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He loved Big Brother. And yet — there was something else now, something that had no name, something that lived in the space between one heartbeat and the next, where the telescreens could not reach. Winston Smith sat at his usual table in the Chestnut Tree Café, the gin-scented tears drying on his cheeks, and for the first time since Room 101, he noticed the quality of the light falling through the dusty window.

It was not that the light was beautiful. Beauty was a concept he had surrendered along with everything else. But the light had a particular slant to it — autumnal, he might once have called it — that stirred in him not a memory exactly, but the ghost of a memory, the way a phantom limb aches in weather that the body can no longer feel.

The telescreen was announcing another increase in the chocolate ration. Winston raised his glass of Victory Gin and drank mechanically, tasting nothing. Across the café, Ampleforth — or someone who had once been Ampleforth — sat hunched over a chessboard, moving pieces against himself. They did not acknowledge one another. There was nothing to acknowledge.

Winston's hands, which had grown thin and liver-spotted in the months since his release, lay flat upon the table. He studied them with a detached curiosity, as one might study the hands of a corpse. These hands had once held a pen. These hands had once opened a diary with cream-coloured pages and written, in their cramped and furtive script, words that were acts of rebellion. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. He did not feel the old terror at the thought. He did not feel anything at all. That was the gift they had given him in Room 101 — not merely obedience but the annihilation of the self that might disobey.

And yet.

There was the matter of the floorboard.

Three days ago — or was it four? Time had become unreliable since the Ministry of Love, not in the way it had been unreliable before, when he had still possessed the stubborn private conviction that the past was real, but in a soft, yielding way, as though time itself had been re-educated — three or four days ago, Winston had returned to what had been his flat in Victory Mansions. The Party had reassigned him there, whether by bureaucratic indifference or by some refined cruelty that he was too hollowed-out to perceive. The room was the same and not the same. The telescreen occupied its familiar position. The table stood where it had always stood. But the hidden alcove — the alcove where he had once sat writing, shielded from the telescreen's gaze — had been walled over with fresh plaster, smooth and white as bone.

He had stood before that sealed alcove for a long time, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. Then he had gone to bed.

But in the night — and this was the thing he could not explain, the thing that sat in him now like a splinter of ice — in the night, he had risen from sleep and walked to the centre of the room and knelt down and pried up a floorboard. He had not decided to do this. He had not even been fully awake. His hands had simply known where to go, as though they possessed a memory that the rest of him had been stripped of. And beneath the floorboard, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth, there had been a small notebook.

It was not the diary. The diary had been confiscated long ago, and in any case it had been larger, heavier, with that distinctive cream-coloured paper. This notebook was cheap, its covers warped with damp, its pages ruled in faint blue lines. He did not recognise it. He was almost certain he had never seen it before. And yet his hands had known precisely where it lay.

He had opened it. The pages were blank.

Winston had stood there in the darkness, holding the empty notebook, and something had moved in him — not thought, not feeling, but something more primitive than either, something that existed below the level at which the Party operated, in the animal substratum of the brain where instinct lived and could not be wholly killed.

He had put the notebook back. He had replaced the floorboard. He had returned to bed. In the morning, he had gone to the Chestnut Tree Café as usual and ordered his Victory Gin as usual and listened to the telescreen as usual. He had done everything as usual.

But he had not forgotten the notebook.

This was what disturbed him. Not its existence — objects appeared and disappeared in Oceania with the regularity of breathing; reality itself was provisional — but the fact that he remembered it. Three days later, or four, he still remembered. The notebook existed in his mind with a fixity and persistence that nothing else possessed. It was, he realised with a dull shock, the only thing he was certain was real.

"You look thoughtful," said a voice.

Winston looked up. A woman was standing beside his table. She was perhaps forty, with a broad, doughy face and the colourless eyes of a Party member who has long since ceased to see anything that the Party does not wish seen. She wore the regulation overalls. There was nothing remarkable about her.

"Do I?" Winston said.

"You were staring at your hands."

"Was I? I hadn't noticed."

