The Pale Room

Chapter One

The coffee had gone cold at her elbow and she had not seen it put there.

Cream, one sugar. Lucas made it that way without being asked and in five years had never once got it wrong, and he would have come in with it and set it down and gone back out, and she had been in this chair the whole time with her hands on the keys.

The clock in the corner of the screen said 11:47. She had opened the file at 9:15.

She checked it twice, the way you check a receipt you already believe. Two hours and thirty-two minutes. The artboard was the same artboard. The cursor sat where she had left it, blinking at the place the first mark should have gone, and the file's own record agreed with the cursor: last saved 9:15, nothing after.

She picked up the mug and drank some of it anyway.

The client ran a chain. Thirty-one properties across three provinces, the kind nobody remembers being inside of, and a flagship downtown with a terrazzo floor somebody had spent real money restoring in 1947 and nobody had looked at since. The brief wanted minimal and modern at once. She had read that line for the first time three weeks ago and known immediately what it meant, because she always knew. That was the part of the job she was good at, the reading, the thing people paid her for without being able to name it. It meant they wanted the building to look like it had always been this way and also like nobody had ever been in it. Two words at war, and her job was to put them on a key card.

She pulled up the competitor set. Eleven downtown properties in the same bracket, their signage photographed off the street on a gray Tuesday, and nine of them were doing the same tired gold script. One up near the airport strip had been rebranded twice in five years and the old letterforms still ghosted through the paint above the door, which was the only honest thing on the whole board, a building that couldn't get its own name to stay on it.

She'd built a folder of reference weeks ago. Lobby shots. Brass gone green at the seams. The slow expensive hush of places she had never stayed in and never would. There was one photograph in it she kept coming back to and could not have said why, a room-number plaque on a dark door, 307 in a plain serif, and behind it a corridor of identical doors running back to a point.

Somewhere in the scroll a news result she hadn't gone looking for. Some downtown hotel, a missing-persons appeal, a woman's face the size of a thumbnail, and something in the set of the mouth caught at her for less than a second, the way a word does when you have heard it somewhere and are not going to remember where. She swiped past it and it was gone by the next photograph.

None of it was going to turn into a logo. She saved all of it anyway.

She tried a wordmark. Just the letters, no symbol, set in a face she hated slightly less than the others, and she looked at it at the size it would sit on a key card and it died there, the letters crowding into a smudge. Large, it only looked lonely. She kerned the pair that had been bothering her, a hair tighter, then a hair looser.

The mark sat on the artboard being a font.

That was the trouble, and she had known it for days. Anyone could set letters in a clean face on a white ground. The job was the extra thing underneath the letters, the part that made a stranger hand over their card and their sleep to a building, and she had been circling that thing for three weeks without once putting her hand on it.

She deleted the artboard and made a new one.

At some point in the hour she stopped drawing the monogram and started drawing a room.

She did not decide to. A white ground, and the walls running off the edge of the artboard in all four directions, because a wall that stopped would have been wrong. No source anywhere for the light. Only the light.

It came fast and it came right, the way nothing had come all month.

She sat back with her hands off the keys and looked at it, and the apartment made its small noises around her, the fridge, a bus going by under the window, and the drawing sat there on the screen being the only good thing she had made since September.

Then she selected it and deleted it, because the client had asked for a mark and this was not a mark.

The other file was still open in the window behind, where it had been since October.

The therapist had given it to her in the first month. Write it down, she'd said. It stops being yours. She had been at it a week of mornings and then on and off ever since, and the whole document ran to eleven lines. She read them again. A white room, no corners. The walls running past the place where a wall is supposed to stop. The color gone out of them. Light from no direction she could name, and no temperature to the air, and someone standing close behind her that she could never turn far enough around to see.

All of it true. None of it right.

The dream was not made of things she could list. It was what it felt like to be standing in it, and that part went out of the words the second they were words.

