Chapter 38: Public Profile
The branch library on Halvard is open until eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays and closes at five the rest of the week.
You get forty-five minutes on a public terminal, once a day.
The timer is on the screen in the top right corner, in red.
To get a card you need photo identification and proof of address.
My photo identification was a state card issued at release, with a photograph taken against a grey wall by a machine that counts down from three.
My proof of address was a letter from Ms. Prine on Cranmore House paper.
The librarian read the letter, wrote CRANMORE on the form in her own hand, and gave me the card without any expression at all.
I have thought about her since. She did that perhaps four hundred times a year.
Terminal six is the one against the wall where nobody can stand behind you. I used terminal six.
Six years teaches you where to sit. It is not fear. It is a preference about walls.
The first time I ever searched my own name was in my second week out and I have already written about that.
The second name I searched, in October, was my cousin's.
I want to set out exactly what I did and did not do, because it matters later and because people assume.
I did not make an account. I did not send anything.
I did not comment on anything. I did not look at anything that was not public.
I typed her maiden name first, out of habit.
Bree Halloway.
The results were six years old and stopped.
People do not delete accounts. They abandon them, and the abandonment has a date on it.
Then I typed the other one.
Bree Mercer.
There were four hundred and eleven public photographs on one account and I looked at every one of them in forty-one minutes.
Four hundred and eleven is close to four hundred and twelve. I noticed. I moved on.
I am going to be plain about this. That is what I did. Forty-one of my forty-five minutes.
Most of it is nothing. Most of anybody's is nothing.
A dog on a rug.
A cake with a sparkler. A pair of trainers on a car dashboard.
A kitchen with a grey worktop and a window over the sink and a jar of wooden spoons.
That kitchen is not the kitchen on Delham Street.
I checked the window, the wall, and the direction of the light. It is not.
I checked because I had to check, and once I had checked I stopped needing to.
Dean is in eleven photographs. In seven of them he is turned away or partly out of frame.
In four of them he is looking at the camera and in all four he has the same expression, which is the one he had when he was being photographed.
He had grown a beard and cut it off again somewhere between photograph two hundred and thirty and photograph two hundred and forty-one.
The surname changed on the fourteenth of September.
I know because the account posted a photograph of a marriage certificate that day, face down, at an angle, with a hand on the corner of it.
Face down. You could see the county seal through the paper because the flash was behind it.
I sat and looked at that for some part of my forty-one minutes.
The fourteenth of September was two years and two months into a six-year sentence.
I was in a housing unit with ninety-six women and a television bracketed to the wall.
That is the arithmetic. I did it at the terminal and I have never needed to do it again.
I will say one more thing about that hour and then I am going to stop.
I did not feel what I expected to feel.
I had spent six years expecting a particular feeling to arrive and what arrived instead was the thing that arrives when you finally read a file you have been carrying.
It was recognition.
It was the click of a document matching a fact.
The timer went red at forty-one minutes because it turns red at four remaining.
I closed the browser.
There is a button on those terminals that clears the session and I pressed it, because leaving a session open is leaving a document on a scanner.
Then I sat for a moment with my hands on the edge of the desk.
A boy at terminal four was playing a game with the sound off, hitting the same two keys.
I stood up, put the chair back under, and walked out past the returns trolley.
I did not save anything. I did not print anything.
I did not write anything down.
I did not need to.
I can still describe the jar of wooden spoons, and I have never seen that kitchen.