Page 66 of Soft Erasure

I took the service stair. Seventy didn’t run the elevator, and I wouldn’t have gotten in it.

The salon was the salon. A woman I had never met put her hands in my hair for half an hour, and I gave the mirror a face.

Cortisol was steady. It had been steady in a coffee house, and on an avenue with thirty free minutes in my hand, and under a man’s palm on my throat. The machine built to know me spent the afternoon watching the wrong organ.

The band warmed at my wrist.

Adherence: 70 → 73.

Three points for the hair.

I had walked into a session room straight out of his mouth, and it read me, and it paid me. On Wednesday the number was done to me. On Saturday I spent it. There is about an inch between those two things, and I crossed it without a session, and nobody logged that either.

The body had been, for thirteen months, the only thing that had remembered me. It had remembered him too. It had not asked me first, either time.

The folio had been under my bedroom carpet since Willson put it in my hands. Nine days in hotel stock, the receipt for the room he took to wait for me in. The way in and the way out were printed on the same page, and only one of them was on purpose. It had been lying under my floor all afternoon.

Wednesday was four days out. I had set the terms in front of witnesses. I gave them away for free on a Saturday, in the one square his own camera could not hold, with my own mouth, and he never had to ask.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The First True Word

The orchid took an inch of water on Sunday morning.

It had been dry when I went to bed. I found it at seven. The green throat was the green it had always been, his green, chosen. Somebody had come in with a can and done the one thing in that apartment nobody would be asked about.

Mateo had not told me which way it read. He had not needed to. Dry costs a man nothing. He would not have spent an entry to tell me nothing happened.

An inch of water was a woman on a road.

I built the letter across Sunday and Monday, in my head, where there was nowhere for the building to look. By Tuesday at six I was at the breakfast bar with the stationery the apartment supplied. Cream. A crown over a hill, a C under it.

Sixty-two hours since the courtyard. He hadn’t written in any of them.

Writing was for what you could afford to have found. I had put almost nothing on paper.

I read the crest properly for the first time. The C was Crownhill. Crownhill was not the family. The family came navy at the edge, and I had been taking both off one hand.

The C on that cream was the C stamped on the brass key in his pocket.

I put the cream back and took the yellow legal pad out from under it. The pad had been supplied for patient journaling. It had never been touched.

The yellow paper had no crest on it. That was the entire reason.

Two pens at Crownhill: the Bic for the hands that worked, the Mont Blanc for the hands that were kept. Mine had been on the desk since the first week. I had used it once, on a bathroom mirror, and taken it off with the heel of my hand.

I wrote the bill in their ink.

Charles,

I am requesting eleven thousand dollars for legal representation.

Five thousand to the trust account of Diane Yates, attorney at law.

Six thousand to a recipient I will name to you in writing on Friday.

The account is below.