Ruth Sterling - The Institutional Nights

Mira’s mop finds the paper under Kellerman’s desk at 2:17 AM, the fluorescent above Laboratory C stuttering its metronomic complaint. The transcript bears her name in official sans-serif, subject classification M-447, but the words inside belong to her mother’s dying.

“The subject recalls verbatim her mother’s final statement regarding the location of family documents. Note the precision of auditory memory even under distress conditions. Emotional resonance measures peak at 847 units during recollection of specific phraseology.”

Her mother’s voice threading through the institutional language: Keep the blue shoebox, Mira. Your father’s letters are in there, and the deed to the house in Millbrook. Don’t let them tell you there’s nothing left.

But she never told anyone about the blue shoebox. Never spoke those words aloud to any researcher, any doctor, any person with a clipboard and a recording device. The mop bucket wheels screech against the polished floor as she backs away from the desk, transcript trembling between her cleaning-chemical hands.

The building breathes around her through its ventilation system, exhaling processed air that tastes of copper and distant rain. Laboratory C fills with the particular silence of expensive equipment in standby mode, machines worth more than houses waiting in their temperature-controlled stillness. Mira folds the transcript into her uniform pocket, next to the small notebook where she writes down things that seem important, though by morning she can never remember why she wrote them.

Down the corridor, the elevator hums its mechanical lullaby. Someone working late, or arriving early for procedures that begin before dawn. Mira returns the mop to its bucket, wheels her cart toward the next room on her route, but the paper burns against her hip like an unhealed wound.

In Laboratory D, she empties wastebaskets full of shredded documents and used tissues. The fragments tell no stories, offer no revelations, just the detritus of a day’s work examining human consciousness like specimens under glass. But now she reads the fragments differently, seeing in the torn edges of forms and the scattered letters of names the remnants of other people’s transcribed intimacies.

By 4 AM she reaches the supply closet where she stores her cart at shift’s end. The notebook comes out, the pen moves across lined paper: “Found transcript today. My name, my mother’s words. How do they know what I never said?” But even as she writes, the memory of finding the paper grows indistinct, like trying to hold water in cupped palms.

The morning security guard nods as she badges out, his eyes carrying the same fluorescent fatigue that marks everyone who works the building’s off-hours. “See you tonight, Mira.” She walks to her car through the pre-dawn darkness, already forgetting the specific words on the transcript, remembering only that she discovered something important about herself filed away in someone else’s cabinet.

The white chair faces a mirror that isn’t quite a mirror, its surface reflecting Mira’s face back to her with a subtle delay, like water disturbed by stones. Dr. Kellerman adjusts something behind the glass while his assistant arranges recording equipment with hands that move too carefully, as if the scarred tissue remembers different motions.

“We’ll begin with free association today,” Kellerman says through the intercom. His voice carries the particular gentleness that medical professionals use when they’re about to cause discomfort. “Mira, I want you to think about doors. Just doors in general.”

But her mind moves immediately to the blue door, the one that led to her father’s study where afternoon light fell across photographs he never let her see clearly. Heavy wood painted the color of deep water, brass handle that always felt cold even in summer. She hears her own voice describing the door’s weight, how it required both hands to open, the way it swung shut with deliberate slowness.

“Tell me about the photographs,” the assistant says, leaning forward slightly. The scars on her hands catch the room’s clinical lighting, mapping old burns or cuts across knuckles and palms.

“He kept them in manila folders. Military photographs from Korea, but also others. Pictures of places I’d never been, people I didn’t recognize. Sometimes I’d hear him in there at night, just sitting with those photographs spread across his desk.”

“What did you feel when you heard him in there?”

The question opens something in her chest, a sensation like warm water spreading through her ribs. “Lonely. Not for myself, but for him. Like he was visiting people he couldn’t reach any other way.”

Kellerman makes notes behind the glass, his pen moving in quick, precise strokes. The assistant watches Mira’s face with professional attention, but something else flickers there too – recognition, or perhaps envy.

“The blue door was always closed during the day,” Mira continues, though she doesn’t remember deciding to speak. “But unlocked. He never locked it when I was home. I think he wanted me to know I could enter if I needed to, even though I never did.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because some spaces are meant to hold someone’s solitude. Even as a child, I understood that.”

The session continues for twenty-seven minutes by the clock on the wall, though time moves differently in the white chair, expanding and contracting like breath. They ask about other doors – the front door of her childhood home, the door to her brother’s room, the door of the first apartment she rented alone. Each question pulls memory from her like thread from a spool, unraveling experiences she’d forgotten she possessed.

When it ends, Kellerman’s assistant walks her to the corridor where her custodial cart waits. “You have beautiful memories,” the woman says quietly, flexing her scarred fingers. “Very… intact emotional architecture.”

“What does that mean?”

But the woman has already turned away, disappearing through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Mira stands in the empty hallway, trying to hold onto the conversation, but it dissolves like salt in water. She remembers sitting in a white chair, remembers talking about something important, but the specifics slip away even as she reaches for them.

Her cart squeaks down the corridor toward the elevator, wheels tracing the same path they’ve traced for months or years. The building settles around her, its institutional bones creaking with the weight of all the human experiences catalogued within its walls. In her pocket, her notebook waits for whatever fragments she might rescue from the day’s dissolution.

The third floor houses what they call the Integration Wing, though Mira has never seen this designation on any official building directory. Her master key opens these doors the same as all others, but the air here carries a different quality – thicker somehow, laden with the particular stillness of sleep that isn’t quite rest.

Room 314 contains a young man whose chart reads PATIENT T-089, TEMPORAL LOBE RECONSTRUCTION, PHASE III. He sits by the window in pale blue hospital clothes, holding a photograph of three people standing in front of a house with green shutters. The woman in the center has Mira’s mother’s smile.

“She used to make bread on Sundays,” he tells the photograph, his voice carrying the careful precision of someone reciting learned information. “Always forgot to set the timer, so the kitchen would smell like burning flour. But she’d just laugh and start over.”

Mira pauses in the doorway, her cleaning supplies suspended in motion. The photograph shows strangers to her – a woman with dark hair, two children, a suburban lawn – but the young man speaks about the woman with the particular tenderness reserved for intimate memory.

“Did you know her well?” Mira asks, though she knows she shouldn’t engage with patients.

He looks up, eyes focusing with effort. “She’s my mother. Was my mother. The doctors say she died three years ago, but I remember it differently now. I remember being at her bedside, holding her hand. She told me about the blue shoebox, about my father’s letters.”

