She read this several times. Then she set the notebook down on the table and she looked at the window and she thought about the apartment. The specific arrangement of it — the round table, the specific colour of the sofa, the books organised in a system, the small pots of herbs on the kitchen ledge, each in a specific position. She had noticed all of this when she woke up and she had noted it as the careful inhabitation of a careful person. Now she thought about it differently. A locus, in a memory palace, was a specific location that you attached a specific memory to. The classical memory palace technique — she knew this, she knew what the words meant, she had the knowledge without the context — was to build an imagined space and populate it with objects that represented memories, so that you could walk through the space and retrieve the memories by encountering the objects.
But this apartment was a real space. Not an imagined one.
The apartment is the palace. It has always been the palace.
She read further. The notebook was part diary, part technical document — entries about memory, about the techniques she was using, about what each part of the apartment contained, about a project she seemed to be working on that involved mapping her own memory externally. There was a recurring figure: someone called L. Not named fully, just L, in the way you referred to someone whose full name was too large to write every time, or in the way you referred to someone whose full name was too complicated to address directly. L came up frequently — L called today, L doesn't understand why I need the system, L says I'm building a prison not a palace. And later: L hasn't called in three weeks. I know why. I've been doing this long enough to know the pattern when I see it.
She was still reading when Inspector Nair came into the room and sat across the table from her.
