Page 110 of Soft Erasure

Somewhere across the city a server that answered to a detective wrote over two days of a north stairwell without anybody asking it to. Nothing anywhere logged the writing. The machine never knew it had been holding anything at all.

I had traded it. Not in a moment I could point to.

Friday was all the reel had left.

I’d have made that trade with my eyes open. I made it with them closed, which is a different thing to lie down beside.

The phone didn’t move under my hand all evening. He had still not written a word, and I had stopped counting the days out loud.

The old way of wanting him had a location. Heat between my legs at a certain hour, regular enough that I could have logged it and been right about the time. My body had found a new way, and it was worse than the old one.

It had started bracing.

I reached for the cabinet and something in me set itself for a hand arriving at the last inch to stop me. No hand arrived. My arm came down through a resistance that wasn’t there.

Thirteen months of a man stopping short of me anywhere a dome could see, and the stopping was what my body had learned to take for proof it was wanted.

Now it braced for an interruption over a cabinet door, in an empty apartment, for nobody.

That was what he had left running in me. Not the count. The expectation of a hand.

I let it happen and didn’t correct it. There was no version of tomorrow that didn’t run straight through it.

I thought about Ruth Okafor in a kitchen in Ohio, not yet knowing a stranger had put her name back into the air, still deciding every morning whether the door stayed shut.

I thought about Marion Delacroix, whose file had probably said something as clean as ninety-four, discharged, the same three words that would have closed mine if a lake had found me first.

The matchbook stayed on the shelf. I didn’t take it down.

Nothing left tonight belonged on paper. Everything that mattered lived somewhere that building had never learned to reach, and would stay there until tomorrow’s room gave it somewhere safer to go.

The band warmed once more before I slept.

Adherence: 68 → 69.

One point back.

Stillness was the only language it had, and it could not tell a body with nothing left in it from a body that had spent everything and hidden where it went.

It had the direction right and nothing else.

Nine o’clock sat on the other side of the night. The reel was gone. Everything I had left was in one place now, and the place was my mouth, and there was no copy of it anywhere on earth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Saturday Morning

By six the names were already in my mouth. Marion Delacroix. Ruth Okafor.

They had gone down into sleep with me and come back up unchanged. I lay in the dark a moment testing them, the way you test a tooth to be certain nothing has loosened overnight.

Sixty-nine still sat on the band. It had not moved in the night and would not move for anything I did before nine.

Sixty-nine bought no water and no elevator and no balcony, and none of that mattered today, because the one door I meant to open didn’t read a wrist.

I didn’t eat. Eating steadies a hand for a task with a spilled cup in it. My hands were already steady.

It was the particular steadiness that arrives after a decision has finished being made somewhere underneath the place where I could still argue with it.