Page 91 of Soft Erasure

He had read a bill drawn on the account of the people who made him, in the one hand he had never gotten ahead of.

He had read four words of Jess’s in my first month and built thirteen months of my breathing out of them. He read everything.

He had not sent me a line since I left him asleep on a floor no camera had ever been in. Standing at that counter I couldn’t make the silence mean one thing.

It was the machine, holding the hours of him I never got to see.

Or it was him, and the article was the price of something I would not be told about until it had already been paid.

Or it was mine.

He had asked me at that table what Edward wanted. I had sat across from a man with nothing left in his hands and told him I was not finished pricing it. He had put it away without a word, as he had put everything away for a year.

I had never once been shown where any of it went.

The Wednesday was still coming. Charles had the staff schedules.

By Wednesday he would have run them against the nights, and Cora’s name would come up out of the schedules on its own.

There was one line out of this building that didn’t run through her. It ran through a woman with a key-shaped pin who had already stood at my door once on a form Voss drew up overnight.

I opened the WELLNESS portal and named Dr. Irene Callow as observer to my next in-residence session, and copied it to Voss.

The clause was still there.

A patient could name an observer to any in-residence session, and refusing a clean one meant Voss putting his reason in the file in his own words.

It went into the log the second I sent it.

On the morning the family put a paragraph in a newspaper about a resident the world outside had started to notice, I asked for a physician by name, in writing, in the file.

Charles would have it before noon. Let him have it. A paragraph had put Irene at my door once.

This morning the family printed theirs, and I filed mine.

Then my body did what it did. My hand went inside the clothes I had not changed since that kitchen, before I decided anything about it.

It no longer needed him in the room to start it. No hand at my throat. No voice going low over the count. Two of my own fingers now.

That was what he had built, whether he set out to build it or not, a body that opened the count on its own the second the wanting found no other way out.

One. Two.

In that kitchen there had been a hand to meet mine, his, not steady for once. I had covered it with both of mine, and nothing had counted at all.

Now there was marble and a dark phone and a ceiling. My own fingers, wet, keeping a rhythm nobody set. My thighs closed on my wrist the way they had closed on his. Six. Nothing came down on six.

What came after six came into a room with nobody in it to catch it or want it back. It went through my stomach and down the backs of my thighs and out through a sound I put into my own arm. It was the loneliest thing my body had done in all that time, finishing for a man who wasn’t there, in a room built to watch me, that watched me do it and had no idea at all what it was seeing.

The band warmed an hour into the morning, once the reading and the count and the silence had settled into the same flat weight.

Adherence: 76 → 71.

Five points.

It read the grief the only way it had, a body coming down off a height, a woman who had climbed to seventy-six on an evening it could not account for and slid back toward the pool line by breakfast. It filed the slide as a resident stabilizing, which was the word the newspaper had chosen too.

The machine on my wrist and the machine on every doorstep in this city had reached the same finding about me on the same morning, and neither of them had touched what was true, which was that a man had gone quiet and my body had felt him leave like a stair that was not where I put my foot.