Page 17 of Soft Erasure

He stood. He picked up the tray. The toast was untouched. He left the orange juice. He didn’t say what he meant, and he didn’t have to. The not-saying was the point.

He paused at the door.

“There should have been a second thing last night,” he said. “Penelope leaves new residents a welcome card and a sleep aid. Sealed packet. White paper. It didn’t come, did it.”

That was not a question either. The sealed packet was the dose, dressed for home. At the clinic they had put it in me. Here I would be expected to put it in myself. And it had not come because he had kept it. The night was his prescription; he had written it and signed nothing. Now he was handing me the error to carry downstairs in my own mouth.

“It didn’t,” I said.

“Tell her at the desk. She likes to know when she’s been sloppy.”

He closed the door. The lock engaged. The quiet one. My pulse did what it now did for that sound, and somewhere a column filled in.

I heard him all the way to the elevator, unhurried, a man who had never once needed to walk fast in a building that answered to him. I stood in a room that answered to him too, and stayed exactly where he’d left me.

The orange juice glass was still in my hand. I hadn’t noticed I was holding it.

Adherence: 94 → 91.

Three points. The band didn’t read words. It read the body the words came from, and my body had been holding Dr. Callow’s card the whole time his question was in the air. Three points was not punishment. It was a readout.

The orange juice went down anyway.

Adherence: 91 → 92.

The watch pocket had been the plan. The watch pocket was a flaw. The jeans would go down a chute into hands paid to go through pockets. I needed somewhere that was not my body.

The book I chose was third from the left, one he’d ordered before I arrived, for the woman he was building. A camera reads a resident taking a book as a resident reading. I noted the spine, lower edge two finger-widths from the shelf’s lip, and carried it to the bathroom.

On the closed lid I took the matchbook from the watch pocket for the last time and opened the green foil cover. On the first night I had taken the matches out and put the card inside. An empty matchbook is a small cardboard envelope. Dr. Callow’s card was folded inside. Four to six weeks. Do not tell him. I had not told him. Under the pencil number from The Greenroom, in the smallest hand I owned, I wrote one line:

He is reading me faster than I am reading myself. Change the ratio.

Card and matchbook went against the spine where the binding was tightest, and the book closed over them. Thickness is not a thing a camera reads across a room. I returned the book. Third from the left. Two finger-widths. If the measurement was wrong when I came back, I would know.

He would never search a thing he had chosen for me. That was his flaw. I was going to live in it.

Then I went down to the desk and made myself useful.

Be good was the first lie I had ever been taught. It meant: say what they need you to say. Cost the room nothing. The building thought it was installing something new. It had only found the door already open.

In the elevator I practiced the line twice. The panel held numbers one through six and blank circles above them, buttons for floors the building didn’t want named. I touched nothing and the car carried me to the lobby anyway.

Penelope was there, in the same lipstick, reading her own tablet, its case the color of butter.

“Ms. Vale. Good morning.”

“Good morning, Penelope. Dr. Caldren asked me to tell you the sleep aid didn’t come with the welcome card last night. He said you’d want to know.”

Her face held. Her eyes moved. Whatever crossed them was filed before it finished.

“Thank you, Ms. Vale,” she said. “I appreciate you telling me.”

“Of course.”

“Ms. Vale.” I had made it three steps. “There’s a residents’ lunch at noon in the Garden Room. Just the women of Floor Six. Adherence above eighty-eight only.” The smile arrived on schedule. “I think you’ll meet some friends.”

“I’ll be there.”