The Pale Room

Chapter One

The therapist had told her to write the dream down, so she opened a new document and faced the white of the page. It came most nights now. It was always the same.

A white room, no corners. The walls ran on past the place where a wall was supposed to stop, washed out, the color gone out of them, and the light came from no direction she could name. The air there had no temperature. Someone stood close behind her, and she could never turn far enough around to see who it was.

She typed a sentence and took it back off the page. Tried another. She deleted that one too, because nothing she put down held the real feel of the place. A photograph of a room is never the room. The dream wasn't made of things she could list. It was how it felt to stand inside it, and that part went out of the words the second she wrote them.

She sat with her hands off the keys a while and let the cursor do its blinking without her. The therapist had made it sound simple. Put it on the page and it stops being yours. She'd been at the page a week of mornings now, and the dream still belonged to her down to the last white inch of it. The page took nothing.

None of the lines were right. She saved them anyway and closed the file.

The logo project opened to where she'd left it, which was nowhere. Her client ran a boutique hotel downtown, established 1947, and the brief wanted minimal and modern at once. Two words at war. The deadline was Friday and she had nothing.

She pulled up reference instead. Lobby shots, ceiling roses, brass gone green at the seams, the slow expensive hush of places she'd never stay in. One photo was a room-number plaque, 307 in a plain serif. She liked the brass and the clean cut of it, so she dropped it on the mood board and kept scrolling.

A dark wood desk. Then a bar under low gold light. A corridor of identical doors running back to a point. Somewhere in the mix a news result she hadn't gone looking for, some downtown hotel and a missing-persons appeal she didn't click, gone again by the next swipe. She read the rooms for the small choices in them, the weight of a font on a sign, the join where one material met another. None of them would turn into a logo. She saved them anyway.

The monogram was the part that wouldn't come. Its two initials were supposed to lock into one clean mark, and instead they fought her at every setting she tried. The kerning stayed wrong. A serif made it worse, a sans made it worse a different way, and after an hour the canvas was as empty as it had started.

The light in the room had not moved since nine. It never did. Whatever the weather was doing outside, the apartment held one flat even white from morning to evening, and she had stopped noticing it years ago the way you stop noticing a hum. She set the cursor at the top of the canvas and left it there. Cold came up through the floor into her socks, and she pulled her knees into the chair and stayed small.

The coffee sat by her elbow in the white ceramic mug, the handle chipped. Still a little warm, so Lucas had set it down on his way out and she hadn't registered him do it. Cream, one sugar, exactly right. Five years, and he'd never once gotten it wrong.

She clicked back to the logo file, where the cursor blinked at the spot the first mark should have gone. The clock read 11:47. She'd opened the file at 9:15, which put two hours behind her with nothing made inside them. She noted it and let it close over.

Her shoulder had gone stiff in the chair. She dug a thumb into the knot of it and held until the dull ache answered.

The phone buzzed once against the desk.

Morgan: Coffee this week? Haven't seen you forever.

She answered without picking it up all the way.

Mina: Swamped with work. Soon though.

Three weeks now of Morgan asking and her saying soon. What Morgan wanted was a table out in the world somewhere, two coffees, a clear look at her across it. One good look and the careful questions would start, and Mina didn't have the answers ready out loud. She turned the phone face down.

She meant to make lunch, and then it was past two and she hadn't.

The phone lit a few times through the afternoon and she let it lie. A parcel left with a neighbor, a sale at a shop she'd bought one thing from years ago. She turned each notice over without opening it and set the phone back down.

At some point she was standing at the open fridge with the cold air spilling out over her bare feet. She'd come in for something. Whatever it was had gone. She closed the door on the lit shelves and went back to the desk and the file that hadn't changed.

Lucas got in a little after three. He kissed the top of her head and asked how the logo was coming. She told him it was good, she was making progress. The screen said otherwise. He saw it and said nothing, and she pulled an old project into a fresh tab so the monitor would look busy.

He hadn't always let it go. The first couple of years he'd have pushed, wanted the file open and the lost hours accounted for, and somewhere in the therapy that had gone out of him without her seeing it leave. Now he asked nothing he didn't want answered. She missed the pushing sometimes. Some days she couldn't tell his growth from a quieter way of giving up.

