Three Versions of the Explosion

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The word took nearly four minutes.

Mina did not pretend otherwise. She held the choices where Marcus could see them, waited, checked what she thought he had selected and began again when a response was uncertain. By the end he had the beginning of a question and the unpleasant knowledge that a short word could contain more effort than a speech.

Who.

They rested before trying to find out what came after it. Marcus hated the unfinished word. It looked accusatory on the page, as though he had named an enemy and simply failed to supply the name.

When he could continue, they worked toward the second part. Who else. Mina asked whether he meant the other people at the building when he was hurt. He confirmed it, then confirmed the narrower question about whether anyone had died.

Naomi returned later with what she could establish from the information available to her. The public incident notice reported injuries, not a death. She was careful not to give him private information about other patients. Questions about the full circumstances belonged with the people examining the incident, not with a guess made from the severity of his own injury.

He was relieved so suddenly that he could not answer the next question. The white shape in his memory had begun to feel like somebody he had left behind. A fact about the real incident did not erase the feeling, but it stopped the feeling from being the only thing he had.

There was a public notice and a statement circulated by the company. Marcus wanted both read to him. Not a summary that made them agree. The actual words.

Getting the request understood took time. Once it was understood, the reading was almost indecently easy. A person with a page could speak twenty sentences in the time he needed to ask for one.

The company statement called his presence at the service annex an unexpected visit. It described employees responding promptly, cooperation with the inquiry and the importance of not speculating. Julian's name appeared as the person handling operational questions.

Marcus listened again to unexpected. He had a sense of arriving somewhere he had been asked to go. But the sense came without a message, a date or a person whose words he could recover. It might have belonged to the day before. It might have belonged to another building entirely.

The public notice described scheduled activity at the annex and an investigation into the incident. It did not say that Marcus had been expected. It did not say that anybody had tried to hurt him. The two descriptions could disagree, or they could be describing different parts of the same day.

He knew that. He did not enjoy knowing it.

The company statement had a photograph beneath the heading. When Eli placed it in view, Marcus recognized the front steps of the main office, where a delivery driver had once broken a wheel against the lowest edge. Four shallow steps, a polished door, a planter that never contained anything alive for long.

Not the service annex.

For a moment the wrong building seemed like another deception. Then Eli read the small caption: company headquarters. It was an illustration, not a claimed photograph of the accident. Marcus had nearly supplied the false claim himself and then become angry at somebody else for making it.

He wanted the page kept whole, photograph and caption together. A cropped piece would have made his suspicion look cleverer than it was. He had seen that happen in reports he used to approve without asking to see the thing before it was cropped.

"Do you want those questions noted for Nadia?" Naomi asked.

Yes. Not an accusation. A question about what had been scheduled and who knew he would be there.

She had it written down in those terms. Marcus looked at the page until he was sure the words did not claim more than he had asked.

The third version belonged to him and was the least complete.

There had been a corridor. He could feel the kind of floor beneath his shoes, although he could not explain why he believed the floor mattered. A white rectangle appeared in a darker opening. Sometimes it became the back of somebody's shirt. Sometimes it was only a patch of light.

He remembered wanting to call out. He could not recover a name.

Then pressure, too large to locate, and an instant in which he was certain something important had not been finished. Memory ended there. No hand on a switch. No face smiling at him. No perfect last sentence to carry into a room full of people who would have to admit he had been right.

Mina helped him communicate only that there were fragments. She did not turn his effort to describe the white shape into a witness identification. When he became frustrated, she gave him a choice about whether to stop or try another approach.

He stopped.

The decision felt like letting go of somebody at the far end of a rope. But the person at the far end might have been a sign, a doorway or a memory from another day. Pulling harder would not make the shape more honest.

In the afternoon, Daniel's bird book arrived in a bag, with a note apologizing for the state of its cover. Eli asked whether Marcus wanted it put where he could see it. He did.

The photograph on the front was worse than he remembered. A brown bird occupied so little of the image that the branch seemed to be the subject. Their father had circled it in pencil, apparently worried that the reader might mistake the purpose of the book altogether.

Marcus could remember that pencil. Yellow, chewed at one end. Daniel borrowing it to draw something on a paper placemat while their father pretended not to see.

He could remember the pleasure of being older than his brother and therefore, by some private family rule, entitled to identify the bird. He had identified it incorrectly. Their father had let Daniel find the right page before pointing this out.

The memory was so warm and detailed that for a moment Marcus tried to use it as evidence of something larger. If this came back, surely Monday would come back too, provided he worked hard enough and chose the right place to begin.

Naomi did not tell him he was wrong to hope. When he asked, with help, whether remembering one afternoon meant he would recover everything else, she explained that the team would keep assessing and supporting him. One clear memory could not answer that whole question.

He turned his eyes away from the book. Eli waited before offering to move it.

No. Leave it.

It did not have to be a tool for recovering the accident. It could be a book his brother had remembered he wanted.

Later a message from Cora was read to him with his agreement. She said people were asking questions she could not answer yet. She wanted him spared the noise around the company, and she was handling what needed handling.

The words sounded kind until he put them beside the sentence about an unexpected visit. She had not said what she knew about his arrival. She had not said whether the building had been open for work. Perhaps she did not know. Perhaps he was hearing yesterday's bedside conversation inside every sentence she sent.

He did not want Eli to decide which explanation was right. He wanted the actual message kept with the other things Nadia would examine.

It was a smaller request than the accusation he could feel trying to form. It also had the advantage of being something he could ask for accurately.

When Nadia's office confirmed a time for the foundation discussion, Marcus was given the choice to keep it or move it. He kept it. There were people at a workshop who might lose a place to work while he tried to make a white rectangle become a face.

Before the evening rest, Mina read his questions back. Scheduled activity. Expected visit. Who had said what, and when. She checked the distinction between a memory and a question he wanted investigated.

He approved the list after one correction. The shape had not been a white shirt. It had sometimes seemed like one. The difference was only a few words, but he would have hated anybody else making the larger claim from so little.

Eli set the bird book at the edge of his view, open to a page with three almost identical brown birds. Marcus looked at it until the effort became too much.

For once, being unable to identify the thing in the picture did not feel like a failure. The picture could wait. Tomorrow there would still be a page, and somebody willing to turn it without telling him what he ought to see.