Chapter One: The Signature

The first thing Martin Sloane noticed was that his shoes had been polished. He had been meaning to have them polished since Easter, but it was August now, and Martin had never been particularly efficient about the maintenance of his own possessions. The second thing he noticed was that he could not remember coming to the room in which the shoes sat, side by side, beneath a narrow wooden chair.

It was a hospital room only in the sense that it contained a bed and somebody had gone to considerable trouble to make the bed unpleasant. There were no monitors, no tubes, no flowers waiting to die in a glass cylinder. On the opposite wall hung a reproduction of a sailboat traversing a greenish sea, and beneath it a clock that read eleven seventeen. The minute hand advanced while Martin watched. He examined the heel of his left shoe for the familiar scuff and found none.

A woman entered carrying a clipboard and a small paper cup of water. She had the healthy, private face of someone who knew the end of a story and intended to enjoy watching the beginning. She introduced herself as Nora Venn, patient liaison, and congratulated him on completing the first phase of his stay.

Martin asked where he was. Nora said that information was available in the orientation materials. He asked what the first phase had involved. She replied that the first phase included the part he was not expected to remember. She was not evasive in the manner of a person concealing a crime. She was evasive in the manner of someone explaining the bus schedule to a man who had asked why buses were necessary.

He sat up too quickly. There was a little resistance beneath his breastbone, the aftertaste of an anesthetic perhaps, although nothing was sore. A paper bracelet encircled his right wrist. Instead of a hospital identification number it carried a six-digit code and two words: VOLUNTARY PARTICIPANT.

"I am not a participant," he said.

"That is a very common reaction," Nora told him. "We record it without prejudice."

Martin had spent twenty-three years adjusting claims for a regional insurance carrier. There were ways in which people spoke when they expected to be sued, and this woman spoke like an institution that had learned to sue first. He asked for his telephone. Nora retrieved it from a drawer, together with his wallet and a small sealed envelope. The phone had a full battery and no service. His wallet contained his driver's license, forty dollars, and a photograph of his daughter at twelve. He had removed that photograph from the wallet the previous winter, following a disagreement that had lasted longer than either of them expected. It was back again, protected by transparent plastic.

"Where did you get this?"

"Your belongings were inventoried," Nora said. "The envelope is yours as well."

On the envelope, in his own familiar writing, someone had written: READ THIS ONLY IF THEY ASK YOU TO CHOOSE. He recognized the peculiar way he made the capital R, bending its leg inward like a broken knee. He turned the envelope over. It was sealed with blue tape.

He asked to leave. Nora nodded, as though she had been waiting for the conversation to become useful, and laid a bound document on the bed. The cover identified it as a CONSENT AND CONTINUITY AGREEMENT, edition forty-one. Martin's name appeared on the first page. Beneath it was his signature and a date six months earlier. Every subsequent page was initialed, including a page devoted to withdrawal.

"You may withdraw at any time," Nora said. "There is a procedure."

"What sort of procedure?"

"The sort to which you agreed."

Martin turned to the final page. Under a paragraph titled REAFFIRMATION, there was another signature, his signature, dated tomorrow.

The ink looked dry. For several seconds he had the peculiar sensation that tomorrow was simply another department of this institution, one he had not yet been permitted to visit. Then he remembered the clock. It was eleven seventeen and the seconds were passing with admirable confidence. He had no reason to believe in tomorrow's signature. He had only the evidence of his hand.

Nora watched him look at it. "Most people begin by asking whether the date is a mistake," she said.

"Is it?"

"That depends on what you decide to do today."

Outside the window, too high to see out of while seated, something metallic struck something else three times. The sound was answered from a greater distance. Nora picked up the clipboard. "We can start with the agreement, your personal recording, or the withdrawal procedure. No wrong answers are recorded here, Mr. Sloane. Only answers."

Martin had never liked the word voluntary. It appeared in the company handbook alongside other words that meant the opposite of what they suggested, such as adjustment and courtesy. At his office a voluntary transfer was a transfer that occurred after an employee had exhausted the alternatives. A voluntary settlement meant that the claimant had decided that eating was more important than litigation. It seemed entirely in character for the word to be printed on the wrist of a man who could not remember arriving at the place that had printed it.

He examined the bracelet. The plastic was warm against his skin, and the lettering had begun to blur at the edge where his thumb worried it. He found a thumbnail-sized notch in the fastening and discovered that pulling the band tighter was much easier than loosening it. The design was familiar from hospitals, concerts, prisons, and amusement parks. Modern society, he thought, had settled on one mechanism for indicating that a person belonged temporarily to someone else.

Nora permitted him to stand. Permission was not expressly requested, but she watched him get to his feet with an expression that made it feel granted. His knees were stiff. There was a smear of violet ink inside his left elbow, where a needle had been removed. Beyond the window lay a concrete courtyard with a fountain in the shape of a broken ring. Three pigeons stood on the rim, evaluating the water. The building across from his room had white shutters, two of them open. In one window a person raised an arm. Martin waved back automatically. The person did not move again.

'Who is that?'

Nora looked out. 'Which person?'

'In the building.'

'Employees use that building. It isn't restricted.'

'I didn't ask whether it was restricted.'