They settled across from each other at the kitchen table. Or he worked, and she kept the mouse moving in small slow circles, a busy hand over a still file. At some point he crossed to the kettle and came back with a fresh Earl Grey by her elbow, the string hooked over the rim. She didn't drink it. He answered an email with one hand and reached across to straighten her coaster with the other, a small housekeeping of her done without looking up.

A notification lit the phone. Her thumb went wrong on the glass and dropped her into contacts instead of the app, and she was halfway down the names before the wrong one registered. Maya (don't call). A Toronto number under it she hadn't dialed in longer than she let herself reckon, just the name and the warning she'd set in the brackets, an entry dragged through every phone she'd ever owned.

She didn't call it. That was the arrangement, the one she'd made with herself and kept without much trouble most days. Her sister. There used to be no one closer, and now there was a closed door where that had been, and Mina stood on her own side of it and didn't knock. Her throat tightened on the name. She left me too was the shape the old ache took, which wasn't fair and was true anyway, and she didn't follow it any further than that.

She backed out and put the phone face down.

Lucas made pasta and talked while it cooked, the work restructuring again, the same as last week. Jenkins was finally retiring and leaving the reporting lines in a mess, and there was a question now of who'd take the floor and whether it reached down as far as his team. He moved around the small kitchen while he said it, the wooden spoon, the colander, the salt held high over the pot. The sauce needed longer than he gave it, and neither of them had said so in five years. She nodded on cue.

The list ran on behind her eyes the whole time he spoke. Milk, the good coffee, the bin bags they were nearly out of, a card for someone whose name she'd lost. The card. She'd meant to buy it three days running now and lost it each time to something smaller. The steam off the pasta water fogged the window over the sink, and his voice came through it even and warm, asking nothing of her that she had to answer yet.

Then he asked what she thought, and she surfaced a second too late. "About what?" she said, and watched him set his fork down.

"I just spent five minutes explaining the whole thing."

"Sorry. Just tired."

He told her she was always tired lately. He didn't make it into anything, and she ate because the plate was in front of her and the hour called for it. The pasta had no taste she could find. She got it down anyway, fork to mouth on a borrowed rhythm, watching the small certain movements of his hands as he ate across from her.

He cleared the plates and ran the tap. She should have got up to help. She stayed where she was.

Later they were on the couch together with the television going low. He reached for her and she let him, easy the way long practice is easy. It had been two weeks. The wanting was polite on both sides, and his hands knew the whole route after five years, her body answering as it had been taught. His mouth found her neck and his weight settled over her and the cushion gave under them, and the television threw its changing light across the ceiling, and she let her eyes go up and track it.

She got there in the end, her mind on the grocery list the whole way through. The heat was real. He said he loved her and she said it back, and both things were true, and neither of them felt like anything she could hold.

Later she went to bed by herself, Lucas still somewhere in the apartment behind her. She lay on her back in the dark and looked up.

There's a water stain over the bed, kidney-shaped. Yellowish brown, there since she moved in, the landlord promising and then not promising and then not mentioning it again. It stayed. She traced its edges with her eyes, the long curve of it, the narrow end, the way it bled at one side where the damp had spread and dried and spread again. She knew its outline by now, every lobe and inlet of it, a map she'd never sat down to study and had anyway.

She lay under the stain and kept tracing it until the sounds in the other room stopped and the whole place went still around her.

At 3:07 AM she woke gasping, the red numbers of the clock the first thing she fixed on, and the dream came down on her all at once, the white room and the walls washed out and the drowning whiteness and someone standing close behind her she couldn't turn toward, all of it crowding in on a single long line before it let go and left her in the dark with her own breathing.

She went to the kitchen. Ran the tap cold and drank a glass standing at the window. The street below was empty, the pavement lit orange under the lamps, nothing moving.

Sleep didn't come again. She lay under the stain and watched the dark lighten by degrees, the kidney shape coming back out of the ceiling as the room grew gray, and she was still watching it when the alarm went at seven.

Lucas showered and dressed and came in to kiss her forehead, his coat already on. The door closed.

She opened the laptop. Found the file from yesterday morning, the handful of lines that hadn't caught the real feel of the place. She read what she'd written and it was still wrong, still a list of the room's facts without the thing that made the room the room. The cursor went on blinking at the end of the last bad line, and she added nothing to it.

