With the Lamp On

For ten years nobody had been able to smell what Megan wanted — not the three alphas she worked nights beside, not Megan herself — and tonight that started to end. The light went blue an hour before her shift and stayed that way, the whole campus sunk in it, the snow holding the color after the sky had let it go. She came up the clinic steps at twenty to seven with her parka zipped to her chin and her breath going white in front of her, and the thermometer bolted beside the staff entrance read nine below, and she believed it. The door took a hip and both hands. Inside, the heat hit her like walking into a held breath.

That was the first thing, every night: the wall of it. The clinic ran its heating the way it ran everything else, generously and according to a policy written by somebody who worked days. By the time she had the parka off and on its peg she could feel the pink coming up across her throat and her chest, the blotchy flush the building always gave her, fair skin objecting to a seventy-degree swing, and her scrubs sat tight across her chest and hips where the parka had flattened everything down and let it spring back. Her hair was already thinking about coming down. It was honey-blonde and too thick for any claw clip ever made, and she had twisted it up in the car and it had not approved. By four in the morning it would be half down, as always, and she would clip it back up at the charting desk without looking, as always.

The corridor clock above the nurses' station said 18:44. Black-rimmed, institutional, the same clock as every room in the building. Sixteen minutes of her own time left, and she meant to spend them the way she had planned, which was getting the whole business over with before the shift could touch it.

The pharmacy hatch was lit at the end of the corridor, the only bright window down there, and Karim was behind it with her card already on the counter.

Of course he had it ready. She had told exactly three people about the taper — her manager, the day resident who had countersigned the request, and Karim, because Karim was the one who would be counting it out — and she had told each of them in the flat voice she used for catheters and bedsores, the voice that said this is a task, and somehow Karim had still managed to make it into a lit window with everything laid out waiting, like a table set for one.

"Evening, Megan." Warm face, very dark eyes under heavy black brows, the close-clipped hair and the short neat beard; he had a pencil behind his ear and his broad careful hands resting either side of her file like a man about to deal. "Step one. You want water?"

"I want to not make a thing of it."

"It's not a thing." He said it kindly and without believing it for a second, and slid the card across the counter.

She had seen the card before, in the day resident's office in October, but it was different under the hatch light with her name typed across the top. Twenty-one boxes, a date printed in each, the first of December in the top left corner and the twenty-first down at the bottom right, a tidy three-week grid, and beside every box a little ruled space for two sets of initials. Hers, and whoever dispensed. Twenty-one tiny ceremonies she had not exactly agreed to.

"I have to read it to you," Karim said. "Protocol. You can look at the wall if you like."

"I'll look at the card."

So he read it. The dose, which was smaller than the bottle she had collected monthly for ten years — the first cut, he said, and each step down smaller again, the shape of a staircase. The schedule: one tablet a night, dispensed at the hatch at the start of her shift, initialed by both of them, no doses carried off, none taken home. The dates. He read every single date aloud, all twenty-one, in his exact unhurried voice, and she stood there in the heat of the building with the flush crawling up her neck, irritated out of all proportion and knowing it, because it was not the reading. It was that he knew them already. He had read her dates before she ever walked in. Somewhere behind that counter was a man who knew, on any given night in December, exactly where her body stood in its arithmetic — better than she did.

"Tuesday the first," he finished, "through Monday the twenty-first. And then the last box." He touched the bottom right corner of the card with one careful finger, not quite landing on it. "Any questions?"

"Yeah. Does everybody get the radio play, or is it just me?"

"Everybody gets it." Not rising to it, not apologizing either. He counted one tablet out of the blister into a paper cup, a white disc the size of her smallest fingernail, and set a second cup beside it already filled with water, because of course he had known she would take it standing at his hatch rather than carry it six yards down the corridor like a woman with a private life. She took it. It tasted of nothing. It had tasted of nothing for ten years, and the nothing was about to start coming back — that was the whole point — and she initialed box one and watched Karim countersign it, his initials small and exact beside hers, and that was step one: done, witnessed, on the record.

Then Lewis caught her at the treatment room door and the rest of her privacy went in with him.

"Two minutes, I promise, it's all on one page." He was already walking, so she followed. Resident-on-call speed, wiry and quick, the near-black curls flattened hard on the left side where the on-call pillow had gotten to him, glasses shoved up with a knuckle as he talked. "Treating check. I have to do it before I can sign you as treated tonight, it's the same page every night for three weeks, and after tonight it'll take thirty seconds. Sit, don't sit, whatever you like."

She didn't sit. He didn't either. The treatment room was too hot like everything else and smelled of disinfectant and the lavender oil somebody dabbed on the radiator against policy, and Lewis stood across the exam table with her file open and read her the page.

