Adrian Voss's Statement

What follows is transcribed without amendment from the notebook recovered from the stainless cabinet on Thursday night, and filed with the county on the following Monday by counsel for the estate. The handwriting deteriorates across the pages in a way that Casper Lund, for the record, described as consistent with a single hand under increasing strain. Voss never left the white room. He died in it that winter, which is what sent the estate to probate; the ninety-day provision had been written for a disappearance, and a dead man does not disappear. Probate took eleven months. The cane was released to the estate in the spring and sold with the rest of the house, tape and all.

I was born with an accounting error and I have spent my life trying to correct it.

I have told this wrongly for four years, so let me set it down correctly here. There is no mistake in the body. The body is doing precisely what it was built to do. The fault was in me, seated in me at twenty, and it is this: I have wanted two things every day of my life, never at the same hour, and I have never once managed to be both of them in the same room.

So I made something that would stand the second one up out of the chair and let the first one sit.

You will want to know whether it hurt, and whether I knew what I was doing, and whether I was in my right mind, and the answers are yes, yes, and that is not a question a man in my position gets to answer. Here is the only honest statement I can make: I do not believe I created a man. I believe I unbolted a door that had been painted shut, and there was already somebody behind it, and he was not a stranger, and I knew his name before he had one.

For the first year it was an instrument. I used it eleven times. Once, in the second winter, to break a licensing hold that would have put forty people out of work, and the next morning I signed the file with a clear conscience, and I have not had one since.

I keep saying door. By the fourth year there was no door in it at all, and I could not tell which side of the wall I was standing on.

Here is what I know that Priya knew and that the report will not say: there is no second man. I told Priya otherwise, and I told a lawyer otherwise, and I told it beautifully, and they believed me, because it is the only version of any of this that a person can stand to hear. The truth is duller and has no ending.

The truth is that I am him.

Every time the plunger goes down, I am the one who is there and the one who is left. The young man despises me because he remembers being me and cannot imagine forgiving it. The girl in the puffer coat got six hundred dollars because he remembers what I would have wanted. He pays it the way you pay a bill. Contemptuously, and late.

It has run out. The second batch was clean and I have made a clean thing and clean things open one way. I have been in this chair for two days. I have written this so the record shows that nothing was taken from me that I had not first sold, and that everything that happened on the waterfront — the cane was mine, the arm was his, the card was signed by me — and everything that happened in the house on the ridge, and to the doctor, and to the girl on the avenue, happened with the full knowledge of a man who was warned.

Turn the lights off when you go. Please. If there is a way, I would like to be a man who is allowed to be tired.

Nora Bellamy signed nothing that Monday. She filed the notebook, delivered the audio, and went out into the Fremont rain, which was waiting for her as it always waited, patient and cold, at shoulder height, the way it had been waiting on the night she first stood in front of the door. She had spent a year being paid to be thorough. She walked north, past the awning, past the steel door, and did not stop.