Page 5 of Soft Erasure

He took his fingers off my wrist. Slowly. He had not finished deciding something.

My pulse stayed where his fingers had been a second longer than it was supposed to. I knew what he was. I let it stay anyway. The inventory had columns for danger, for evidence, for what the band logged. It didn’t have a column for this.

The skin cooled where he had been.

I wanted the two fingers back, and the wanting didn’t care what it would cost.

I had said it before I’d thought it, the words already gone before I chose them. Be good was a phrase I knew without needing the lights on. I couldn’t have told you when I had first heard it.

I only knew that my mouth had its shape ready. That the band had read the muscle, not the meaning. That the muscle was older than the band. Older than Guerrero.

There was a single orchid on the side table, white, perfect, in a porcelain pot. The orchid had been replaced sometime in the last three days. I had noticed because I had counted, and counting things in this room had become a trouble all its own.

A poster on the wall showed a sunrise and a sentence: Healing is a privilege. Adherence is the rent. Whoever hung it used a level. The center of the poster was the exact center of the wall.

Not close. Exact.

Precision that announces it has been paid for.

There was a small line at the bottom of the poster, in a font you would not see unless you had been sitting in this chair as many times as I had. Methodology by M. C. Caldren, MD. Protocol © Ashford Institute, all rights reserved.

I had read the line on the second day and asked Matthew about it on the third. He had said I’m proud of the work, Amber. The work has helped a lot of women. He had said the work like men say the firm when they own the firm.

“Stand up, please.”

I stood. The room was small and bright and smelled of nothing. Not the nothing of a closet, not the sealed-off nothing of a new car. The nothing of a room that had been stripped of every woman who had sat in this chair before me.

The air had been treated. Somewhere in the building, a filter changed itself and made a soft chime, and somewhere else a tablet logged the change.

“Cabot will check us out,” Matthew said.

The hallway was the same color as the room. There was no draft. There was no warmth. The temperature was the temperature of a phone that has been off for hours.

At the end of the hall, a security station with a tall glass partition. The glass had been cleaned that morning. I knew because there was no fingerprint on it, anywhere, and a building this size moves enough hands past glass to leave a hundred fingerprints in a day.

Behind the glass, a man with a buzz cut and a uniform shirt the color of asphalt. The shirt was pressed. The crease down the front of the trouser was sharp. The name tag said CABOT.

“Dr. Caldren,” he said. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the band. “Number?”

“Ninety-five.”

“Out at fourteen-oh-six.”

He didn’t ask Matthew for a badge, or for an ID. Four days they had brought me down this hall, and not once had Cabot asked.

Five doors in this building opened only with a badge, and his job was to ask every man who came through. I had logged it on day four. Matthew was not a man Cabot had been hired to check. Matthew was a man Cabot had been hired to admit.

He pressed something. The glass door beside the station unlocked with a sound like a small no. I was almost through it when a woman in a white coat stepped out of a side hallway and walked into me.

Not into me. Alongside me.

Her shoulder met mine, then her hand. She said, “I’m so sorry,” in the voice doctors use when they’re not, and she kept walking, and there was a card in my palm where her fingers had been.

I closed my hand. I didn’t look down. The wrong hand had been on me. My wrist knew it before I did. It had learned one hand, and this was not it.

She had not been wearing a name tag. Her white coat was clean. Every white coat in this building was clean. But there was a thin grease line on the hem where she had brushed against something the building didn’t advertise.

The boiler room. The service stair. The places the family’s money paid people to keep clean of anyone like her.