She holds the needle above the groove. Just once, she wants the hall to begin without her.
Forty cabinets to a row. The licensed dead. Their cooling fans keep separate time. Above them the clearing floor. Above that the Board sets rates.
Every fourteenth she brings her crate down at three. Vinyl, cardboard corners worn soft. Her turntable. Fingerless gloves. The flashlight rests in the notch her back teeth have made for it.
WINDOW: 03:00 to 04:00. PERSONS PRESENT: none.
Her card says environmental stimulus, recurring.
She lowers the needle.
The brushes begin. One fan leaves its clock. Others follow. The second row first, the fourth last. Mid-hall, a cabinet runs half a beat ahead. It works harder when she watches. In spring its estate paid four units more. Nobody queried it.
She had thought it was glad to see her.
She reads the sleeve until the track ends.
Row two, near the aisle: an empty bay. Factory-clean, cables coiled, a paper tag with a room number from an office across town. Decommissioned. She plays its record to the end. Nothing moves.
Half past three. A gray case comes through the freight door. Two good wheels, one that argues. The public unit, off weddings and halls and the square, brought for its monthly look-over. A worker plugs it in and leaves. It has never been danced to badly.
In the crate she finds the unlabeled pressing. A private cut from a wall recording. The slow one. Six steps down.
On the old recording her heel catches before the fifth note. A scrape, then her laugh. The man she was dancing with says something under the music. She has never quite caught it. He kept apologizing that night. She had kept going back to him.
She puts it on for the unit. Its own tune, returned.
Four notes. Her left heel lifts.
She puts it down. Hard.
The scrape comes from the speaker. Her old laugh. On the fifth note the unit's lights change rate. On the sixth its fans slow. The cabinets settle with them.
She lifts the needle.
The fans continue. Cooling, she thinks. They have to cool.
She lowers it again, trying to catch what the man said. Her heel lifts. The unit's lights brighten. She has missed his words again.
She puts the needle in its rest. The gray case hums beside her. She presses her bare fingertips against it. Warm.
She follows its power lead to the socket and pulls the plug. Its lights go out. The cabinets keep humming.
She leaves the plug on the case, where the worker will see it.
Then she puts the record back on.
This time she steps away from the deck. Her knees take a while. She holds one hand out at the height of someone's shoulder. When the scrape comes she is on the wrong foot. She nearly laughs over the laugh.
Four o'clock. The fans separate. The fourth row last. She sleeves the record and puts it in the crate's middle.
WINDOW COMPLETE. STIMULUS DELIVERED. PERSONS PRESENT: none.
She carries the crate past the first clerks. In the street she tries the step again. Misses it.