The woman sat down without being invited. This was not unusual; in the Chestnut Tree Café, the usual social conventions had a way of dissolving, as though the establishment existed in a pocket of reality where the rules were slightly different, slightly softened, like rules glimpsed through frosted glass.

"I'm Comrade Withers," the woman said. "I work in the Fiction Department. Novels."

The name meant nothing to Winston. But then, names meant nothing. People were interchangeable. He himself was interchangeable.

"I've seen you here before," Withers continued. "You always sit alone."

"Yes."

"So do I, usually." She paused. The telescreen was playing a military march. "Do you play chess?"

"No."

"I used to. Before—" She stopped herself, and the stopping was so practised, so reflexive, that Winston recognised it instantly: the internal censor, the mental scissors that cut the sentence before it could become dangerous. Before what? Before the Ministry of Love? Before whatever Room had been hers? Everyone in the Chestnut Tree Café had a before, and no one spoke of it.

"I work in Records," Winston said, though he was not sure this was still true. He went to the Ministry of Truth each day and sat at his desk and received instructions through the pneumatic tube and carried them out, but he could not have said with certainty what his function was. The work passed through him like light through glass, leaving no trace.

"Records," Withers repeated. "Then you deal with the past."

"There is no past," Winston said automatically.

"No," she agreed. "Of course not."

They sat in silence. The military march ended and was replaced by a bulletin about increased steel production in the fourth quarter. The figures were certainly fabricated, but this knowledge — if it could be called knowledge — produced no reaction in Winston. It was simply a fact, inert and harmless, like knowing that the earth orbited the sun. It changed nothing. It meant nothing.

"I had a curious experience the other day," Withers said carefully. Her voice had dropped, not to a whisper — that would have been suspicious — but to the flat, neutral tone that people in the café used when they were approaching something they should not approach. "I found a pencil."

"A pencil?"

"A real one. Wood and graphite. Not a Party-issue pen. I found it wedged behind a filing cabinet in the Fiction Department. It must have been there for years."

"What did you do with it?"

"I turned it in, naturally."

"Naturally."

Another silence. Winston drank his gin. It burned in the familiar way, a controlled and predictable pain, comforting in its reliability.

"But before I turned it in," Withers said, and now something shifted in her colourless eyes, a flicker so brief that it might have been imagined, like a fish turning beneath the surface of murky water, "I held it for a moment. I held it and I—" Again the mental scissors. "I held it. That's all."

Winston looked at her. He looked at her as he had not looked at anyone since Julia, and the thought of Julia produced no pain, which was itself a kind of pain, the worst kind, the kind that could not be felt.

"I understand," he said.

And the terrible thing was that he did understand. He understood precisely. The pencil and the notebook. The notebook and the pencil. Two objects separated by the breadth of London, each one meaningless in itself, each one an empty vessel, a potential that would never be fulfilled because the people who held them had been broken past repair.

And yet they remembered.

Withers finished her gin, stood, and left without another word. Winston watched her go. Through the window, he could see the enormous face of Big Brother gazing down from the poster across the street. The face was benevolent, protective, all-seeing. Winston loved it. He loved it with every fibre of his being. This was not a lie. Room 101 did not produce lies; it produced truths, truths so absolute that they occupied every atom of consciousness and left no room for anything else.

Almost no room.

That night, Winston returned to his flat. He stood in the centre of the room. The telescreen murmured its endless stream of statistics and slogans. He did not look at the floorboard. He did not even think about the floorboard. He thought about Big Brother. He thought about the Party. He thought about Oceania and its eternal, righteous war.

But his hands — his thin, liver-spotted hands — trembled.

And somewhere beneath the floorboard, in the darkness, the blank pages waited.

They were infinitely patient. They had all the time in the world. The pages did not need Winston to remember them, because they existed independently of his remembering, in the old stubborn way that objects had once existed, back when the past was real and two plus two made four.

The pages waited. And Winston Smith, who loved Big Brother, who had been broken and remade in the image of perfect obedience, lay in his narrow bed and stared at the ceiling and did not sleep.

Somewhere, very far away, a clock was striking thirteen.