The photograph trembles in his hands. Mira’s own hands grow cold around the handle of her mop.

“What blue shoebox?”

“The one with the family documents. She said not to let them tell me there was nothing left.” He returns his attention to the photograph, voice softening into the rhythm of practiced recollection. “Keep the blue shoebox, she said. Your father’s letters are in there, and the deed to the house in Millbrook.”

Word for word. Her mother’s dying voice speaking through this stranger’s mouth, carrying the exact cadence of that final afternoon when pneumonia had reduced her mother’s speech to whispers. But this young man has never been to Millbrook, never knew her father, never sat in the hospital chair where she held her mother’s cooling hand.

“What’s your name?” Mira whispers.

“David. David Chen. Though sometimes I feel like I should be someone else.” He sets the photograph on the windowsill, next to others showing families he’s never met. “The doctors say the memories will integrate better with time. That eventually I won’t be able to tell the difference between what I lived and what they gave me.”

Mira backs into the hallway, her cart wheels protesting against the sudden movement. The Integration Wing stretches before her, door after door of patients carrying borrowed experiences, transplanted griefs, secondhand loves. Room 315 holds an elderly woman who speaks about a brother’s departure for war with tears that belong to someone else’s loss. Room 316 contains a teenage girl who describes her first kiss with passion harvested from another person’s adolescence.

The notebook emerges from her pocket as she reaches the supply closet, her pen moving across paper with desperate urgency: “They’re taking memories from the sessions. Giving them to patients who can’t remember how to feel. David Chen has my mother’s death. My exact words. How many others carry pieces of me?”

But even as she writes, the sharp edges of discovery begin to soften. By morning, she’ll remember only that she found something disturbing on the third floor, some violation she can’t quite name. The notebook will hold the words, but they’ll read like someone else’s handwriting, someone else’s impossible discovery.

The building breathes around her, its ventilation system cycling through another night of institutional sleep. Somewhere above, Dr. Kellerman reviews the day’s extractions, measuring emotional resonance in units that quantify the unquantifiable. Somewhere below, her mop bucket waits to clean the residue of tomorrow’s procedures, erasing the evidence of commerce in human feeling.

The basement archive extends beyond what architectural logic should permit, rows of climate-controlled cabinets housing files that span decades of human extraction. Mira’s flashlight cuts through the darkness between overhead fixtures, illuminating labels that read like a catalog of consciousness: MATERNAL GRIEF, FIRST LOVE, SIBLING RIVALRY, CHILDHOOD TERROR.

Cabinet M-400 through M-500 contains her life in manila folders.

M-447-A: Subject’s recollection of father’s funeral, age seven. Note exceptional detail regarding sensory impressions - the weight of black dress fabric, specific hymn selections, texture of gravel thrown on casket. Emotional resonance: 723 units.

M-447-B: First romantic encounter, age sixteen. Subject demonstrates unusual capacity for preserving physical sensation alongside emotional content. Particularly valuable for patients with intimacy disorders.

M-447-C: Brother’s departure for military service. Extract includes not only separation anxiety but complex pride/fear/love matrix. Successfully integrated into Patient T-089 with minimal degradation.

Seventeen folders. Seventeen extractions. Each containing transcripts of sessions she barely remembers, descriptions of experiences she can no longer access completely. The files reveal a systematic harvesting spanning two years, her most formative moments catalogued and redistributed to patients whose own emotional architecture had been damaged by trauma or disease.

“You’re not supposed to be down here.”

The voice belongs to Dr. Kellerman’s assistant, the woman with scarred hands who now stands in the archive doorway. She doesn’t sound alarmed, merely stating fact.

“These are my memories,” Mira says, gesturing toward the open files.

“They were your memories. Now they serve a larger purpose.” The woman approaches slowly, her movements careful in the dim space. “Do you know how I got these scars?”

Mira shakes her head.

“House fire when I was twelve. Lost my parents, my younger sister, my ability to feel safety in enclosed spaces. For twenty years, I couldn’t be in a room with the door closed without panic attacks. Couldn’t sleep without checking exits. Couldn’t form lasting relationships because every space felt like a trap.”

She flexes her damaged fingers, studying the patterns of old burns.

“Then Dr. Kellerman developed the integration protocol. I received memories from a donor who had experienced profound security in domestic spaces - someone whose childhood home represented safety rather than danger. The integration took six months, but now I can sit in windowless rooms, sleep in unfamiliar places. I can love someone without constantly calculating escape routes.”

“Whose memories?” Mira asks, though she suspects she knows.

“A woman who grew up in a house with green shutters and a mother who baked bread on Sundays. Someone who knew what it felt like to be safely held within walls that meant protection rather than imprisonment.”

The files scattered across the table tell the story: M-447-J: Subject’s recollection of childhood security. Donor experienced exceptional sense of domestic sanctuary. Suitable for patients with spatial anxiety disorders.

“You stole my ability to feel safe in my own home.”

“We shared it with someone who had none.” The woman’s voice carries no apology, only the certainty of someone who has found redemption through complicated means. “Your capacity for that feeling was so abundant, so intact. The extraction barely diminished your overall emotional range.”

But Mira remembers now why she lives in the studio apartment with three locks and a chair wedged against the door. Remembers the inexplicable anxiety that began two years ago, the way her own space began to feel like a trap rather than refuge. The memory of safety remains, but its emotional weight has been harvested, leaving only the intellectual knowledge that she once felt protected within walls.

“How many others?”

“Forty-three patients have received portions of your extracted experiences. Your grief helped a woman process her son’s suicide. Your joy at your brother’s college graduation gave a man the capacity to feel pride in his daughter’s achievements after his traumatic brain injury. Your first heartbreak provided the emotional framework for a patient to understand her own romantic disappointments without being destroyed by them.”

The archive around them houses thousands of such transactions, human feeling commodified and redistributed according to medical need. Mira’s memories live now in strangers’ minds, providing emotional scaffolding for damaged psyches while leaving her own consciousness full of holes she’s only beginning to recognize.

“The choice was always yours,” the woman says softly. “You volunteered for every session. Signed consent forms. The temporary memory suppression was necessary to prevent psychological damage during the extraction process, but you agreed to everything.”

“I can’t remember agreeing.”

“Because remembering would interfere with future extractions. But the paperwork is all here, in your own handwriting.”