'No,' she said. 'You asked who it was.'

He had been married once to a woman who could distinguish between a question and its intention with equally exasperating precision. Catherine had been a teacher, and she insisted that an answer did not become incorrect merely because a person disliked it. When their marriage failed, Martin had considered the collapse sudden. Catherine had offered him seven years of documentation to the contrary. He had declined to review it.

The ward contained six doors, all alike except for the numerals painted above the handles. His was Room Three. Opposite stood Room Four, where a young man in a paper robe sat at a table and ate a pear without looking up. A second door opened onto an empty room containing an unmade bed and a bouquet of flowers in a wastebasket. At the end of the corridor a woman in a green cardigan was arguing softly with an attendant about her shoes. She wanted the shoes she had arrived in. The attendant assured her they were the shoes she was wearing. The woman looked down at the brown loafers on her feet and seemed, for the moment, unable to decide whether she had won.

Martin asked whether everyone on the ward had signed the same agreement. Nora said that the agreements differed according to the needs of the study. He asked whether all of them suffered from memory loss. She said memory loss was not a useful term for what the institute did. He asked whether the young man with the pear was there voluntarily. Nora stopped walking.

'Would his answer be more convincing than yours?'

It was an annoying question because it deserved an answer. Martin found that he wanted the young man to be a prisoner, since a prisoner would prove the facility's dishonesty; or an employee, since an employee would provide an explanation. The possibility that the man had entered freely, like Martin apparently had, supplied neither comfort nor evidence.

At the nurses' station a television played silently. The screen showed a weather forecast with a red band of thunderstorms moving eastward. Beneath it, a news ticker announced the arrest of a city official. Martin recognized the official's name. He had read about the investigation before coming here, or believed he had. The ticker disappeared; a commercial for patio furniture replaced it. He tried to recall whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. When Nora told him the date, he discovered that he had been counting the days from an event he could not identify.

A telephone stood on the reception desk. It had a long black cord and a strip of masking tape over the manufacturer's name. He asked whether it was connected to an outside line. The attendant answered that some calls were permitted. Martin reached toward it, and the attendant drew a sheet of paper from beneath the telephone as neatly as a magician producing a card.

The paper was a request for external communication. There were boxes for the identity of the person to be contacted, the purpose of the conversation, whether the conversation might influence a pending decision, and whether the participant was willing to authorize a recording. Martin filled in his daughter's name and stopped at the box asking whether the call was necessary.

Necessary to what? He could not know. He knew only that he wanted her to hear him breathing. The institute could probably classify that as an objective, or an emotional dependency, or a measurable behavior that proved the need for the institute. For the first time in his life he wanted to write something indecent on an official form. Instead he wrote: I NEED TO KNOW SHE IS SAFE.

The attendant read it without expression. 'We can pass that request along.'

'When?'

'When it has been reviewed.'

'By whom?'

'People who are authorized to review it.'

Martin regarded the pen. It was one of those cheap promotional pens distributed by insurance companies, black with a silver clip, and on its side was stamped a phrase he had once used in meetings: PEACE OF MIND IS A CHOICE. The phrase had won a marketing award several years earlier. He wondered if the institute was mocking him, or if everybody had simply been selling the same lie for so long that it had become a form of office equipment.

On the way back to Room Three, a door across the corridor opened. A man stepped out carrying a cardboard box filled with folded clothes. He wore trousers and a tie and appeared no more distressed than someone checking out of a hotel after a disappointing conference. Nora nodded to him. He nodded back. Martin waited until they were past the man before asking whether he had completed the study.

'He completed the portion he was scheduled to complete,' Nora said.

'And he can leave?'

'He's leaving.'

'Will I be able to leave?'

Nora looked at the door through which the man had passed. 'You may leave,' she repeated. 'The question you keep asking is whether you'll like the conditions.'

In his room the sailboat had acquired a second occupant, or Martin noticed for the first time a pale shape seated near its stern. He stood close enough to see the paint cracked along the horizon. Under the frame, scratched into the wall with a pointed object, were four words: I ASKED THIS TOO. The scratches had been painted over at least once. Whoever had made them had pressed hard enough to leave a groove.

Martin sat on the bed and opened his wallet. He took out Alice's photograph, flattened the softened corners, and tried to remember exactly when he had decided it was important to punish his daughter by removing her picture. The reason had once seemed excellent. He could remember its excellence but not the reason itself. The image showed her in a red sweater with a missing front tooth. She was smiling because someone had told her to. He had told her to.

A sound came through the wall. Three knocks, separated by pauses. He knocked back once without thinking. The other room became quiet. A minute later there was a soft scraping, as if a chair were being dragged across the floor. Martin wondered whether he had answered a signal or merely disturbed somebody having a worse morning than his own.

Nora returned with a paper menu for lunch. The choices were vegetable soup, chicken salad, and a sandwich whose contents were identified only as protein. Martin chose soup. Nora marked the selection and asked whether he would prefer the agreement, the recording, or the withdrawal procedure first. He asked whether the menu had been a test.

'Everything can be a test,' she said. 'That doesn't mean everything is one.'

He watched her leave and wondered which of those two propositions she had expected him to find comforting.