Chapter Two

The coffee was on the nightstand when she woke, still warm, cream and one sugar. His way. He'd set it down and left her sleeping, as he had every morning for months, the mug turned so the handle faced her hand.

A note leaned against the mug, and she read it before she let herself drink. Didn't want to wake you. Have a good day. \-L. Five years on, and he still got the cup right, the cream and the one sugar measured out exactly, like it cost him nothing to know her this well.

She showered and dressed. The laptop went onto the kitchen table, and the logo file got exactly one look before she closed it again, the deadline a day closer, and she reached for the phone instead.

Morgan had sent the link months back, some astrology app with a whole brunch lecture about algorithms and birth charts. "You have to try this," she'd said. "It's uncomfortably accurate." The thread had sat unread since, like everything did lately.

She opened it now. It wanted a birthday, then a birth time down to the minute. She didn't have the minute, so she gave the same half-remembered number from an old document she'd lost. She uploaded a photo without checking which one.

The chart loaded as a wall of text she read maybe a third of. A rising sign. A square between two planets she'd never heard of, and a moon the app called difficult without saying why. There was a line about an Anti-Vertex, fated encounters and karma and past lives, the sort Morgan would underline. The rest was paywalled, so she scrolled down to the matches.

The app put a number on each stranger, and she thumbed past them, sixty-one and fifty-three and sixty-eight. One at seventy-one. Then, near the bottom, one she stopped at, higher than the rest by a long way.

T.K., forty, Toronto. The photo was a distance shot, a man at an outdoor table, his face too far to read. Dark hair, and a bio one line long that said he was here for the people who think too much at 3am.

Ninety-four percent.

She checked it twice in case the app had glitched. Sixty-eight was next.

She should have worked. She typed instead, before she could think better of it.

Mina: 94%. That's high.

The three dots came up before the screen had settled.

T.K.: Highest I've seen too. Two months on here, never above eighty.

Mina: No idea what it even means.

Mina: My friend Morgan would know. She's the one into this.

T.K.: Should we find out?

She didn't answer straight. She asked him something small instead, and he asked one back. It didn't feel like starting. It felt like picking something up partway through, a thread already running.

He did IT, he said. Database work for a hospital downtown, servers and tickets and people who deleted the thing themselves and swore they hadn't. She did logos. Mostly for people who didn't know what they wanted until they saw what they didn't.

T.K.: So you read minds for a living.

Mina: I read minds people don't know they have. They hate it, then they pay the invoice.

T.K.: What are you working on now?

Mina: Hotel rebrand. Boutique place, nothing fancy.

T.K.: Do you like it? The work.

Mina: Sometimes. When the client knows what they want, which is almost never.

T.K.: And you're the opposite, I'd guess. Someone who always knows what she wants.

Mina: You'd think so. No. I haven't known what I wanted from a Tuesday in years.

T.K.: Wrong, then. Noted.

He didn't defend the guess. She liked that, a man who could put a theory down as soon as it stopped being true.

T.K.: Did you study it? The design.

Mina: No. English. Which is what people study when they want to be told they have taste.

Mina: I fell into the other thing after. It pays on time.

They talked about the small lies the work ran on, the that'll-hold he typed while already planning the workaround. A blue logo she'd once called purple. The client loved it blue. He asked if the performing bothered her, and she told him she'd stopped noticing when she did it.

T.K.: When you lie?

Mina: When I perform.

The dots came and went on his side before he answered.

T.K.: Most people wouldn't say that.

Mina: Maybe I'm not most people.

T.K.: No. You're not.

T.K.: You stop noticing the performing because there's a version of you underneath that never started. She's the one I'm talking to.

She read that twice. It hit too square, named a thing she'd never put words to, and she told herself he'd guessed, that it was the kind of line that fit anyone if you squinted.

Mina: Lucky guess.

T.K.: Probably.

They got into worst jobs. He'd done eight months in a call center and still heard the hold music in elevators sometimes. She'd worked a print shop once and told him about the day she'd backed into the big-format printer, knocked it into the wall, and stood there while a four-foot banner of the mayor's face fed out slowly across the floor and came to rest over her shoes. He said that was the most he'd ever wanted to have been somewhere.

T.K.: We're bonding over misery. That's a sign of something.

They moved off work and onto movies. He liked slow films. She liked horror. He found that interesting.

T.K.: Horror as in actually scared, or horror as in you like watching people make bad decisions.

