In the ox-blood room, he waits, and wonders, and passes the time by counting the ceiling tiles. At 12 tiles, he forgets whether or not he has just counted the twelfth tile or is about to count it. His eyes retrace his progress and he begins again.
He is on his seventeenth tile when a door opens and a woman’s head appears. First, a head; a body follows, and the woman is framed by a strange static light. She is shockingly diminutive. “Anderson – Anderson, Adams?” Her voice is like steel wool; Adams does not look up. He almost cannot: his eyelids are heavy and the woman’s voice carries a conviction that makes Adams certain she already knows who he is, could pick him out in a lineup, does not require his acknowledgment.
But if she’ll see him anyway – Adams rises, still without meeting the woman’s eyes. “I’m Anderson.”
He feels the woman’s eyes; the added stress of being closely-scrutinized makes his scrotum tighten. Fuck, he breathes, and lifts his gaze to meet the woman’s, and follows her through the door into the room that is neither well lit nor dark enough to be sinister.
The fluorescent bulbs hum; there is still an almost imperceptible tremor in the light. These things are irrelevant – the buzz, the lighting, even the fact that, in this remarkable lighting, Adams can almost convince himself that the situation is imagined. He entertains himself, for a moment, with the idea of the situation as a thought, a dream, and so – a cloud he can sweep from the sky. His sister used to scoop spider webs from corners in much the same way. She would shake her hand, use the other to peel the filaments from her skin. […]
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