentieth of November and the fifth of December 2026.
Sixty-one hours of it at the folding table, in a pair of over-ear headphones Deon lent me and never asked for back.
The rest I looked at.
I want to describe the work honestly, because people describe it for me now and they make it sound like a search.
It is not a search. It is filing.
You open a file. You look at the ribbon. You type a word. You press the down arrow.
Sixty files an hour if the ribbon is boring. Nine an hour if it is not.
My hands got cold. The lamp made a small ticking sound when it had been on for two hours.
Marco’s sister brought me tea at ten and took the cup away at midnight without saying anything, twelve nights running.
The first thing that undid me was not the house.
It was my own voice.
Twenty-four years old, flat, careful, over-articulating the numbers the way you do when you are frightened of being wrong.
Zero two forty. Three ounces. Took it all. Winded at zero two fifty-one. Down at zero two fifty-eight.
I sounded like somebody reading out a hostage list.
I sounded, I understood after about the fortieth file, exactly like somebody who expected one day to have to prove she had done her job.
I had not known I was that frightened.
I had been that frightened for sixteen months and had described it to myself as being organized.
The second thing was the baby.
Ethan at three weeks breathes about fifty times a minute.
It is a fast, light, uneven sound, and it is on most of two hundred hours of my life.
He would go quiet for six or seven seconds and then start again, which is normal, and which I checked on the monitor every time anyway.
At sixteen months, in the room down the corridor, he was breathing eighteen times a minute and sleeping through four nights out of seven.
I could hear both of them if I sat still.
That is not a figure of speech. It was two rooms and fifteen months apart and I had headphones on.
The house itself came through in pieces.
Roz’s vacuum cleaner at seven, which dated more than one file later.
A piano downstairs on Sunday afternoons, badly, four bars at a time, which I never established the source of.
Victor on the stairs, on a phone call about a lease in Milwaukee. Twenty-two seconds of him.
He sounded younger and considerably more certain.
Constance, twice, saying goodnight to somebody in the corridor.
A door at the far end with a two-note squeak, fixed in November. The ticket is in the maintenance log, which is how I dated block four.
I tagged as I went and I did not permit myself to jump.
That was the discipline and it cost me something every night.
There were four hundred and six files in block six and I did not open one of them.
I told myself it was method.
Do the blocks in order. Do not contaminate your own attention.
The truth was simpler and I knew it at the time. I did not want to be in that fortnight.
By the end of the first week I had one thousand and nine files tagged.
SLEEP, eight hundred and sixty-one. FEED, ninety-four. CRY, thirty-one. SPEECH, mostly mine, eighteen. OTHER, forty-one.
Forty-one shapes that did not belong.
On the third of December I got back at six and Ethan was standing at the stair gate with both hands on the bars.
He had learned in November to put his arms straight up without saying anything, which means lift me.
He weighed twenty-four pounds by then. My back knew it.
He put his hand on the side of my face and then took hold of my ear.
He did that in the middle of the day now, which was new, and which Dr. Moreno noted without comment.
Serena was in the morning room with the door open, on the phone, in a gray suit. She did not look up.
She had not spoken to me since the fourth of October.
The wedding date had come and gone on the twenty-fourth and nobody in that house said the word.
That night I sat at the table with the forty-one OTHER files listed on a sheet of paper.
Marco came in at nine with a folder under his arm and looked at the sheet.
“Forty-one,” he said.
“Most of them will be pipes.”
“Most of them will be pipes,” he agreed. “Play the ones that aren’t.”
I said I would start in the morning, when I was fresh.
He said, “You’ve said that for three days.”
I looked at the sheet. He was right and I did not enjoy it.
Somewhere in the middle of the list, between B1-0071 and B1-0083, was a line I had written on the tenth of November and walked past every night since.
B1-0079. 04:11. Thirty seconds. Not a feed, not a cry.