Two Documents

The first document was Warren Pike's, and Amos read it in the office on the Monday, alone, with the door shut.

It was an affidavit, sworn in March in front of a notary at a bank in Worthington, four pages, no rhetoric anywhere in it, written the way the man had written everything in his life. It said that in 2009 he and Adrian Voss had filed a patent on a family of compounds developed from a line of research into the chemistry of shame — Pike's own phrase, in quotation marks, because he had never found a better one. It said that the trials they had run were on themselves, because no ethics board would have signed off on what they were doing, and that in 2013 Voss had come to his house and had drunk a preparation of the forty-one compound in his kitchen and had changed, in front of him, over about ninety minutes, into a person who was not Adrian Voss and who had, in a voice Pike described as the same throat and a different man, asked him for a glass of water.

It said that the change was not an illusion and was not a costume and was not, in the end, reversible on demand. It said that the preparation worked the first time only if it was taken with care, and that Voss had not been careful after 2019. It said that one of the two reagents could not be got any more, and that what was left in the freezer would last him less than a year.

And then the affidavit did the thing that Amos had spent three weeks preparing himself not to be surprised by, and was surprised by anyway. It said, in Pike's flat, orderly way: I have known since 2016 that the second person is not a person. It is a part of him that was already there and had been getting louder since he was nineteen, when we were undergraduates and he told me, once, and never again, that he had never in his life been in a room without wanting to break something in it, and that whatever we made in this house, we did not make that.

The second document was 168 pages, and had a title page, and a date, and no signature.

It was written in the first person by a man who had begun by believing he was conducting an experiment on himself and had ended by keeping two sets of records so as not to have to read both at once. The early pages had a voice to them — it comes over me the way a current comes over a swimmer who has decided to stop swimming — and he described the first change in detail and with love, in the language of a man on a boat describing the water. Then, over about forty pages, the language turned. He began to write about himself in the second person. Then in the third.

Amos copied one passage out by hand and kept the copy, and it is the only piece of the 168 pages that exists anywhere now:

I took it at 4:10 in the afternoon, in Pike's kitchen, with the door shut. There is a person in me who has been waiting a long time for this, and he is not sorry about anything, and I would like it on the record that I knew exactly what I was doing.

That was page eleven. Everything after page eleven had been written from the other side of the door.

By page ninety he was keeping accounts, in a kind of ledger, and the entries had a subject who was not the man writing them. Rusk got out of the house on the eleventh of the month, three weeks running. Rusk broke the mirror in the upstairs bathroom on a night the account does not otherwise describe. Rusk went to Fourth Street at the times when the cameras in the loading bay were off, because Rusk had read the schedule, because Rusk read everything Voss wrote — which was the detail that stopped Amos's breath at the page and held it there for a while: the second one had access to the same memory, the same vocabulary, the same handwriting. There was nothing in Voss's mind that Rusk did not have. There was only everything Voss had that Rusk refused.

Near the end the account of the morning on the Olentangy path was given in eleven lines, composed and cold, and Amos read them four times, and then understood that he was not reading a confession but an invoice. Rusk had seen the judge and the judge had been kind to him, had stopped, had asked him whether he was all right, had asked the man in the dark coat, in that voice of a man on a bench who has stopped caring whether people owe him anything, whether he needed help — and Rusk had taken the stick out of the old man's hands and beaten him to death with it in the open air on a beautiful morning, for no reason at all; and then the account went on to the weather, and stayed on the weather for a page and a half.

The last page of the file was nine lines long, and it was the only place in 168 pages where the two voices in the document seemed to be arguing over the same sentence, one in the body of the paragraph and one inserted above it, as if a man had come back to a paragraph and found it wrong.

If you are reading this, I did not burn it, which means I was not myself at the end and I was honest at the beginning. I have no defense. I want you to know that I have thought about stopping every day for six years, and that the reason I did not stop was not the chemistry. It was that the second one was the only company I ever kept that did not require me to be admired.

The house and the building are yours to deal with. There is an envelope in your drawer. Do not open it before the funeral and do not open it after.

On the twenty-eighth of May, Cory Lindstrom came back to the office with the final price and a signature page, and put the page on the desk between them, and did not sit down.

"Nobody is going to ask you about the basement," he said. "The coroner wrote what he wrote. The group has the building, and the building is going to have a clean room where the freezer was, by August. I need two things from you, and one of them I already have. I need the freezer inventory, and I need to know whether the instrument in your file is the instrument, or whether there is something in this office that is not in your file."

"The instrument in the file is the instrument," Amos said.

"And there is nothing else in this office."

Lindstrom was not looking at him. He was looking past him, at the bottom drawer of the credenza behind the desk, where an envelope with a name on it had been sitting unopened for nine years.

"There is nothing else in the file," Amos said.

Nobody said anything for a moment. It was the closest a lawyer ever gets to telling a lie out loud, and Amos found that his right hand had gone flat on the desk as though the desk were the drawer and he were holding it shut with his own weight.

Lindstrom looked at him for a while. Then he took the page and left, and Amos sat for a long time after the door shut. He thought about the freezer inventory, which had been wrong because two men had been keeping it. He thought about an institute that was going to a group from Chicago for a price nobody would call the highest, when the man who built it had told anybody who would listen that it would go to Boston. Then he got up and put his hand on the drawer handle, and stood there, and did not open it.

Amos did open the envelope. He opened it nine days later, at night, with the door shut, and by then the coroner had ruled and the institute had been sold for an amount that everybody agreed was generous.

Inside the envelope there was one page of paper and one object.

The paper had been folded twice, and the wax had been pressed with something flat rather than a seal. He worked a thumbnail under the edge of it the way he had been taught to open a document he could not afford to tear, and it came apart in one piece.

It was a codicil, signed and witnessed, dated nine years earlier. The first line revoked the gift to Dell Rusk outright. He stopped there for a while, and then read the rest of it out loud, slowly, which he had not done with a document since law school.

The rest left the entire bequest to a scholarship at the university in his mother's name, and named the man who was to administer it, which was Amos.

It had never been delivered to the office. It had never been filed with the will it amended, which is why the file Amos had kept for nine years still said what it said.

The object was a small silver plate, engraved the same way as the one the police had photographed in the grass, and pried off the handle of its twin — the second of the two the board had given him, the one he had kept at home — and never replaced.

He sat there with both of them in his hands for a long time, with the lamp on and the blinds still open on High Street, and he thought about the one thing in the whole file that had not been explained by chemistry or by money or by any of the men who had told him what they saw.

The first time, in the kitchen in Worthington, in 2013, Adrian Voss had asked for Warren Pike to be there. He had wanted a witness. Somewhere at the beginning, before the account, before the four hundred names in the papers, the man had wanted somebody to see him do it and to say that it had been done.

Nobody was ever charged with either of the two things that had been done in the open that year: a girl knocked down on a sidewalk on Fourth Street in February, and an old man beaten to death on a path in March for asking a stranger whether he was all right. There was going to be a clean room, and a donor wall, and his name in bronze above a door. Nobody ever apologized for any of it, and nobody ever resigned, and Amos, who had spent a career believing in paperwork, found that he had been wrong about which part of it would arrive: no scandal, no apology, no letter to the editor, only a sale, a settlement, and a wall with a name on it. The girl's mother still had the check.

Teo still walks down Fourth Street once a year or so to look at a service door that is always shut. Amos has never asked him what he is looking for.

Amos put the plate in his pocket and put the page back in the envelope and took the envelope down to the office safe, and he did not tell anybody, and he has not told anybody yet, which he is aware is the last thing he has left from the whole of it.