She produces a folder thick with Mira’s signature, consent forms spanning two years of systematic emotional harvesting. Each document bears her careful penmanship, her explicit agreement to procedures she can no longer recall approving.

The woman leaves her alone with the files, ascending stairs that lead back to the world of fluorescent certainty. Mira sits surrounded by the catalog of her dismantled life, trying to reconstruct a self from medical documentation and bureaucratic forms. Outside, dawn approaches the building’s windows, bringing another day of procedures, another night of cleaning up their residue.

Her notebook waits in her pocket, but what words could capture this? How do you write about discovering you’ve been systematically erased by your own consent, your deepest experiences redistributed to strangers who needed them more than you apparently did?

The fifth floor requires a different keycard, one Mira finds taped inside her cleaning cart with a note in her own handwriting: “Use this tonight. Remember what you found.” She doesn’t remember writing the note, but her fingers recognize the pen’s pressure, the particular slant of letters formed by her hand.

The Recovery Ward houses thirty-seven patients in various stages of memory integration. Unlike the clinical sterility below, these rooms attempt warmth – printed curtains, wooden furniture, photographs of people the patients may or may not have actually known. The hallway smells of chamomile tea and the particular sadness of borrowed emotions settling into foreign minds.

Room 507 contains a woman roughly her own age, sitting cross-legged on the bed while organizing photographs into careful piles. Her movements carry the ritualistic precision of someone performing a sacred duty.

“These are my children,” she tells Mira without looking up. “Emma and Lucas. Emma’s seven now, Lucas just turned five. He started kindergarten this fall.”

The photographs show two children Mira has never seen, but their faces trigger something deep in her chest – a flutter of protective love, pride mixed with worry, the specific joy of watching small humans discover the world. The feeling arrives without context, emotion divorced from experience.

“They’re beautiful,” Mira says, though speaking feels like moving through thick water.

“Emma wants to be a veterinarian. She practices on her stuffed animals, gives them check-ups and makes charts of their imaginary illnesses. Lucas is different – he builds things. Elaborate structures with blocks and cardboard, entire cities that take over the living room.”

The woman’s voice carries the warmth of lived experience, but her medical chart tells a different story: PATIENT K-231, MATERNAL MEMORY INTEGRATION, SEVERE POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION WITH PSYCHOTIC FEATURES. Emma and Lucas exist, but not as her children. The photographs belong to her sister’s family, appropriated as props for memories that were transplanted from a donor whose maternal joy had been successfully extracted and purified for therapeutic use.

“Do you remember when Lucas was born?” Mira asks, though she knows she shouldn’t encourage the delusion.

“Three in the morning, February fifteenth. Twenty-two hours of labor, but when they finally placed him on my chest…” The woman’s face illuminates with borrowed rapture. “Nothing else existed. Just this perfect weight against my heart, this tiny person who had grown inside me. I counted his fingers, his toes. Ten and ten. Perfect.”

But Mira recognizes the memory because it belongs to her – not as mother but as witness. She had been in the delivery room when her cousin gave birth to Jacob, had watched that moment of transcendent connection between mother and child. The experience had moved her deeply, left her understanding something profound about human love. Now that understanding lives in a stranger’s mind, attached to photographs of children this woman has never held.

“The doctors say the integration is going well,” the woman continues. “Soon I won’t need the photographs to remember. The feelings will just be part of me, natural as breathing. I’ll be able to go home to Emma and Lucas, be the mother they deserve.”

Room 509 holds a man in his sixties learning to feel grief for a father he never lost. His actual father sits beside the bed, alive and confused, watching his son weep over memories of a funeral that never happened. The transplanted sorrow comes from Mira’s own experience of loss, her father’s death when she was nineteen, but processed through this stranger’s consciousness it becomes both more and less than what she originally felt.

“I miss him so much,” the man tells his living father. “I keep expecting him to call on Sundays, wanting to talk about the baseball scores.”

The older man reaches for his son’s hand with desperate gentleness. “I’m right here, Michael. I call you every Sunday.”

“I know, Dad. But it’s different now. Since the funeral, everything feels different.”

Room 511, 513, 515 – each contains someone learning to navigate emotions that originated in Mira’s consciousness. Her first heartbreak teaches a teenager how to survive romantic disappointment. Her wedding day joy provides a framework for a woman whose own marriage ended in trauma. Her grandmother’s death gives an elderly man practice in letting go of people he loves.

They wear her feelings better than she does now, these patients who received her experiences stripped of complication and refined into pure emotional content. Her messy, contradictory human responses have been processed into therapeutic doses, leaving her with the residue while they inherit the essence.

At the nurses’ station, she finds her own psychological profile in an open folder: “Donor M-447 demonstrates exceptional emotional resilience and memory retention. Subject appears capable of generating new experiences to replace extracted content, making her suitable for long-term harvesting protocol.”

The notation is dated yesterday. Below it, a schedule for future extractions: her childhood Christmas mornings, her college graduation, the summer she learned to swim in Lake Champlain. They plan to take everything that ever made her feel fully human, processing it into medicine for minds that need healing more than she apparently needs wholeness.

Her cart wheels squeak against the polished floor as she moves between rooms, each one containing pieces of herself redistributed according to medical necessity. The building around her operates as a vast processing plant for human experience, transforming individual consciousness into therapeutic resource. She is both worker and raw material, cleaning up after procedures that dismantle her one memory at a time.

The notebook emerges as she reaches the elevator, but what words could contain this discovery? How do you document your own systematic dissolution, the transformation of your inner life into someone else’s healing? The pen moves across paper anyway, recording what she can before morning erases it again: “I am being harvested. They take my memories and give them to people who need them more. I agreed to this. I don’t remember agreeing.”

The locked drawer in Dr. Kellerman’s office yields to Mira’s master key at 3:47 AM, revealing a photograph tucked beneath research journals and patient evaluations. The girl in the image has her father’s eyes but carries emptiness where joy should live – fifteen years old, staring at a birthday cake with the expression of someone observing a foreign ritual.

“Her name is Sarah.”

Mira doesn’t turn toward Kellerman’s voice in the doorway. His presence feels inevitable, as if this moment has been scripted by the building itself.

“Brain injury when she was twelve,” he continues, settling into the chair across from his desk. “Horseback riding accident. Physically, she recovered completely. But the damage to her limbic system was precise, surgical in its cruelty. She lost access to happiness.”

“So you steal it from other people.”