"Implant." A glance up. "In date, sited here, countersigned here, all squared away — that's not a question, it's a line I have to say." His long fingers moved down the sheet. "Taper, twenty-one steps, you've had the radio play. Baseline: fully suppressed, no designation scent detectable. That's me writing down what everyone already knows, and it's the last night I get to write it, because the whole point is it stops being true." He turned the page over. "Heat estimate, on letterhead, and I quote, 'expected with the final step, good to a day either side.' So the twenty-first, plus or minus. And the reassessment is booked for the morning after, Tuesday the twenty-second, ten o'clock, panel room. They'll want—" he caught himself, pushed his glasses up again, "—they'll want what panels want. Any questions that are actually questions?"

It had taken him under two minutes, as promised. She had tried twice to say she knew her own file and been overtaken both times mid-breath.

"One," she said. "Why are you my treating physician? I didn't pick you."

"Nights." He said it simply. "There's me and there's Haldane, and Haldane's days, and the rule says your treating doctor works the rota you work. You're on nights, so it's me." He closed the file. "It's signatures, Megan. Everything that matters is already in your own head."

That was meant to be kind, and it was kind, and it was also exactly wrong, because the thing she had liked about the taper — the thing she had held close since she signed the request — was that it happened inside her own head and her own body and nowhere else. Ten years she had been a closed file. A Placement panel had deferred her at twenty-two and never once undeferred her, and the pills had come every month since, and nobody had asked her anything about her own body in a decade, because the pills answered all of it. Now the file was open on a counter at one end of the corridor and in a treatment room at the other, and three men she had worked beside for years — the pharmacist, the doctor, the porter — were going to spend December doing their jobs in a ring around her body.

She went on shift. Vitals on bay two, the nine o'clock meds, a new admission in bay four who needed a warmed blanket and a hand to hold about the dog he'd had to leave with his daughter down in the valley, and then the ordinary deep quiet of the ward settling in, and by the time the corridor windows went properly dark she had almost stopped thinking about the card.

Almost. The thing about ten years on suppressants was not that she had forgotten what scent was. It was that she had stopped noticing the absence, the way you stop noticing a hum until it cuts out — and ever since the letter came, ever since the taper had a start date, she noticed it everywhere. She noticed it at handover, when the day staff said goodnight with their faces doing the small extra things faces did around air she could not read. She noticed it walking the corridor, where anyone else on staff would know who was in the next room before the door opened, and she knew nothing. Nothing. Had known nothing since she was twenty-two — not other people, and not herself, her own body an airless room she happened to live in.

It was why she was on nights. People assumed she took the twelve-hour night rota for the differential, or because nobody else at eight thousand feet wanted it, where the dark came down at half past four and sleep never sat right — and both of those were true, and neither was the reason. The reason was that the day shift was a crowded room full of a conversation she could not hear, and the night shift was small. Four beds, five, the kitchen, the corridor. On nights the world shrank to what her eyes and her hands could tell her, and her eyes and her hands were good, and nobody at three in the morning expected you to read the air, because at three in the morning everybody was a little scent-blind with tiredness anyway. On nights she was not the broken one. On nights she was the one you wanted.

Owen went past her at ten-thirty with the oxygen trolley.

She knew it was him by the sound — the left wheel of that trolley had a squeak she could have picked out of a fire drill — before she looked up from the charting desk. Six one and broad through every part of him, shoulders and chest and the big square hands resting loose on the trolley rail, sandy hair clippered short, the square-cut inch of beard, fair skin weather-red across the cheekbones even in December, pale lashes over light blue eyes. He had snow on his boots and on the shoulders of his fleece, which meant he had come up the dock from the garage bay, which meant the cold had come in with him. She could see it on him, a warm man steaming faintly in a cold draft, and she could smell none of it. Ten years ago, she thought, I'd have known you were coming around that corner before you did. Now she got a nod.

It was a good nod, as nods went. Owen did not waste anything, words least of all, and the nod was the entire transaction: he saw her, he registered her, he was not stopping, the trolley was wanted in bay six. He went past, and the squeak went with him, and the dock-cold went with him, and that was all there was. She watched the trolley round the corner and went back to her chart and pressed the pen down harder than the paper needed, and could not have said why.

At eleven she went to the kitchen for coffee and stood in the doorway instead of going in.

The night kitchen was the warmest small room in the building, and the only one that felt like anybody lived in it. All three of them were in there. Lewis was up on the counter with one knee under him, mid-argument — about the radio, it was always about the radio; the little set on top of the fridge was the most contested object on the corridor — and talking with both hands. Karim stood at the counter with his back to the room, doing something unhurried with the kettle and the big dented steel thermos that went up in the snowcat. And Owen was in the far doorway, the one toward the garage, saying nothing at all, holding a mug, watching Lewis the way you would watch weather come over a ridge.

"—because the valley station goes to static at midnight, that's the whole point," Lewis was saying. "I am not asking for much. I am asking for a station that exists after twelve, and the Denver one—"

"The Denver one is advertisements," Karim said, to the kettle. "At one in the morning it is a man shouting about trucks. I have counted."

"You counted the truck advertisements."

"Fourteen in an hour." The kettle came off; the thermos cap went on with two careful turns. "In Beirut it is already morning and even the radio has more sense."

"Take a vote with your mother at three," Lewis said. "She'll side with me."

"My mother has taste. She will side with me."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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