Page 75 of Soft Erasure

Not off. Warmer, the color the building used when a stretch of floor came back under a schedule it expected to be empty. Four fifty-five plus forty, and somewhere in the wall a relay reset itself and started logging again, because it had always been going to.

I never gave him the word. The building gave it for me. That was the part I took up the stairs.

He heard it before I did. His whole body went rigid, the old stillness, and there was no resetting our faces first this time. Only a woman and a man putting themselves back into their own clothes with hands that were not quite steady.

He straightened my collar like a man straightening a mistake he intended to keep. I smoothed his hair back into the shape a clipboard would expect.

“Forty minutes,” he said, rougher going out than it had been coming in.

“Somebody just logged all of it.”

We walked out three feet apart, in the correct order, at the correct pace. Nothing on either of our faces would have told a camera a single true thing about where we had been standing when the light came back on.

I took the service stair to six. The band ran warm on the last flight.

Adherence: 68 → 71.

Three points, the same rate card that had paid me for the seven-count in the Garden Room. A woman coming back from a companion walk with color in her face and a level pulse read, to the system, as a woman who had gotten fresh air. Seventy was the pool. I had gone under it on Tuesday for a letter and come back over it on Friday for a wall and a clock. The building would open the water to me and never know what it had paid for.

It had built an instrument that could find the six. It had never been asked to find what a hallway keeps for free.

I didn’t know yet what Monday would cost the name I had put in a stranger’s coat.

I knew what the forty minutes had cost me instead, and that I was already counting the days until the next Friday put that floor back in my hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Let Me Not Know

Monday came in gray. I didn’t leave the apartment before nine. A woman who leaves early on the one day something is scheduled to move is a woman who knows a schedule exists.

I made coffee I didn’t drink. I read the same paragraph four times and couldn’t have said a word of it back. The band sat cool through all of it. A woman resting. I let it think that. The alternative was giving it something to name.

My body didn’t agree to the performance. My face did.

It had kept its own ledger since the bathroom. The machine was never built to read that one. Monday it opened without asking me. My shoulders wouldn’t sit where I put them. My hand went to my throat, low, where his mouth had been on the tile. I had to make it come down.

I had learned to want him in the abstract. A want was a thing I could set down when the room required it. I couldn’t set this down. It had stopped being a want. It had gotten into every column now, not just the one marked want, until his name was somewhere in all of them.

Wednesday was five days back. Twelve minutes at the glass on two, and not one wrist had lifted in any of them. Caleb had said noon. Somebody in that house had said no.

Callow had said Monday. Callow had not said what hour. I had learned by now that the gap between a promise and its hour is where it does its worst work.

The eleven thousand had cleared on Thursday night. The six inside it went to a name Charles never got to see. By now it had reached them or it had not. There is a version of Monday where a mother and a child are further down that road than anyone can follow. There is a version where they are not. I had no instrument for telling the two apart. Neither did the band.

Penelope’s voice came through the panel at eleven, pleasant, procedural.

“Ms. Vale. Building accounting has a query on file. Nothing that concerns your schedule.”

I didn’t ask what the query was. Asking was a woman with something to protect. I said thank you, the flat register I kept for weather and elevators and every other thing in that building I was not permitted an opinion about.

By noon I knew two things the band could not read off me.

A query on file meant someone downstream of Charles had watched a number leave a column it had no business leaving. That was the first.

The second was worse. I had no way to learn whether the number had arrived where I sent it. Not knowing sat heavier in my chest than any read the band had ever taken.

Matthew came at one. He didn’t knock. I had stopped expecting him to.