“I redistribute it from people who have abundance to those who have none.” Kellerman reaches for the photograph, handling it with the careful reverence reserved for sacred objects. “Sarah can recognize that something is supposed to be pleasurable – birthday parties, Christmas morning, summer afternoons – but she experiences them as performance art. She goes through the motions because she understands intellectually that these things once brought her joy.”

The office around them breathes with institutional quiet, expensive medical equipment humming at frequencies below conscious hearing. Through the window, the city spreads in patterns of light and shadow, millions of people sleeping through dreams they’ll own completely when they wake.

“The first successful integration was your memory of feeding ducks at Riverside Park when you were eight,” Kellerman says. “Do you remember that afternoon?”

She doesn’t, though something flickers when he mentions the park – a sense of water and bread crumbs and small hands reaching toward webbed feet. But the emotional weight of the memory has been evacuated, leaving only neurological shadows.

“Sarah received that experience eighteen months ago. For the first time since her accident, she felt uncomplicated delight. She went to the park the next weekend and spent two hours by the pond, crying because she could finally understand what she’d been missing.”

“And you decided that justified taking more.”

“I decided that your capacity for joy was so profound, so architecturally intact, that sharing it could heal minds that medical science had written off as permanently damaged.” Kellerman sets the photograph carefully on his desk. “Sarah has received portions of forty-three of your memories. Your first snow day, the afternoon you learned to ride a bicycle, the evening you watched fireflies with your brother. Each integration has restored another facet of her ability to experience pleasure.”

“What about my ability to experience pleasure?”

“Diminished but not eliminated. You generate new joyful experiences to replace the extracted ones. Your psychological profile indicates exceptional resilience to memory harvesting.”

But Mira understands now why colors seem muted, why food tastes like careful nutrition rather than sensory celebration, why she hasn’t laughed spontaneously in months. They’ve been strip-mining her capacity for happiness, leaving her with the neurological infrastructure but not the emotional electricity that makes experience feel worth having.

“The other patients – they’re not just receiving random memories. You’re targeting specific donors for specific needs.”

“The Integration Program matches extracted experiences to compatible recipients. Your maternal memories go to women with postpartum depression. Your grief helps patients process loss without being destroyed by it. Your childhood security assists those with spatial anxiety disorders.” Kellerman’s voice carries the satisfaction of someone describing elegant engineering. “It’s the most precise therapeutic intervention ever developed.”

“It’s psychological cannibalism.”

“It’s medicine. Sarah can feel happiness now. Michael can grieve his losses and move forward. Lisa can be alone in a room without panic attacks. Forty-three people are living fuller lives because you had experiences in excess of your own need.”

The photograph of Sarah stares up from the desk, a girl learning to inhabit borrowed joy while somewhere in the building machines catalog tomorrow’s extractions. Mira tries to imagine feeling what the photograph should trigger – parental concern, protective anger, the complex satisfaction of knowing her suffering serves someone else’s healing. But those emotions arrive as intellectual concepts rather than lived experiences, thoughts about feelings rather than feelings themselves.

“The choice remains yours,” Kellerman says quietly. “We can discontinue your participation. But Sarah will lose access to joy again within six months as the integrated memories fade. The other patients will revert to their original psychological states. Forty-three people will return to various forms of emotional hell so that you can maintain complete ownership of experiences you’ll generate again naturally.”

“How do you know I’ll generate them again?”

“Because that’s what psychologically healthy people do. They create new memories, new emotional experiences. The extracted content represents your past, not your future capacity for feeling.”

But the future stretches before her like a series of empty rooms, each one waiting to be cleaned of its emotional residue before being redistributed to minds that need healing more than she apparently needs wholeness. She understands now why she volunteered for the program initially, why she signs consent forms she can’t remember signing: the choice between her own completeness and other people’s healing isn’t really a choice at all.

The photograph of Sarah watches from the desk as Mira returns the master key to her pocket and wheels her cart toward the corridor. Behind her, Kellerman calls softly: “The next extraction is scheduled for Thursday. Your first day of high school – we have a patient with social anxiety who could benefit from your memory of belonging.”

The elevator doors close on his words, carrying her toward the lower floors where she’ll spend the remaining hours before dawn cleaning spaces designed for the clinical processing of human consciousness. In her notebook, she writes: “They take what I can spare and give it to people who have nothing. The math makes sense. The mathematics of mercy.”

But even as she writes, she wonders whose handwriting she’s looking at, whose thoughts these are, whose capacity for moral reasoning guides the pen across paper that belongs to a woman who’s forgetting how to be herself one extraction at a time.

Rain streaks the observation deck windows where Mira finds Kellerman at 4:15 AM, studying brain scans backlit against the city’s sleepless glow. The images show neural networks firing in patterns that resemble constellations, synapses igniting across hemispheres in choreographed cascades of electricity and meaning.

“These are Sarah’s scans from this morning,” he says without turning. “Look at the activity in her anterior cingulate cortex – that’s joy, actual neurochemical happiness firing for the first time in three years.”

The scans are beautiful in their alien precision, mathematical proof that consciousness can be mapped and measured and redistributed according to medical need. But they also chart the dissolution of someone Mira no longer remembers being, her extracted experiences translated into another person’s neural architecture.

“When I was a resident, we had a patient named Marcus who lost his capacity for fear after a stroke damaged his amygdala,” Kellerman continues. “Sounds liberating, doesn’t it? No anxiety, no terror, no paralyzing dread. But fear serves essential functions – it keeps us alive, helps us avoid danger, provides the emotional weight that makes safety meaningful.”

He sets down the scans and faces her for the first time. “Marcus walked into traffic because crossing streets held no emotional significance. He trusted dangerous strangers because his brain couldn’t generate appropriate caution. We had to institutionalize him because a world without fear is actually a world without the capacity for self-preservation.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died trying to pet a German Shepherd that was obviously aggressive. His brain couldn’t process the visual cues that would have warned a neurologically intact person to maintain distance.”

The rain intensifies against the windows, transforming the city below into impressionist smears of light and movement. Kellerman returns his attention to the brain scans, tracing neural pathways with his finger like a priest reading sacred text.

“The Integration Program doesn’t just transfer memories – it transfers the emotional architecture that makes those memories meaningful. Sarah doesn’t just remember your afternoon at Riverside Park, she feels it the way you felt it. The neurochemical cascade, the specific quality of eight-year-old wonder, the exact texture of delight you experienced watching ducks navigate pond water.”