She put the cursor at the end of the last bad line and left it there and added nothing, and after a while she closed the window.

The light in the apartment had not moved since nine.

It never did. Whatever the weather was doing out there, the place held one flat even white from morning to evening, and she had stopped noticing it years ago the way you stop noticing a hum. The cold came up through the floor into her socks. She pulled her knees into the chair and stayed small.

The phone buzzed once against the desk.

Morgan: coffee this week? I have gossip and you're wasting it

She answered without picking it up all the way.

Nina: swamped. soon though

Morgan: you said soon three weeks ago

Morgan: I'm writing it down now. there's a list.

She turned the phone face down.

Three weeks of Morgan asking and her saying soon. What Morgan wanted was a table out in the world somewhere and two coffees and a clear look at her across it, twenty minutes at most, and one good look was all it would take, and then the careful questions would start. She did not have the answers ready out loud. She had them ready enough at two in the morning, lying still, arranging them for nobody.

She meant to make lunch. Then it was ten past two and she hadn't.

The notification came in while her hands were somewhere else and her thumb went wrong on the glass, and instead of the app she was in the contacts, halfway down the M's before the wrong one registered.

Maya (don't call)

A Toronto number under it. She had not dialed it in longer than she let herself reckon and she knew every digit of it, and the name and the warning in their brackets had been dragged through four phones in eight years, exported and imported and sitting there each time, unchanged, waiting. She had put the brackets there herself, five years ago, and could not now have said who the instruction was for.

Her sister.

There used to be nobody closer. Now there was a closed door where that had been and she stood on her own side of it and did not knock, and that was the arrangement. She had made it with herself and kept it without much trouble most days.

She left me too was the shape the old ache took when she let it take a shape. It wasn't fair and it was true anyway, and she did not follow it any further than that.

She backed out of the contacts and put the phone face down beside the cold mug.

Lucas got in a little after three.

He kissed the top of her head on his way past and asked how the logo was coming and she said good, getting there, and the screen said otherwise behind her. He saw it. He did not say anything about it, and she pulled an old project into a fresh tab so the monitor would look busy, and he went to put his bag down.

He had not always let it go. The first couple of years he would have stood there and wanted the file open and the hours accounted for, and somewhere in all the therapy that had gone out of him without her watching it leave. Some days she missed the pushing.

He made pasta and talked while it cooked, the restructuring again, Jenkins finally retiring and leaving the reporting lines in a mess, two directors furious about it and one of them furious in a meeting. He told it well. He did the voices.

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, milk, the good coffee, bin bags, a card for someone whose name she had lost. The card. She had meant to buy it three days running now and lost it each time to something smaller.

Then he asked her what she thought and she surfaced a second too late.

"About what?"

He set his fork down. "I just spent five minutes explaining the whole thing."

"Sorry. Just tired."

"You're always tired lately."

He did not make it into anything. He picked the fork back up and finished the story to a person who was listening, 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.

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 with the television going low and he reached for her and she let him, easy, the way long practice is easy.

It had been two weeks. His hands knew the whole route after five years and her body answered as it had been taught, 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 was on the grocery list the whole way through. The heat was real and it happened some distance from her, in a room she could see into.

He said he loved her and she said it back. Both things were true.

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

There is a water stain over the bed, kidney-shaped. Yellowish brown. It has been there since she moved in, and the landlord promised and then stopped promising and then stopped mentioning it. She knows its outline now. Every lobe and inlet of it. A map she never once sat down to study and has anyway.

She lay under it and traced the edges with her eyes until the sounds in the other room stopped and the whole place went still around her.

Some time after that she slept.

At 3:07 she woke gasping.

The red numbers were 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 going on too far in every direction, the light from nowhere, the drowning whiteness of it, someone standing close behind her that she could not turn around far enough to see, all of it crowding onto one long breath before it let go and thinned out and left her in the dark with her own breathing.

Lucas did not wake. He was turned away from her, the duvet pulled to his shoulder, going up and down.

