Page 16 of Soft Erasure

I looked at my hand. It was in my lap.

“You didn’t notice,” he said. “You would have, in another week. You’re cataloguing everything in this building except yourself. That part of you is going to be the most useful to us. It’s also going to be the most expensive to you.”

He looked at his band. Not my wrist. His. The face held numbers stacked below the hour. Not the time. Three scores, three residents.

“The dose tastes like nothing,” I said. “That’s the answer to your homework. The nights at the clinic taste like nothing. There’s a lid over them. So if safety tastes like surrender, then what you’re calling safety is the part where I’m not there for it.”

He didn’t flinch. I’d wanted him to flinch.

“Rest,” he said, “is the word we use.”

“I know the word you use.”

“Consent requires clarity. Clarity requires rest.” He said it like a line he had said in rooms larger than this one. “You came to us with neither. The protocol restores both. You don’t have to like the protocol for it to be true.”

“And last night?”

He leaned into the space between us until there was none left to spend. “Last night I gave you the alternative.” Another quarter-turn of the cup, closer now than the question needed him to be. “Nine lucid hours. No dose. No lid. You felt all of it. So tell me, Amber. Which do you prefer?”

It was not a question. It was a scale, and he was setting me on it. If I said the dose, I was asking him for the lid. If I said the night, I was telling him I preferred nine hours on the floor, listening for a lock to decide what it was going to do. He waited like a man who already had the answer in a column and wanted it from my mouth anyway.

“I prefer the version where I choose,” I said.

He reached over and turned my wrist so the band faced him, slow, the same two fingers, the same exact spot. He didn’t check the number; he’d already read it off my face. The wrist stayed in his hand a beat past where reading anything required, his thumb resting where his fingers had been my first morning here, and let me feel exactly how little my preference had changed what he could still do with my arm.

Something moved through his shoulders. A half-inch settle and release. I noticed the settle. I noticed I noticed.

“Good,” he said. “That’s the first true thing you’ve said since I came in.”

“Everything I’ve said since you came in is true.”

“Everything you’ve said is accurate.” He stood the distinction up between us and left it there. “You moved the tablet.”

“No. You did. It wasn’t here at midnight. It was here at one. I left it where it was put.”

“Penelope has the tablets brought up for new residents around half past twelve. I should have told you.”

“You said the building is quiet from eleven to six. So residents may rest.”

“That’s the rule for residents. Penelope is staff.”

The distinction sat on the marble with the other one. Rules for me. Rules for the people who manage me. Two buildings, one address.

“What came under your door last night?”

He already knew. The question was a protocol. He was running it to see which version of me would answer.

I’d been doing the math since three. The schedule card cost nothing to surrender. The other card had not come under any door. It had come from a hand at the clinic, into a fist the cameras could not read. He had not asked about that card. He had asked about the door.

“A schedule card,” I said. “From the desk. The pool opens at five, the salon at eight, the laundry at seven. Quiet hours eleven to six. It was signed P.”

“Penelope signs everything P. She’d call it a signature. I’d call it affectation.” He smiled. The elevator smile, brought indoors. “I asked because I wanted to see if you would tell me.”

“I told you.”

“You told me what came under the door.”

Distance came back into it first, the same care he’d used closing it now spent taking it back, an inch at a time, like something only ever lent.