She walked back to the living room. She sat on the floor — not the sofa, the floor, some instinct against taking the sofa. She sat on the teak floor with her back against the wall and she looked at the apartment and she tried to find, inside herself, something that connected her to this space. Some memory of arriving. Some sense of before.
There was nothing. There was the floor she was sitting on, and the room around her, and the woman at the end of the corridor, and herself — sitting here, present, alive, in possession of a body and a set of functional instincts and apparently no personal history whatsoever.
She looked at the coffee table and the stack of notebooks and the unwashed ceramic cup. She reached out and picked up the top notebook. It was full of handwriting — the same handwriting as the dates on the leftover containers in the fridge, she could see this immediately. Dense, organised, the writing of someone who wrote to think, every page full. She turned to the last written page. There was a single line at the bottom, below a longer entry she had not read yet: If you are reading this and you do not know who you are — start at the beginning. The apartment will tell you. It was built for exactly this.
She read the line three times. Then she set the notebook down on her knee. She looked at the apartment around her. She thought about the phrase: built for exactly this.
Then she picked up the ceramic coffee cup from the table — someone had drunk from it recently, there was a faint ring of dried coffee inside — and she carried it to the kitchen and she put it in the sink and turned on the tap and washed it, because the cup needed washing and because doing something with her hands was the only thing available to her, and because she was, whatever else she was, the kind of person who washed dishes.
She was about to fill the kettle for tea when someone knocked at the front door and then, not waiting for an answer, a voice said: "Police. Open the door, please."