Sleep did not 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 went gray, and she was still watching it when the alarm went at seven.

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

She got up and opened the laptop and found the file from yesterday morning, the eleven lines that had never caught the feel of the place.

She read them through. They were still wrong. Still a list of the room's facts with the thing that made the room the room left out of them.

The cursor went on blinking at the end of the last bad line and she added nothing to it, and then she opened the artboard and started again on the hotel.

Chapter Two

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

A note leaned against it. Didn't want to wake you. Have a good day. L.

She drank half of it sitting up against the headboard. The logo file got one look on the way past, the deadline a day closer than it had been, and she put the laptop down on the kitchen table and reached for the phone instead.

Morgan had sent the link in August with a whole brunch lecture attached. Algorithms and birth charts, uncomfortably accurate, you have to try this. The thread had sat there since.

She opened it now.

It wanted a birthday and then a birth time to the minute, and she didn't have the minute, so she gave it the same half-remembered number she'd given the last form that asked. It wanted a photograph. She uploaded one without looking at which.

The chart came up as a wall of text and she read maybe a third of it. A rising sign. A square between two planets she'd never heard of. A moon it called difficult and didn't say why. There was a paragraph about an Anti-Vertex, fated encounters, karma, the sort of thing Morgan would underline and send on. The rest was paywalled.

She scrolled to the matches.

The app put a number on each stranger and the numbers ran along the bottom of their photographs in a font she'd have charged a client to talk them out of. Sixty-one. Fifty-three. Sixty-eight. A seventy-one.

Then one at ninety-four.

She looked at it for a while. Ten years of reading briefs had taught her what a number on a screen was for, and this one was doing the oldest job there was: it was a retention mechanic, set high enough to feel like an event and rare enough to feel earned, and somebody had chosen ninety-four rather than ninety-five because ninety-five is a round number and a round number looks decided. She could have drawn the meeting where they picked it.

She opened it anyway.

T.K. Forty. Toronto. The photograph was taken from a distance, a man at an outdoor table with a cup in front of him, his face too far off to read. Dark hair. The bio ran one line.

Here for the people who think too much at 3am.

She should have gone back to the logo. She typed instead, before the part of her that deleted things could get there.

Nina: 94%. Somebody in a meeting picked that number.

The three dots came up before the screen had settled.

T.K.: Probably. Two months on here and I've never been above eighty, so either they picked it for you or the algorithm has finally lost its mind.

Nina: Those are the same thing.

T.K.: They are. Should we find out which?

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

He did IT, he said. Databases 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.

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

T.K.: What's on the desk now?

Nina: Hotel rebrand. Chain, thirty-odd properties. They want minimal and modern at once.

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

Nina: 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.

Nina: You'd think so. 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 the second it stopped being true.

They got onto the small lies the work ran on, the that'll hold he typed while already planning the workaround, the blue logo she'd once described to a client as purple because purple was what he'd asked for and blue was what he wanted. The client loved it blue.

T.K.: Does the performing bother you?

Nina: I stopped noticing when I do it.

The dots came and went before he answered.

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

Nina: Maybe I'm not most people.

T.K.: No. You stop noticing because there's a version of you underneath that never started. She's the one I'm talking to.

She read it twice and told herself he'd guessed.

Nina: Lucky guess.

T.K.: Probably.

They got onto worst jobs. Eight months in a call center for him, and he still heard the hold music in elevators. She'd done two years in a print shop and told him about the afternoon she'd backed into the big-format printer, knocked it four inches into the wall, and stood there while a life-size banner of the mayor's face fed out slowly across the floor and came to rest over her shoes.

T.K.: That is the most I have ever wanted to have been somewhere.

They moved onto films. He liked slow ones. She liked horror.

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

Nina: Both. Mostly the second.

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

Nina: Someone walks into the basement and you already know and they don't, and somehow that's the relaxing part.

