Page 85 of Hushed

Levi

Bastien sleeps like he’s been shot.

It’s a little after two in the afternoon and he’s face-down with one arm hanging off the mattress. He hasn’t moved since he went under. I lie there for a while and look at him. Then I get up. If I stay in that bed another ten minutes I’m going to start thinking about how sexy he is and then I’m never going to get anything done.

The transcript is still sitting in the printer tray in the spare room. It comes to 140 pages. If I had noticed that, I would have at least printed it double-sided, but there are good points: I can use the back of the page before to sketch down notes.

I take them down to the kitchen and make myself some coffee.

I find a highlighter in my backpack and I start at page one.

It goes slower than I thought it would. Not because it’s hard. Because every few pages I have to stop, look up a word, or just pull myself back from ranting at the humiliation of it.

They read his emails out loud. Not summaries. The actual emails, one after another, with a man saying the date and the time stamp before each one like he’s reading out a charge sheet. Somebody in that room decided that the way to do this was to make him sit and listen to his own words in somebody else’s mouth for four hours.

And then on page sixty-one there’s a transcript inside the transcript.

EXHIBIT 11. VOICEMAIL, RECEIVED 19:47.

It’s the message. Somebody typed it out. Every word, with the pauses marked in brackets, and a note at the bottom giving the duration in minutes and seconds.

I read it twice and then I put the highlighter down and sit there, because now I’ve heard Robby’s voice, and I’m not just angry for Bastien. I’m angry for this stranger, who had made up his mind to do something, and didn’t deserve to have those final words read out like that. Somebody in Washington made copies of a dead man’s last phone call and handed them around the table like a meeting agenda.

I finish the coffee as it’s turning cold and rinse it in the sink. Then I sit back down, because that’s the job.

Ronald’s notes start after the transcript. They are photocopies of handwritten scrawl that nobody’s bothered to annotate and type up. They’re a couple of lines on hotel stationery, folded in half and stuck in with a paper clip, and I think he printed the transcript for himself first and then decided to send the whole thing.

Chen—11 disciplinary committees in 8 yrs. Ask yourself why.

Whitman shut him down twice. Read p.94 and p.112.

I go to page ninety-four.

Chen asks a question. Whitman says something short. Chen tries again, differently, and Whitman says something shorter, and there’s a bracket in the transcript that says [pause].

I flip back and reread, slowly, and I understand about a third of it, and the third I understand is enough to make my ears go hot.

I’m still there when he comes down.

He’s wearing my sweatpants, which are too long on him, and he’s got sleep creases on one side of his face. He looks about nineteen. He stops in the doorway and sighs. “Minou, you weren’t supposed to be allowed to see this.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the NDA.”

“And who’s that protecting? You or the institution?” I turn the page.

“Levi, that is legally confidential. I signed a document. Ronald said explicitly on the phone this morning that I could not share those with you and I told him I understood.”

“The cat’s out of the bag. I finished the first pass and now am going back for notes. I’ve read the part where they ask you if you had sex with him. I’ve read the voicemail. You can’t unring this bell anymore.”

He sits heavily. “I feel like I’ve been hearing a version of that with you since I met you. There’s always a cat that’s escaped a bag, an open barn door, and all it translates to is that you just muscle in and hop over the boundaries because they’re inconvenient to you. How would you feel if I started nosing around in some kind of file about your service that I wasn’t entitled to?”

“It’s not the same thing.” I uncap a different color highlighter.

“How is it not the same thing?” Bastien demands. “I gave my word.”

I highlight a comment in pink and look up at him. “Firstly, what did you think I was going to do when I asked for the transcript? Make little paper airplanes out of it?”