Corm had told himself, on the drive over, that he had a question. He had been formulating it for three years, which was the time since he had last visited the facility. The question was about the last eight months of Daren's life, the eight months Corm had not been present for. Not by distance. By argument. By the specific failure of a specific conversation in the spring of 2011 that Corm had been carrying since.
The question, as he had most recently formulated it, was: did Daren understand why Corm had said what he had said.
The receptionist confirmed that access to Unit-3 archives required researcher credentials and a supervised appointment. Corm had neither. He explained that Daren was his brother, which did not change the access requirements. He sat in the lobby.
He had not, he understood sitting in the lobby, actually planned to access the archive. He had not been sure what he planned. The question had a home here, somewhere in the forty-four thousand indexed units, in whatever portion of those units had been set down in the last eight months of Daren's life. Some part of him had believed that proximity would resolve something.
It did not.
The question he had formulated was not, he also understood, the right question. The right question was more like: did those last eight months register differently in the archive than the years before them. Whether the system could tell the difference between the memories of the period after the argument and the memories before it. Whether grief and anger and the absence of a brother looked different, measured, from joy and ordinariness.
He drove home. The question was still there. He had not asked it. He was not certain the archive could have answered it. He was not certain he wanted to know.