Page 63 of Soft Erasure

Mateo held it open at two forty-five.

Not the tan vest. A denim jacket, a shirt with a collar. He had come in unbilled on a Saturday to stand in a doorway, and held it one-handed, face turned toward the building so it could not file the angle of his head.

“Ninety minutes,” he said. “Then it asks. Lauren knows. She’ll seat you at the back. Her phone stays in a drawer when you’re in the shop.”

“The camera.”

“Broken since June.”

“She has not fixed it.”

“She broke it.”

He didn’t mention his daughter. He would leave the answer in my foyer on Sunday morning, and Mateo never said a thing twice.

The schedule read Salon Visit, four o’clock. I had let Penelope’s office book it on Thursday. A woman with a four o’clock intends to be back by four o’clock, and the building had already decided about her.

I stepped through.

The door shut behind me and nothing read me. No chime. Nothing at my wrist. Every door in that building had opened because it knew my body. This one let me out without learning a thing.

The avenue was the avenue. I had never been on it. One of the things the apartment took in the act of becoming the apartment, in increments the band called a radius and I called my life.

Marlowe and Co. sat three blocks past the last one the building let me cross, under a green awning. A green that came off a roll, in a lot of three hundred, faded on the street side.

The green over this door was the green of an awning, and he wasn’t here. My body took the absence of him the way it takes a missed stair.

Lauren didn’t greet me. Lauren tilted her head at the back.

The booth was wood, green vinyl, a bottle of olive oil on the Formica. Jess was in it with Noah asleep in the carrier and her hand spread on his back.

I sat.

“I’ve been on five three years,” she said. “That part is real. Lauren, the stairwell, the loaf in the tea towel. All of it real. Keep that after I say the next part.

“Then you came, and they came to me. The loaf wasn’t mine. It was on a sheet. They gave me a woman.”

The bottle of oil had a fly in it, a long time in there.

“I’m the woman.”

“You’re the woman. And I report. Every Friday. Four lines. Six if there’s something.”

“To Penelope.”

“That’s what I thought the whole time.” She went on through the place where she stopped. “Two weeks ago, near enough, I found out who reads them. He does. Himself. Not the office. Friday afternoons he sits down with four lines about you in my handwriting, and that is where they have always gone.”

Friday. I had a Friday. He had the same one.

“The pills,” I said. “And the hand. You knew about both before I sat down in that chair.”

“They tell me first. That’s the arrangement. They tell me what’s coming so I can write down what it did.” Her hand didn’t leave Noah’s back. “I’m not the one watching you, Amber. I’m the instrument they read you with.”

“Say the rest.”

“In your first month I wrote that you watch for him.”

I didn’t move.