Nobody steered it onto music. It got there. 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.

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

T.K.: Whatever doesn't make me think. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes the same album until it gets light.

Nina: Which one.

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

The phone lit in her hand with Nasser's name across the top of it and the buzz went up her wrist. Her thumb silenced it. A few seconds later a text dropped into the space the call had been in.

Nasser: You coming Sunday.

She left it there.

He asked her, somewhere in the afternoon, what she'd wanted to be before logos, and she said a painter, badly, a long time ago, and he didn't laugh. She asked things back. He answered them straight and then the question came over the net again with her name on it, and four exchanges later she was talking about herself and could not have said how she'd got there.

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

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

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

Nina: No. You?

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

Nina: Same.

Then he asked about her family and she told him about her mother, which she had not planned to do. It came out the way a folded thing opens once you 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. Nina was nine. She believed it, because twenty minutes is a number you can count down and wait out.

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

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

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

She could see the stove clock from where she sat. The long hand and the slow one. Twenty minutes had no edge to it that she could find.

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

It was Maya who took it over. All of it, and she was fourteen. Five years older and acting forty, packing the lunches, 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 the same three jokes until Nina laughed.

Their father worked doubles and Maya did the rest, and nobody decided it out loud. Then four years later his heart stopped between one shift and the next and there was nobody left to decide it with. Maya was eighteen. She did not go where she had been going. She got work, and kept getting it, and what she made went on the table and into Nina's school fees and later into the tuition, and she did that for eleven years and never once said it was a thing she'd done.

There was a night Nina had never handed to anyone. Sixteen, a school trip due at seven the next morning and the fee gone from where it should have been. Maya came in past midnight in her work polo with the name tag still pinned crooked, counted bills out of her own pocket onto the kitchen table without being asked, didn't look up, and said, go to bed, I've got it, in a voice too tired to be anything but true.

Nina never once heard her complain about money in front of her. She found out later, going through boxes, that some months there hadn't quite been enough, and Maya had made the going-without look like nothing at all.

She braided Nina's hair every morning before school. Three over and under, fingers quick, never once pulling.

The table got left behind when they packed the place up, the chair still out on her mother's side. She hadn't thought about it in years.

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

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

T.K.: That stays with a person.

Nina: 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 somebody decides something. She half expected the obvious question, the where-is-she-now that anyone else would have sent.

He didn't send it.

She asked after his mother 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 through. They went back to smaller things.

Lucas came home while she was still in it, the door and the keys in the bowl and his voice down the hall asking how the day had gone. Fine, she said. Making progress. 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 one 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 down whenever he glanced over, and he glanced over less than he used to.

Afterward he took the loupe to the corner desk and bent over the flea-market watch he was bringing back, and the small sounds of it came across the room to her, 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. He set it down gently. It wasn't an accusation.

"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, and when she asked him the same back he stepped around it too.

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

Nina: Go ahead.

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

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

T.K.: Yeah. You do too.

The kitchen light hadn't moved, or she hadn't watched it move. Usually the hours just went. She'd been inside every one of these.

It was 11:11 when she looked up. She stared at the number, a child's habit she'd never managed to drop, and made a wish without meaning to, and a second later couldn't remember what it was.

Nina: I should go.

T.K.: Yeah. Me too.

Nina: Goodnight.

T.K.: Goodnight.

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

Ninety-four percent. Somebody in a meeting picked that number.

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.

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.

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 when she checked it.

She scrolled up through the whole night before she answered, first message to last. It read like old friends. None of it squared with the plain fact that yesterday morning he had been nobody to her.

Nina: I was asleep at 3. Just seeing this.

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

Nina: You said Toronto. On your profile.

T.K.: Yeah. You?

Nina: Same.

The 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, and she had put him somewhere else without once checking.

Nina: That's either a coincidence.

T.K.: Or it's four kilometers and an algorithm.

Nina: Say the other one.

T.K.: You say it.