Page 12 of Soft Erasure

I had started wanting it. Not the cameras. Not the lock. Those only watched, only held the door shut. The count was different, the one place he still reached me after the door had closed.

He had set me homework at the half-closed door.

“Safety tastes like surrender. Think about it tonight,” he had said, and I had spent the night doing what he asked without deciding to.

That is what the building means by the phrase. I heard it in his voice. Not Penelope’s. Not the building’s. His.

The phrase had come into the apartment and sat where the dose should have been.

Caleb sat on my chest in the dark. My body had a name for him and wouldn’t give it to me. Not threat.

The band would have flagged threat: something with no column.

In the car he had read his lines like a man who hated the script and couldn’t set it down.

They hadn’t sent me a stranger. I knew it like I knew the seventh count.

Four things were older than the band: the count, Be good, the yellow kitchen, and Sherry.

The last one was the dangerous one. The name was not on my license or my chart.

It lived under a lid only my mother’s voice could lift. I didn’t look at it long.

I closed the lid as I had been closing it for as long as I could remember, which was not as long as I had been alive.

The tray had come at six that evening, hours before the dose didn’t. He had said it would.

The cover lifted on something pale and proteined, plated by a trained hand. I put the cover back and left it.

Nothing here was allowed to sit long enough to smell; they would take it on their schedule.

The band logged the uneaten meal and ticked to ninety-two. Through the night it drifted back up a point at a time, the system reading my stillness as obedience.

Near half past twelve I went into the bathroom, the window the size of a paperback set high in the wall.

I sat on the closed lid and let the breath run where nothing could read it.

I was in there a few minutes. When I came out the apartment was the same and it was not.

At one-oh-four the light under the front door went white to amber, the amber a hospital uses when it has decided the patients should sleep.

A folded card came under the door. I watched the hand that pushed it.

A woman’s hand, small, the nails done in a pale color chosen to photograph as nothing; no ring.

It pressed the card halfway and let go, careful, the gesture of feeding something you have been told not to touch.

Then it was gone. I waited four minutes and picked it up.

6B. Welcome. The pool opens at 5. The salon at 8. The laundry at 7.

The hallway is quiet from 11 to 6 so residents may rest.

If you need anything in the night, the concierge is on the in-suite tablet. The tablet is on the kitchen counter. P.

Now there was one.

It had not been there when I checked at midnight. I worked out how it had arrived.