Page 28 of Soft Erasure

She smiled. It was the face she put on to say the next thing.

“Long enough that I’m the one who tells the new ones.”

I had no way to tell if Jess was the building’s kindness or its other hand. The bread was warm either way. An informer brings warm bread. So does a friend. The bread didn’t say which.

The band warmed.

WELLNESS (08:55): Wednesday 10:00 DEEP confirmed. “You asked.” Adherence: 84.

I had not asked. It had logged the asking anyway. It had logged a thing I had not done. The system had found a way to make consent into infrastructure.

Jess’s eyes went to my wrist.

“They’ll do that,” she said. “Confirm what you didn’t request. The trick is to confirm something else, in writing, before they confirm theirs.”

She handed Noah to me. She didn’t ask. She handed him.

He crossed the air to me, warm, smelling of milk and the soft starch of a clean burp cloth. He had the small weight babies had, heavier than he looked.

I didn’t know how to hold him. My hands knew, and my elbow, and my hip, and the shoulder that dropped on its own to the angle a shoulder drops to. My breath moved into a pattern it had not asked for. My whole body became a hand, and the hand had known this before the band, before the apartment, before any word they had given me for it, and somewhere under it a thing in my chest let down.

The let-down was not a word I knew.

The let-down was a thing my body knew to do.

Something had been lifted out of me once, and the place it had been lifted from hadn’t closed over.

I had not known the place was there. The body had known. The body had kept the outline of the thing the way a drawer keeps the shape of what was carried out of it.

I was holding a boy who was not mine, and the body was answering. A debt I couldn’t remember owing had come to the door to be paid.

I didn’t cry. The band had a number for crying and the number was not in my favor. So I held still. I held the boy. I watched it from the small distance the program had built inside my own chest.

There was a wanting under the watching. The wanting didn’t have a sentence. It had a weight, and a heat, and a shape, and the shape was the size of what I was holding.

The band did something I had not seen it do.

It went dark.

Its face was black. No number. No pulse. Nothing.

SIGNAL FAULT. 08:57.

Jess saw the screen and said nothing. She didn’t move. She waited.

The fault held for seven seconds.

Seven seconds was the longest the building had ever let me alone. I counted them. I hadn’t meant to. The count was always in me. I rode it down to the place it stopped, and my body, with no one reading it, finished the part the count didn’t say.

Then the band came back on.

Adherence: 84.

She took Noah back, gently, with the small ceremony of a woman returning a thing on loan. She kissed his hair.

“What was that.”

“I don’t know.”