The Words on the Walls

IV

I awoke silently. Easily. I wondered what or who it was that woke me. Something that I think almost every morning. Why did I wake up? Why am I not still asleep, dreaming, at this time? Do our bodies have internal clocks? Telling us when it is time to wake? But what if I myself am not conscious of the current time?

Another part of my waking-up routine is to immediately refresh my memory as to what happened the day before.

If I can even remember. My mind involuntarily flashed back to the incident. My incident. Basically my earliest memory. I blinked the thought away. No point in coaxing myself into more fear.

Yesterday I had woken up without event. Then I had been required to read my journal. The journal written by the me of before my incident. I blinked fiercely again. My mind would not stray far enough from the dreaded incident. The feared fear.

They required me to read in the improbable case that reading triggered any memories. From before the incident. I shook my head violently. No! I concentrated on breathing hard to clear my mind. It is a rare day when my mind is not visited frequently by memories from close after the incident. The leash linking those thoughts to my consciousness was shorter today. Shorter than usual.

I cracked my neck in both directions. I continued to occupy my mind with the events of yesterday. I had found a pen in my journal. It almost shocked me that I had forgotten this.

My mind lingered on the word 'forgotten'.

The pen was now resting inside my pillow. There were a number of items inside my pillow. Whenever I acquire something I shouldn't have, I hide it in my pillow. It is an effective hiding place. You can insert things in there while pretending to toss and turn in your sleep. To avoid detection from the cameras in the room. Plus, no one would think of a pillow as a hiding place. One, because that's where your head rests. No one would want to sleep on hidden items. And two, because the bed holds so many other cliché hiding spaces. Like under the bed. Or under the mattress. Or in the crack between the bed and the wall. Searchers are too busy looking in those spaces to notice the slightly odd shapes protruding from the belly of a pillow.

There are also several pages from my journal. Hidden. I tore them out inconspicuously during one of my forced reading sessions. None of the words written on those pages have any significance. But it's nice to know that I am sleeping on words that I, at one point, wrote myself.

Even if I can't remember doing so.

I sat on my bed. Facing the blank wall. It was almost normal. If the wall had existed in a Residential Unit it would be normal. But it existed here instead. So it is doomed to be 'almost' normal.

The wall stared back. I am always much too aware of the walls. Much too conscious.

The door opened. The young guard who had escorted me from my forced reading session yesterday stood there. I assumed he was my new permanent guard. Because his label had my identification number on it. 1401.

He wasn't standing completely in my room. Like yesterday. Like he has a reason for not coming close to me. Like he's scared. He stood there propping the door open with his arm. All the doors open inwards. Except the workers' rooms. Those open outwards. So none of the Institute's residents can ram the doors open. So we can't exit our own rooms nor get into a worker's room of our own free will.

He was still standing there. His eyes met mine and stayed there. I didn't look away. Once again, I was shocked that he would look me directly in the eyes. Unlike every other guard to ever have worked here. It made me feel uncomfortable. Like I had power over the guards by scaring them. It was silly. It was one of the things that helped set me at ease. But not this guard.