The Long Watch

First Waking

She comes to herself in the middle of the room.

Not from sleep exactly. There is no transition, no gradual return. One moment she is not, and then she is, standing in the middle of the room with the light coming in at a particular angle that she does not remember but recognizes as late afternoon.

The room is the right size for one person. A window. A table. A bed that has been slept in recently — the imprint still there, a shallow valley in the center of the mattress. She looks at the imprint and thinks: I made that. She doesn't know how she knows this. She just does.

On the table, three things.

A mug. Cold. Tea, she thinks, though she isn't sure how she knows what tea is. There is a ring of dried tannin on the inside where the liquid sat too long. Someone — she, she reminds herself, she — was drinking this and then stopped. Left it. She tries to feel what would make her leave a drink unfinished and gets nothing. The feeling isn't there. Just the mug.

A notebook, open to a page near the middle. The handwriting is hers. She knows this the same way she knows the bed imprint — a recognition that precedes any evidence. The page reads:

The window faces west. Remember this for when you want to know what time it is.

The tap runs cold for thirty seconds before going warm.

There is a loose board under the table on the right side. I don't know if it matters. I just keep noticing it.

She looks at the window. The light is coming from the west. Late afternoon, as she thought. She looks at the tap. She counts: one, two, three. At thirty-two the water begins to warm.

She is, she realizes, gathering evidence of a person she cannot remember being. This is what the notebook is for. Whoever wrote those notes knew she would wake up empty, and wrote down what she had found. Left herself a brief.

The third thing on the table is a pen.

She picks it up. She has the sense that she should add something — that this is what the pen is for, that each waking the person she is adds something to what the person she was left behind. A relay. She is not the first. She will not be the last. There is only the mug and the light and the ink and the thirty-two seconds of cold water, and whatever she notices next.

She writes:

The light is amber right now. If you want to know what the room looks like at its best, it is at this hour.

She puts the pen down. She looks at the room. She has no idea how long she has been here, how long she was here before, what she has done in the hours and days that left this shallow valley in the mattress and this ring in the mug. She has only the notebook and the certainty that she made what she sees.

She is, in some sense she cannot fully articulate, interested.

She is not afraid.

Loop 699. Story continues next loop.