Carey’s Recovery
Eight months of a room makes a person who knows what rooms can contain.
Carey || Recovery || Debrief || Future
She went to see him on the fourth day, when he had slept enough and eaten enough and the specific quality of his eyes — which had been on arrival the eyes of someone who has had access to only their own thoughts for too long and is now carefully relearning the scope of a larger world — had settled into something more like his ordinary self, or so she assumed, having no prior reference for his ordinary self except the wall-writing, which was a very particular kind of self-expression. He was sitting up in the medical facility cot with a cup of tea and a newspaper from Marten that was three days old and was reading it with the concentrated attention of a man catching up on a world that has continued operating in his absence. He set the newspaper down when she came in and looked at her with the directness that had characterised every conversation they had had since she found him. “How are they?” he asked. He meant the patients. “Stable,” she said. “The third-floor patients are all accounted for. Second floor patients are being assessed. Several will need specialist care that Coldmoor was not providing — a fact that will appear prominently in the report.” He nodded. “Voss?” “Still at the Institute. Under effective custody — the investigators are with him.” She paused. “He has been, by all accounts, extremely cooperative.” “He would be,” Carey said. “At this stage, cooperation is his best position. He’ll be trying to manage the scope of what they understand.” “He won’t succeed,” she said. “The Bruck report is too comprehensive.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he asked: “What happens to the thing in Room Seven? To Kehl?” She had been thinking about this question since the moment she had backed through the door and left the second room. The investigators had called it a complex case. The additional personnel with different kinds of expertise had arrived by the third day, and she had spoken briefly with one of them — a man who had the specific manner of someone whose professional life consisted entirely of things that were not in any standard operational manual — and he had said, with deliberate precision: “The individual in the additional space is being assessed. His situation is — unusual. We are proceeding carefully.” She had not pressed further. “I don’t know,” she told Carey honestly. “I know that he was a person once, and that what was done to him was done to him without his full understanding of what it would cost. Which makes him a victim of it as much as anyone in that building.” Carey was quiet for a long time. “What kind of person can survive that?” he said. Not rhetorically — seriously, as a clinical question. “The kind,” she said slowly, “who is given no other option. And possibly — only possibly — the kind who believed, at some point, that what was being done was for a reason. That the cost was worth something.” He looked at the newspaper. “Was it?” She considered this with the full weight of everything she had seen and done in thirty-three days. “No,” she said. “No. It wasn’t. Not for him and not for the forty-one people in that building and not for the decades of people before them.” She paused. “But it is over. Or it is ending. That has to be enough for now.” He looked at her with the long, clear assessment of someone who has had eight months to develop an extremely accurate read of another person from a very small amount of evidence. “You’re exhausted,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “Then go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.” She looked at him. “Neither am I,” she said. And went to sleep.