Mina: Both. Mostly the second one.

T.K.: So you watch them for the comfort.

Mina: You watch someone walk into the basement and you already know, and they don't, and somehow that's the relaxing part.

T.K.: That's a very specific kind of comfort.

Mina: It works.

They drifted onto music next. Nobody steered it. She had a playlist she put on when she worked that she'd never shown anyone, not even Lucas, because explaining it would mean explaining the mood it was for and she didn't have words for that yet.

Mina: What do you listen to when you can't sleep.

T.K.: Whatever doesn't make me think too hard. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes the same album until morning.

Mina: Which one.

T.K.: I'll tell you when I know you better.

Mina: Fair.

It went on like that, quick and easy, each answer making room for the next one before she'd finished it. She kept waiting for the lull where a stranger runs out of things to say. It never came.

Her phone lit in her hand, Nasser's name across the top, the buzz of it cutting into the thread. She thumbed it silent. She never quite decided to, and she kept her eyes on what T.K. had just sent. A few seconds later a text dropped down where the call had been.

Nasser: You coming Sunday.

She left it there and went back to the thread. Nasser had been the one to fold her into all of it, the Sunday tables and the weddings and the funerals where everyone knew everyone. Sunday could keep.

She told him she was always performing, that she'd forgotten how to stop. He didn't think she was. She asked how he could possibly know a thing like that about a stranger he had never met.

T.K.: Because you keep saying you don't know. Nobody performs not knowing.

T.K.: Can I ask you something real?

Mina: You've been asking real things for an hour.

T.K.: Fair. Do you believe in this? The chart, the number.

Mina: No. You?

T.K.: No. But I'm still here.

Mina: Same.

He asked about her family, and she told him about her mother, which she hadn't planned to do. It came out the way a folded thing opens, once you finally stop holding it shut.

Her mother said twenty minutes. Going to the store, twenty minutes, the door already half open behind her, the cardigan blue and the sneakers white. Mina was nine, and she'd believed it, because twenty minutes was a number you could count down and wait out.

Mina: My dad waited at the kitchen table with me. Past dinner. Past the news. Until midnight.

Mina: Then he said she wasn't coming back.

He'd made tea around nine, two cups, because nine was the hour her mother usually wanted one. He set hers across. He didn't drink it, and he kept his hands around his own long after it sat there cold. Her chair he never moved, and it stayed pulled out a little, on her side, for years.

She could still see the stove clock from where she'd sat, the long hand and the slow one. Twenty minutes had no real edge to it. A number could be a thing someone handed you to hold while they left.

There'd been a letter, she found out later, left where her father would find it and not her. She never read it. By the time she was old enough to ask for it, it was gone, and asking only made the room go quiet in a way she'd learned to leave alone.

It was Maya who took it over after that, all of it, though she was only fourteen herself. Five years older, acting forty, packing the lunches and signing the school forms in a careful copy of a grown woman's hand, sitting on the edge of the bed on the nights the dark wouldn't settle and telling her the same three jokes until she laughed. She raised her. Their father worked doubles and her sister did the rest, and nobody ever decided it out loud, and then four years later his heart stopped between one shift and the next and there was nobody to decide it with. Maya was eighteen. She did not go where she'd been going. She got work instead, and kept getting it, and what she made went on the table and into Mina's school fees and later into the tuition, and she did that for eleven years without once saying it was a thing she'd done.

There was a night Mina had never handed to anyone, not Lucas, not the therapist with her gentle questions. Sixteen, a school trip due at seven the next morning and the fee gone missing from where it should have been, and Maya coming in past midnight in her work polo with her name tag still pinned crooked, counting bills out of her own pocket onto the kitchen table without being asked, not looking up, saying only, go to bed, I've got it, in a voice too tired to be anything but true. Mina never once heard her complain about money in front of her. She only found out later, going through boxes, that some months there hadn't quite been enough of it, and Maya had made the going-without look like nothing at all.

Maya braided her hair every morning before school, three over and under, fingers quick, never once pulling. Mina had loved her the uncomplicated way you love the person who stays.

The table got left behind when they packed up the place, the chair still pulled out on her mother's side. She'd forgotten it until tonight, and she'd never once told Lucas any of it in five years of telling him things.

She'd given Lucas a version of the rest once, flat, like reading off a file. This was more. Her throat was tight and her eyes hot by the time she'd sent the whole of it to a stranger.

