In the morning the ring was still lying on the table.
Hans Castorp took it, put it back on his finger.
The skin underneath was warm again, the imprint remained briefly visible, like a reminder of disobedience.
He picked up the phone, opened the app that pretends to be a diary, and saw the curves.
There was, as expected, a gap.
A white piece in the night, an empty band between the colored segments. No heart rate, no temperature, no sleep score. Only: white.
It looked like a disgrace. And it looked like freedom.
Under the gap it said, in that polite, algorithmic language that so likes to present itself as friendly:
Please wear your ring during the night to achieve optimal results.
Hans Castorp stared at the sentence.
He smiled.
It was a polite smile.
And a little unsatisfying.
For he understood: even the gap is recorded. Even not-knowing is knowledge. Even the white spot is a data set.
He heard a knock at the door – not hard, not threatening, but the way they knock in hotels when they bring something you have ordered.
An employee wordlessly placed a small envelope on the table.
Hans Castorp opened it.
Inside lay a card, printed on thick paper, with the sun symbol at the top and a handwriting-like script underneath:
Health Service Reminder: Continuity is the key.
Below it a small smiley, like a modern apology.
Hans Castorp put the card down, looked at the smiley, and thought that a smiley is a new form of power: it smiles so that you do not resist.
He sat down at the table.
He picked up the logbook.
He opened to a new page.
The pen lay next to it, neatly.
Hans Castorp held the pen in his hand, hesitated – and put it down again.
Instead he took the little wooden stick that was still in his pocket, this ridiculous, light thing that had once carried a marshmallow and then a truth.
He set the tip on the paper.
He wrote at the top:
The white spots.
The writing was messy, because a wooden stick is not a pen. It smudged a little. And precisely because of that it was true.
Hans Castorp looked at the sentence.
He thought of Gustav: A sentence lives from the white.
He thought of Zieser: Muscle building is simple, but hard.
He thought, with a sudden, Tonio-like clarity: Not only muscles grow through resistance. Sentences do, too.
He leafed back, saw the numbers, the repetitions, the values.
Then he left one line blank.
Only one.
A small white spot in the order.
He closed the book.
The ring on his finger gleamed dully.
And Hans Castorp felt that the device that was supposed to know everything knew nothing that night – and that precisely for that reason, in this white, something had happened.
