Page 23 of Soft Erasure

I did what I had done since the first morning: I put the clip in the inventory in my head. The time. The eleven seconds. The green seam at the edge. The date the Portal gave it, which I didn’t trust: the body said the hair and the word were older than the screen. The one room they had not furnished.

The metronome ticked once and went still, because it read the body, and the body had stopped moving.

Four practice rooms existed.

A phone now held a week’s worth of clips, arriving on his schedule.

And a man had stood past the edge of every frame, deciding I would find the green seam grounding.

I didn’t know what the fourth room was for, only that there was one. I knew the seventh clip would not be a clip. It would be the room. The one I had been in before the band, before the clinic, before the name they handed me in a corridor.

On his way out, he had asked if I had been alone. He had not asked to learn the answer. He had asked because he already had it.

I wasn’t ready to look for the room yet. My body was.

CHAPTER SIX

The Permit

A pen clicked behind a wall at seven minutes after eight. Not a click. A tick. The sound a pen makes when a hand is thinking.

Click. Pause. Click. Pause. Click. A Bic, three dollars at any drugstore. Here it was three dollars too. Someone had been paid not to upgrade it, because the staff was meant to look like staff. A staffer with a five-dollar pen was one who had begun to think of herself.

The band warmed.

WELLNESS (08:01): Wednesday 10:00 confirmed. DEEP available only by request. Adherence: 86.

It had read ninety-three when I went to sleep. The night had taken the difference, and I knew where. My body had spent the dark hours in the room it would not show me, the one I had told myself I wasn’t ready to find. The number was the fare. It went without me and came back and didn’t say what it saw.

Only by request. They had been hammering it since the discharge room. We will never do anything you do not ask for. The phrase of a man who had taught a woman to ask for the thing he built for her.

The TV came on at eight-oh-three without a remote. It needed only a number above a threshold my wrist had crossed at seven-oh-six, when I ate the breakfast tray in Matthew’s order: yogurt, then toast, then juice. The order a child ate hospital food.

The screen flickered awake. A watermark surfaced in the corner and held a half-second, a pale mark, then dimmed under a glossy production card.

ASHFORD INSTITUTE COMMUNITY AWARD: POLICE PARTNERSHIP

A press conference. A woman stepped to a microphone. Honey-colored hair, the same as Penelope’s. Her name plate said PENELOPE GRAHAM, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS.

Penelope Graham was Penelope. I had been calling her by her first name for three days, never told her last.

She gave a speech about partnership, about care without intrusion. A speech a woman had been paid to write and a woman with the same hair had been paid to read.

A man came onstage. The man was Caleb, in a navy blazer cut for a photograph. He shook hands with a precinct commander whose name plate the camera had blurred, the blur a thing a video editor had been told to do.

A banner crawled along the bottom.

COURTESY PERMITS PROGRAM (PILOT). Ashford Institute × Metro PD.

The video ended, the screen holding the pale mark a second too long before it dimmed. The same as the first night. One in the morning, Penelope’s card under the door.

Two soft taps at the door. Not Penelope. Knuckles this time. A man taught to knock before he entered a room of women. I didn’t know him yet. I knew only the hand, by the shape of what had come before it.

I opened. The hallway was empty. There was a card on the floor, faintly scented with toner and citrus, from a printer serviced that week.

Lobby orientation, 8:30. Courtesy permits laminated. Please sign. — Simon, Concierge.

Below that, a smaller line.