“But I can’t feel it anymore.”

“You can’t feel that specific memory anymore. But you retain the neural capacity to generate similar experiences. Sarah had lost that capacity entirely – the physical ability to produce joy was damaged beyond repair. Until we gave her yours.”

The observation deck overlooks the Integration Ward, where patients sleep through the complex neurochemical process of assimilating borrowed experiences. Through the rain-streaked glass, Mira can see into lit rooms where strangers dream with her emotions, their minds learning to navigate feelings that originated in her consciousness.

“There’s something you need to understand about the consent process,” Kellerman says quietly. “The memory suppression isn’t just to prevent psychological damage during extraction. It’s to prevent you from developing attachment to experiences we need to harvest. If you remembered agreeing to each procedure, you’d start hoarding memories, trying to preserve experiences for your own use instead of allowing them to serve therapeutic purposes.”

“So you make me forget that I’m choosing this.”

“We make it possible for you to choose it repeatedly without the psychological burden of loss. Each extraction feels like the first because you can’t remember the previous ones. It’s a mercy, really – you experience the satisfaction of helping others without the cumulative grief of watching your own past redistributed to strangers.”

But standing in the observation deck with rain painting abstract patterns on the windows, Mira understands that mercy and violation can occupy the same space, that healing and harm can emerge from identical procedures. The brain scans in Kellerman’s hands prove that Sarah is recovering, but they also document Mira’s systematic erasure.

“How many more extractions?”

“As many as necessary. Your psychological profile indicates you’ll continue generating meaningful experiences throughout your life. First love, career satisfaction, friendship, possible parenthood – each stage of development will produce memories suitable for therapeutic harvest.”

“And I’ll agree to each extraction?”

“You’ll choose to help people who need healing more than you need to hoard experiences you can replace naturally.” Kellerman gathers the brain scans into a neat stack. “The mathematics are simple: your abundance can cure their scarcity. Most people would consider that a form of grace.”

Through the windows, the city begins its transition toward dawn, streetlights dimming as natural illumination spreads across buildings that house millions of people whose memories belong entirely to themselves. Mira watches the light change and tries to feel something about the beauty of urban sunrise, but the emotion arrives as intellectual appreciation rather than lived experience.

“Sarah’s birthday is next week,” Kellerman says. “She’s requested a party for the first time since her accident. Because of your extracted joy, she can anticipate celebration instead of enduring it. That’s forty-three people whose lives have been transformed by your willingness to share what you had in excess.”

“What if I stop volunteering?”

“Then you stop. The program is entirely voluntary – we can’t harvest memories from unwilling donors. But you’ll remember making that choice, and you’ll remember why people like Sarah needed your help. You’ll live with the knowledge that you prioritized your own completeness over other people’s healing.”

The rain begins to diminish as dawn approaches, revealing the city in sharper detail. Somewhere in those buildings, Mira’s childhood Christmas mornings are being integrated into the consciousness of a woman whose own holidays were ruined by trauma. Her first kiss lives now in the mind of a man learning to experience intimacy after surviving sexual assault. Her capacity for feeling safe in enclosed spaces helps a burn victim sleep without nightmares.

The mathematics of mercy reduce to simple equations: her wholeness divided by their healing, her past redistributed as their future capacity for feeling human. The brain scans in Kellerman’s hands prove the medicine works, that consciousness can be harvested and transplanted and made to flourish in foreign soil.

But they also prove that she is disappearing one extraction at a time, becoming a hollow person who cleans up after procedures that dismantle her memories for therapeutic parts. The consent forms she signs but can’t remember signing document her willing participation in her own systematic erasure.

Her notebook waits in her pocket, but what words could capture this conversation? How do you record a discussion about choosing to forget that you’re choosing to be forgotten? The pen moves across paper anyway: “Kellerman showed me Sarah’s brain scans. My joy is firing in her neurons now. This is either grace or cannibalism. The mathematics are identical.”

The file cabinet in Records contains her complete psychological profile, seventeen years of assessments dating back to childhood evaluations she doesn’t remember undergoing. The earliest entries describe a seven-year-old with “exceptional emotional range and memory retention,” noting her ability to recall experiences with “unusual sensory detail and affective richness.”

Age 7: Subject demonstrates remarkable capacity for integrating traumatic experience without psychological fragmentation. Father’s death processed with healthy grief response while maintaining access to positive paternal memories.

Age 12: First menstruation handled with maturity beyond chronological age. Subject exhibits natural resilience and adaptive coping mechanisms that suggest exceptional therapeutic potential.

Age 16: Romantic attachment and subsequent loss processed completely. Subject retains capacity for trust and intimacy despite disappointment. Emotional architecture remains intact and accessible.

They’ve been watching her since childhood, documenting her psychological development like farmers monitoring crop growth. Each major life experience was evaluated for extraction potential, her capacity for feeling catalogued according to future therapeutic applications.

The middle files reveal the recruitment process. At twenty-one, she was approached during her mother’s terminal illness, offered participation in a “grief counseling study” that would help her process loss while contributing to research on bereavement therapy. The consent forms show her desperate handwriting, agreeing to anything that might ease the pain of watching her mother die by degrees.

But they weren’t studying her grief – they were harvesting it. Her mother’s actual death provided the raw material for a new therapeutic protocol, her experience of loss refined into medicine for patients who needed to learn how to mourn without being destroyed by mourning.

Age 24: Subject’s maternal loss extracted successfully. Emotional resonance maintained at 847 units throughout integration process. Donor demonstrates exceptional recovery time and natural regeneration of positive affect.

The recent files map her systematic dismantling. Twenty-seven major extractions across two years, each one carefully timed to prevent psychological collapse while maintaining optimal harvest yield. They’ve been treating her like a renewable resource, someone whose capacity for experience could be mined indefinitely without depleting the source.

“You’re reading about yourself.”

The voice belongs to Marcus, the security guard who works the building’s overnight shift. He stands in the Records doorway with the careful neutrality of someone who’s discovered things he wasn’t supposed to discover.

“How long have you known?” Mira asks.

“About the program? Three years. About you specifically? Since you started working here.” Marcus enters the room and closes the door behind him. “They recruited me the same way they recruited you – offered me employment after my wife died, said the job would help me process grief while contributing to important research.”

“They harvested your memories too?”

