The room is white.
The room has always been white. The whiteness is not the cold whiteness of a hospital. It is the soft cream of an old book, which is a thing the patient remembers without remembering that she remembers it.
There is a chair in the corner. The chair is the same color as the room. There is a person in the chair sometimes. The person is not always the same person, but the person is often the same person. The person has hands.
The hands do things.
The hands change the sheet. The hands hold a cup of water to her mouth and she drinks and the water tastes like water. The hands turn her, gently, every two hours. She feels the turn. She does not resist it. The hands write things in a book she cannot see. The hands wear a silver ring on the third finger of the left, a thin band with no stone, which she has decided is important although she does not know why.
She does not have a name.
She had a name once. She knows because the absence has a shape. The shape is Anna. She does not know that the shape is Anna. She knows only that there is a shape.
She is humming.
She has been humming for seven years.
The hands belong to a woman.
The woman is older than her. She knows it without checking, the way one knows the weight of a coin in one’s pocket. The woman is not old. The woman has gray at the temples. The woman has the kind of face she might have liked to talk to, in the time before. The woman’s hands are competent and slow.
The woman comes in the morning and the evening. She comes at other times too but the patient is mostly asleep then. The woman opens the curtains in the morning and closes them in the evening. The light in the morning is the same as the light in the evening. The windows face an inner courtyard. She has not seen the sun in some long time.
The woman says, sometimes, good morning.
She says, sometimes, good morning, though she is not certain of the time and the woman does not correct her.
The woman says, sometimes, can you sing it for me, and she hums, and the woman closes her eyes for the length of the hum and then opens them and writes something in the book.
She does not know what she is humming. She is humming what she has always been humming. There is one song. There has only ever been one song.
The woman is kind to her.
She knows this in the way she knows the weight of the coin. The kindness is structural. The kindness is the room being warm. The kindness is the water at the right temperature. The kindness is the way the woman lifts her under the arms, not by the wrists, when she helps her sit up. The kindness is the way the woman never asks her who she is or where she comes from, the way the other ones used to.
The kindness is the way the woman does not flinch when she hums.
Sometimes she remembers a boy.
The boy is small. The boy has hair the color of weak tea. The boy is eating something, a piece of bread, or fruit, she cannot quite see, at a table she is also sitting at. She is holding a cup. She is laughing. The boy is laughing. There is light from a window she cannot see.
The memory is bright.
The memory is unrolled.
The memory is sharper than anything else she has. Sharper than the room itself. Sharper than the woman’s face. Sharper than the humming. The memory has the quality of a photograph she has stared at for many years.
She does not trust the memory.
The memory is too clean.
This is what the binding has done, although she does not know that, and could not put it in words if she did. The binding has made certain memories into the kind of thing that cannot be doubted. The memories are not real. The memories are not unreal. The memories are completed. The memories have the texture of things that no longer admit revision.
The boy at the table is one of those memories. She knows this in the way she knows everything now, which is incompletely.
She does not know whether the boy is hers.
She thinks he is.
The woman comes in the afternoon today.
The afternoon is unusual. The woman usually does not come in the afternoon. The woman is carrying something.
“I brought you flowers,” the woman says.
She looks at the flowers. They are small and white. Snowdrops, she would have said once. She does not know that word now. She knows only that they are small and white and that the woman has put them in a glass on the table beside the bed, and that the glass is the glass she drinks from, which the woman has not refilled with water yet, which means the woman will refill it after the flowers leave the glass.
“It’s your birthday,” the woman says.
She hums.
The woman sits down in the chair. She looks at the flowers. She looks at her. She looks at the flowers again.
“I’m not supposed to tell you that it’s your birthday,” the woman says. “It’s against protocol. But I thought you should know.”
She stops humming.
She looks at the woman.
For the length of a held breath, the case file will not record this moment because there is no biometric instrument that records the gap between humming, she sees the woman clearly. The woman has a child. The child is fourteen and has hair the color of weak tea and is, this afternoon, in another city, walking home from school across a square where the trees have been pollarded for the season. The woman knows this. She does not know this.
She sees the woman seeing her.
And the woman, for the length of that breath, sees her seeing her, and considers, briefly, the way one considers a step toward the edge of a cliff one will not take, telling her who she is and where the child is and what name she used to answer to.
The woman does not say any of these things.
She resumes humming.
The woman writes nothing in the book.
She sits in the chair for forty minutes, longer than she should, and then she stands and tucks the blanket more carefully than she needs to around the patient’s shoulders. She turns off the light. She goes home.
She is asleep in four minutes.
She dreams of a boy at a table. She dreams the dream completely, as she has dreamed it almost every night for the seven years since she gave him up. The boy laughs. She laughs. There is bread on the table. There is fruit. There is light from a window.
In the morning the woman comes back. She opens the curtains. The flowers are still in the glass.
“Good morning,” the woman says.
“Good morning,” she says.
She hums.
The woman writes in the book.
The day proceeds.