Mina: My older sister did most of the raising after that. Maya. She was fourteen herself.

T.K.: That stays with a person.

Mina: It was a long time ago.

T.K.: Doesn't make it not matter.

She waited. There was a beat on his side, the kind where a person decides something. She half expected the next question, the obvious one, the where-is-she-now that anyone else would have sent. He didn't. He moved on the way you do when you already know the room and don't need the tour.

His mother she asked after carefully, leaving room around the question.

T.K.: We called her Rania. She had these eyes. You'd meet them once and not forget.

She asked what she'd been like. He gave her a sentence that stopped partway. They moved back to smaller things.

Lucas came home while she was still in it, the door and the keys in the bowl and his voice asking how the day had gone. Fine, she said, making progress, and he believed it the easy way he believed her when she sounded like herself. She turned the phone face-down.

He made dinner, and she didn't watch a single part of him doing it. The food arrived plated. He talked while they ate, a name retiring, a migration pushed to next week, and she made the sounds that go in the gaps. The screen lit under her hand between his sentences. She picked it up and set it back down whenever he glanced over, and he glanced over less than he used to.

Afterward he went to the corner desk and put the loupe in his eye and bent over the flea-market watch he was bringing back, and the small sounds of it reached her from the couch, tweezers on the tray, a part set down on felt, the little screwdriver finding its slot. He could sit like that for two hours and want nothing from anyone.

"You've been on that phone all night," he said. Not an accusation, just set down gently.

"Work thing." It came out easy, and she watched herself say it. He said he was turning in. She said a while longer. He went, and the apartment quieted, and she stayed at the table with the screen bright against the dark window.

They kept going. He asked a married-sounding question, light, and she stepped around it. When she asked him the same back, he stepped around it too, and neither of them minded. The room she should have been in was one wall away, and she stayed where she was.

They talked about fate, whether you could be fated to something you walked into by accident, whether the accident still counted if you'd chosen it.

T.K.: Can I ask you something else.

Mina: Go ahead.

T.K.: Do you think we've met before.

Mina: I don't know. You feel familiar.

T.K.: Yeah. You do too.

The light in the kitchen hadn't moved, or she hadn't been watching it move while the hours slid past. Usually they just went. This time she'd been inside every one of them.

It was 11:11 when she looked up. She stared at the number, a child's habit, and made a wish without meaning to, and a second later couldn't remember what it was.

Mina: I should go.

T.K.: Yeah. Me too.

Mina: Goodnight.

T.K.: Goodnight.

She plugged the phone in. Lucas was already asleep, his back to her side, the duvet pulled to his shoulder. She lay down beside him in the dark, close enough to feel the warmth of him, and looked at the ceiling.

Ninety-four percent. You feel familiar.

The numbers on the clock moved. She didn't. She'd told a stranger about the chair her father never moved, told it before she'd told it to herself, and in the dark it would not lie down.

She told herself it was a tired thing, a whole day spent talking to a stranger, nothing more than that. People did it. She believed it for about a minute at a time, then lost it, then found it again. Lucas's breathing went on, steady and even, the whole length of him turned away.

In the morning the phone was the first thing, before she was properly awake. One message waited at the top of the thread, sent at 3:07 AM.

T.K.: Can't sleep. Keep thinking about our conversation.

She'd been asleep at 3:07, flat asleep, the kind with no edges to it. The watch agreed. She looked at the timestamp twice, the same way she'd looked at the ninety-four twice, making sure she had it right. He'd been awake, thinking about her, while she was somewhere with no edges at all.

She scrolled up through the night before answering, the whole thread from the first message to the last. It read like old friends. None of it squared with the plain fact that yesterday morning he had been nobody to her. She'd dreamed again, too, and she didn't type that to him.

Mina: I was asleep at 3\. Just seeing this.

T.K.: Good. One of us should have been.

Mina: You said Toronto. On your profile.

T.K.: Yeah. You?

Mina: Same.

The three dots came up and held there a beat longer than usual.

T.K.: Same city. This whole time.

She read it again. The app had shown her a distance shot, an outdoor table, a city that could have been anywhere. She'd assumed some other city without asking.

Mina: That's either a coincidence.

T.K.: Or fate. If you believe in that.

Mina: Starting to.