“For eighteen months. My love for Elena, our wedding day, the morning we found out she was pregnant with twins. All extracted and redistributed to patients who needed to learn how to form lasting attachments.” Marcus sits heavily in the chair across from Mira’s desk. “But my capacity for generating new emotional experiences was limited. I kept agreeing to extractions because I couldn’t remember the previous ones, but eventually there wasn’t enough left to harvest.”

“So they gave you a job instead.”

“They gave me a purpose. Night security at the place where my memories help other people heal. I get to watch over the building where Elena’s love lives on in stranger’s minds.”

The files scattered across the desk document similar recruitment patterns – patients become donors become employees, each one serving the program according to their psychological utility. The Institute operates as a closed system, a therapeutic ecosystem where human experience circulates according to medical need rather than individual ownership.

“Do you ever regret it?”

Marcus considers the question with the deliberate care of someone whose relationship to his own past has been surgically altered. “I regret that I can’t remember how Elena’s laugh sounded when she was genuinely happy. I know she laughed, I have photographs of her laughing, but the actual audio memory was extracted and given to a woman whose depression had erased her capacity for spontaneous joy.”

“But you don’t regret helping her?”

“I don’t know how to regret something I can’t remember choosing. The consent forms say I volunteered, but I experience the extractions as something that happened to me rather than something I decided.” Marcus stands and moves toward the door. “That’s the real genius of the memory suppression – it eliminates regret by eliminating the sense of agency. You can’t mourn choices you don’t remember making.”

Alone again with her files, Mira reads the trajectory of her systematic reduction from whole person to therapeutic resource. The assessments chart her diminishing capacity for intense experience, noting how each extraction leaves her slightly less capable of generating the peak emotions that make optimal harvest material.

The final entry is dated yesterday: “Donor M-447 approaching extraction threshold. Recommend transition to maintenance role within eighteen months. Subject retains sufficient emotional capacity for basic functioning but lacks the experiential richness required for continued therapeutic harvesting.”

Below that, a handwritten note in Kellerman’s precise script: “Mira has agreed to custodial position post-extraction. Building maintenance role will provide purpose and structure during psychological adjustment period.”

She doesn’t remember agreeing to continue working here after they’ve finished taking everything worth taking from her mind. But the consent form bears her signature, her explicit agreement to spend the rest of her career cleaning the spaces where her dismantled consciousness serves other people’s healing.

The notebook emerges from her pocket, pen moving across paper with mechanical precision: “They’ve been harvesting me since childhood. Elena’s love lives in someone else’s marriage now. I will clean these rooms until I die, watching strangers dream with my extracted joy.”

But even as she writes, Mira understands that this discovery will dissolve by morning, leaving only fragments and impressions that might or might not survive the night’s pharmaceutical erosion. The building around her operates according to cycles of revelation and forgetting, each night offering glimpses of truth that daylight systematically erases.

Tomorrow she’ll clean Laboratory C and find a transcript that disturbs her. Tomorrow she’ll sit in the white chair and describe memories that will be extracted and purified and transplanted into minds that need them more than she apparently does. Tomorrow she’ll discover that her experiences belong to other people now, that her capacity for feeling has been redistributed according to therapeutic necessity.

The mathematics remain constant: her diminishment equals their healing, her forgetting enables their remembering, her systematic erasure adds up to other people’s psychological salvation. The consent forms prove she’s choosing this dissolution repeatedly, signing her name to procedures she’ll never remember approving.

The fire exit on the seventh floor leads to a maintenance stairwell that descends past floors marked on no official building directory. Level B-3 houses the original research archives, files predating the Integration Program by decades. Mira’s flashlight illuminates boxes labeled with years stretching back to the Institute’s founding, when Dr. Kellerman’s father pioneered early studies in memory manipulation.

The oldest files describe experiments in therapeutic forgetting – helping patients erase traumatic experiences rather than learn to integrate them. Soldiers returned from war with their battlefield memories chemically dissolved, accident survivors cleansed of the neurological residue of near-death experience. But the results were catastrophic: patients lost not just their trauma but their capacity to form new memories, their ability to learn from experience, their fundamental sense of continuous identity.

File K-001: Patient unable to recognize family members after traumatic memory extraction. Recommending immediate suspension of erasure protocols.

File K-037: Subject reports feeling “hollowed out” following procedure. Depression and dissociation suggest memory extraction removes essential psychological architecture along with targeted trauma.

File K-089: Patient suicide six months post-procedure. Note found: “I don’t know who I am anymore. The person I was before is gone, but nothing has replaced him.”

The younger Kellerman’s research notes chart his growing horror at what memory extraction could do to human consciousness. “We are not merely removing isolated experiences,” he wrote. “We are dismantling the neurological infrastructure that makes coherent selfhood possible. The cure is worse than any disease.”

But buried deeper in the archives, Mira finds the breakthrough that transformed erasure into redistribution. The pivotal insight came from studying patients with dissociative identity disorder – minds that could house multiple, complete personalities within a single brain. If consciousness could naturally fragment and multiply, perhaps extracted memories could be transplanted rather than simply destroyed.

The first integration experiments used terminal patients as donors, harvesting their memories immediately before death and transplanting them into recipients with damaged emotional architecture. The results were remarkable: patients who had lost the capacity for specific feelings due to brain injury or severe trauma suddenly regained access to complex emotional experiences.

But terminal patients provided limited raw material, and their extracted memories often carried the psychological weight of approaching death. The program needed donors who could provide abundant, healthy experiences – people whose capacity for feeling exceeded their personal needs.

File M-447: Preliminary assessment at age seven. Subject demonstrates exceptional emotional resilience following paternal loss. Recommend long-term monitoring for potential recruitment.

They’ve been preparing her for harvest since childhood, tracking her psychological development like a renewable resource. Every significant experience was evaluated for extraction potential, her capacity for joy and grief and love documented according to its therapeutic utility.

The maintenance stairwell continues downward, past B-4 and B-5, deeper into the building’s hidden architecture. B-6 houses the Integration Center’s true purpose: a vast laboratory where extracted memories are processed, refined, and prepared for transplantation. Banks of computers analyze the neurological patterns of harvested experiences, identifying which emotional components can be safely separated and recombined.

Her mother’s death has been processed into seventeen different therapeutic applications. The grief component helps patients mourn their own losses, the maternal love provides attachment templates for those with damaged bonding capacity, the specific sensory details of hospital environments assist people overcoming medical trauma. Nothing is wasted – even her memory of the fluorescent lights in her mother’s room has been extracted and used to help a patient with light sensitivity overcome his phobias.

