She can see her breath in the room of her future.
If it were any warmer, the Polaroids that paper the walls would develop.

She moves her thumb over one of the pictures, like doing a rubbing of a grave. The warmth brings out the brown eyes of a child. They're her eyes, but how could she be a child in her own future? She rubs to reveal more—tiny blue hands—and the cold sends the eyes back into the chemicals.

The doctor told her to sleep. Instead she revisits thoughts from her childhood, as if the thoughts had never before occurred to her. The thoughts are so opaque, so veiled by chemicals, that she can't seem to have them for the second time.

She's rubbing. She's looking into the eyes of the child again. She can hear her mother telling her to dress more warmly, lest she catch a cold in her future, or worse.

Her heart is kept in a room with a very expensive security system.
When she told the combination to her doctor, he couldn't believe how mundane it was.

'Anyone who knows you could guess that,' he said, making notes on her chart.

She told him, 'It's only obvious once you've heard it. '

And besides, that's just the first level of access. There's the floor one can't touch, the matrix of lasers, the dogs that haven't been fed in days. When her eyes are red and splintered, even she fails the retinal scan.

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'Room After Room' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.