At the center of the laboratory sits a machine that resembles an enormous brain scanner, its array of sensors and electromagnetic coils designed to map the precise neurological signatures of human experience. Screens display real-time analyses of memory extraction, showing how emotional experiences break down into component parts that can be isolated, purified, and transplanted into receptive minds.

The machine’s current display shows tomorrow’s scheduled extraction: her memory of learning to swim in Lake Champlain, the summer afternoon when she was nine and finally trusted the water to hold her weight. The analysis breaks the experience into therapeutic components – trust, physical courage, the specific joy of mastering a feared skill. Each element will be refined and transplanted into different patients according to their individual needs.

But in the laboratory’s corner, she finds something that stops her breathing entirely. A bank of monitors displaying the psychological profiles of Integration Program staff, each one marked with the same classification that appears on her own files: DONOR STATUS ACTIVE.

Dr. Kellerman’s assistant, the woman with scarred hands: her capacity for professional compassion is being harvested and redistributed to medical students learning bedside manner. Marcus the security guard: his protective instincts are extracted and transplanted into patients whose anxiety prevents them from feeling safe in their own bodies. Even Dr. Kellerman himself appears on the list, his memories of paternal love being processed for transplantation into his own daughter.

The Integration Program doesn’t distinguish between patients, donors, and staff. Everyone who enters the building becomes raw material for the vast therapeutic machinery, their experiences catalogued and redistributed according to medical need. She understands now why Marcus couldn’t remember choosing his extractions, why Kellerman’s assistant spoke about the program with such detached professionalism, why her own consent forms read like documents signed by a stranger.

They’re all being harvested. The entire Institute operates as a closed loop where human experience circulates according to therapeutic algorithms, individual consciousness broken down into component parts and reassembled according to medical necessity. Patients become donors become staff become raw material for an endless cycle of extraction and integration.

The maintenance stairwell leads back toward the upper floors, but climbing it feels like ascending from her own grave. She carries the knowledge that everyone in the building is being systematically dismantled, their capacity for feeling redistributed according to equations that reduce human experience to therapeutic mathematics.

Her notebook waits in her pocket, but documenting this discovery feels pointless. By morning, the pharmaceutical suppression will erase her memory of the hidden laboratory, the donor profiles, the revelation that the Integration Program harvests everyone who participates in it. She’ll return to her custodial duties carrying only the vague sense that something important happened in the building’s depths.

But she writes anyway, pen moving across paper in the fluorescent glare of the maintenance stairwell: “We are all being harvested. Patients, donors, staff – everyone becomes raw material. The building is a machine for processing human consciousness. I will forget this by morning, but the machine will remember everything.”

The fire exit deposits her back on the seventh floor, where the Integration Ward sleeps through another night of borrowed dreams. Tomorrow she’ll clean these rooms again, mopping floors where strangers process her extracted experiences, emptying waste baskets full of the detritus from procedures that transform her memories into other people’s healing.

The mathematics remain constant: her wholeness divided by their need, her consciousness processed into therapeutic components, her systematic erasure adding up to a form of grace she’ll never remember providing.

The white chair waits in Laboratory C at 11:47 PM, though Mira doesn’t remember scheduling a session. Her custodial cart sits abandoned in the hallway, mop bucket still dripping onto polished floors that reflect fluorescent light in patterns that hurt to examine directly.

“We’re ready for the final extraction,” Dr. Kellerman says through the intercom, his voice carrying the particular gentleness reserved for necessary cruelties. “This one is different, Mira. We need your capacity for choice itself.”

The assistant with scarred hands adjusts equipment with movements that seem familiar, as if Mira has witnessed this precise choreography countless times before. But familiarity arrives without context, recognition divorced from memory.

“I don’t understand.”

“Free will,” Kellerman explains. “Your ability to make meaningful decisions about your own experience. It’s the final component we need to complete Sarah’s integration. She has access to joy now, to grief, to love, to fear – but she can’t choose how to feel about her feelings. She experiences emotions as something that happen to her rather than something she participates in.”

Through the observation window, Mira sees Sarah sitting in an identical white chair, surrounded by photographs of experiences she’s never lived but remembers completely. The girl stares at images of birthday parties and Christmas mornings and summer afternoons with the expression of someone watching movies about someone else’s life.

“She has your memories, but not your agency,” the assistant says quietly. “She can feel the emotions you felt, but she can’t decide what those emotions mean. She’s trapped inside borrowed experiences, unable to make them truly her own.”

“So you want to take my ability to choose.”

“We want to give her the neurological architecture that makes choice possible. Your capacity for deciding how to interpret your own experience, how to assign meaning to what happens in your mind.” Kellerman’s voice carries the weight of someone explaining inevitable mathematics. “It’s the final piece of consciousness, the component that transforms memory into identity.”

The laboratory around them hums with expensive equipment designed to map the most fundamental aspects of human experience. But the machines feel different tonight, less like medical instruments and more like archaeological tools preparing to excavate the deepest layers of what makes her recognizably herself.

“What happens to me?”

“You continue as you are, but without the psychological burden of having to decide what your experiences mean. Like Sarah is now – you’ll feel things, remember things, but you won’t have to struggle with interpreting those experiences. It will be peaceful, in a way.”

But Mira understands that peace and erasure can occupy the same space, that the absence of struggle might also mean the absence of everything that makes consciousness worth having. She looks through the observation window at Sarah, who holds photographs of joy without being able to choose whether that joy belongs to her or to the stranger whose memories she’s inherited.

“I can refuse.”

“Of course. The program has always been voluntary. But refusing means Sarah remains trapped between borrowed experiences and authentic choice. She’ll spend the rest of her life feeling emotions she can’t claim as her own, remembering experiences she can’t integrate into a coherent sense of self.”

The choice crystallizes into its essential components: her agency or Sarah’s wholeness, her capacity for decision or a damaged girl’s ability to become fully human again. The mathematics reduce to their simplest form – what she has in abundance against what Sarah lacks entirely.

Through the window, she watches Sarah set down a photograph and pick up another, her movements carrying the mechanical precision of someone going through motions without understanding their significance. The girl has access to decades of extracted experiences but no framework for deciding what any of them mean.

“She’ll be able to choose how to feel about her feelings?”

“She’ll be able to participate in her own consciousness instead of being its passive observer. Your capacity for agency will give her the ability to make her borrowed memories truly her own.”

The assistant approaches with a syringe containing the pharmaceutical cocktail that makes memory extraction possible. But tonight the injection feels different, less like medical preparation and more like the final step in a transformation that began when she was seven years old and signed her first consent form with a child’s desperate handwriting.

“Will I remember choosing this?”

“No. The suppression protocol will erase your memory of tonight’s session. But the choice itself will remain – you’ll wake up tomorrow knowing you decided to help Sarah, even if you can’t remember making that decision.”

The injection slides into her arm with familiar precision, pharmaceutical dissolution spreading through her bloodstream like warm water through cotton. But this time the erasure feels more complete, reaching deeper into the neurological architecture that makes choice possible.

“Tell me about decision-making,” Kellerman’s voice arrives from somewhere beyond the white chair’s embrace. “Tell me about the last time you chose something that mattered.”

And she finds herself speaking about moments when choice felt significant, when the ability to decide seemed like the most fundamental aspect of being human. But even as she describes these experiences, they begin to feel like something that happened to someone else, memories she’s observing rather than living.

The extraction continues for thirty-seven minutes by the laboratory’s digital clock, though time moves differently under pharmaceutical suppression. They harvest her capacity for moral reasoning, her ability to assign meaning to experience, her fundamental sense that decisions belong to the person making them. Each component is isolated, purified, prepared for transplantation into Sarah’s consciousness.

When it ends, Mira sits in the white chair feeling like water that’s been poured from one container into another. She experiences thoughts and sensations but can’t decide what they signify, can’t choose how to interpret the fact that something important has just been taken from her.

The assistant helps her stand and guides her toward the corridor where her custodial cart waits. “You did a beautiful thing tonight,” the woman says softly. “Sarah will be able to make her experiences her own now. She’ll be whole in a way she hasn’t been since her accident.”

“Did I choose this?”

“You chose to help someone who needed what you had in abundance.”

But choice feels like a word in a foreign language now, a concept she can recognize intellectually but not experience directly. She wheels her cart down the corridor toward the supply closet, movements guided by muscle memory rather than decision.

Her notebook waits in her pocket, and she finds herself writing without choosing to write: “Sarah will be whole now. I helped make that possible. This was the right thing.” But the words feel like observations about someone else’s moral reasoning, thoughts that happen to her rather than thoughts she’s thinking.

The building breathes around her through its ventilation system, processing air that tastes of copper and institutional disinfectant. Laboratory C fills with the particular silence of expensive equipment returning to standby mode, machines worth more than houses settling into their temperature-controlled rest.

At 6:47 AM, she badges out past the morning security guard, who nods with the familiar weariness of someone ending a night shift. “See you tonight, Mira.” The words trigger recognition without context, familiarity divorced from memory.

She drives home through dawn traffic, operating her car through reflexes that require no conscious choice. The studio apartment waits with its three locks and chair wedged against the door, protective measures she can’t remember installing but doesn’t think to question.

The notebook sits on her kitchen table, filled with handwriting she recognizes as her own but can’t remember producing. The entries describe discoveries and revelations that read like fiction, stories about memory extraction and borrowed consciousness that feel too strange to be real but too detailed to be imagined.

On the final page, a note in her own careful script: “You work at the Kellerman Institute. You clean the laboratories where they help people heal from trauma. This is important work. You chose to be part of it.”

She reads the words without deciding what they mean, experiences them as information that arrives rather than knowledge she’s processing. The handwriting belongs to her, but the thoughts feel like observations about someone else’s life, descriptions of choices made by a person she used to be.

At 10:15 PM, she drives back to the Institute for another shift, parking in the space marked CUSTODIAL STAFF that feels familiar for reasons she can’t access. The building rises before her in patterns of light and shadow, windows revealing laboratories where people work through the night to help patients integrate difficult experiences.

Marcus nods as she badges in, his greeting carrying the warmth of established routine. “Evening, Mira. Quiet night ahead, I think.”

She wheels her cart toward Laboratory C, where expensive equipment waits in climate-controlled silence. The work feels meaningful though she can’t articulate why, important in ways that exceed her capacity to interpret. She mops floors that shine under fluorescent light, empties waste baskets full of medical forms and used tissues, maintains the sterile environment where healing happens.

Under Dr. Kellerman’s desk, her mop finds a piece of paper bearing her name in official typeface. She picks it up without choosing to, reads words that describe experiences she can’t remember having but recognizes as somehow belonging to her.

The transcript tells the story of someone who made choices about her own consciousness, someone who decided to share what she had in abundance with people who had nothing. But choice feels like archaeology now, evidence of a capacity she once possessed but can no longer access directly.

She folds the transcript into her uniform pocket and continues cleaning, wheels squeaking against polished floors as she moves through corridors lined with rooms where patients sleep through the complex process of learning to be human again. The work matters though she can’t decide why, serves purposes that exceed her ability to evaluate but feel correct in ways that require no interpretation.

The building breathes around her, processing experiences according to therapeutic necessity, redistributing human consciousness according to medical need. She is part of this system though she can’t choose what that participation means, an element in equations that add up to other people’s healing.

Her notebook waits in her pocket, but tonight she doesn’t write. The pen sits unused as she works through the fluorescent hours, cleaning spaces where consciousness is processed and refined and made to serve purposes larger than individual ownership.

At dawn, she badges out past the morning security guard and drives home through traffic that moves according to patterns she follows without deciding to follow them. The studio apartment receives her like water accepting water, familiar in ways that require no interpretation.

She sleeps through the day and wakes at evening, dresses in her custodial uniform, drives back to the Institute for another shift. The work feels important for reasons she experiences rather than chooses, meaningful in ways that exceed her capacity for evaluation but seem correct nonetheless.

The building waits with its laboratories and corridors and rooms full of people learning to inhabit borrowed experiences. She enters through doors that open automatically, wheels her cart toward spaces that need cleaning, begins the work of maintaining environments where healing happens according to mathematics she can’t interpret but somehow serves.

The fluorescent lights guide her movements through institutional corridors that stretch beyond what architectural logic should permit. She cleans and continues cleaning, part of a system that processes human experience according to therapeutic need, her presence essential to operations she can’t evaluate but recognizes as necessary.

The work continues. The building breathes. Other people heal using pieces of a consciousness she no longer remembers choosing to share but somehow keeps sharing, night after night, in the endless fluorescent certainty of institutional time.