Page 99 of Soft Erasure

Wednesday at ten his chair stayed empty.

Irene Callow was at the door at five to.

She came in as a physician comes into a room that belongs to somebody else, and sat where an observer sits.

I had put her in that chair myself, in writing, through the family’s own portal, and paid for the sending and watched the number take it.

The woman who came in at ten was not him.

She had my file open before she sat down. A name tag with the Institute’s mark on it.

A clipboard of her own, held against her chest coming in, set on the table going down.

He had carried one every Wednesday for thirteen months, and it had always meant one thing, which was a man telling a room it was not on the record while the room recorded all of it.

She carried hers because somebody had handed it to her in a corridor on the way up.

She read the protocol carefully, in the order the file gave it. I answered in the order the file expected.

Nowhere in that hour was there a hand that stopped a count at six, or a silence with anything inside it, or a question that had not been printed before either of us walked in.

At the end she thanked me for my candor. He had never used that word on me.

Irene wrote nothing down. I watched her not write for a full hour.

At the door Irene stopped and half turned, the clipboard against her hip.

“You look well,” she said.

A card pressed into my palm in a clinic corridor. Four to six weeks, do not tell him.

A line through a relay telling me to ask who had wanted her in that room.

And at the end of an hour the family had granted her, in a hall with a dome, she told me I looked well.

There is a version of that sentence that is a doctor being careful where she can be heard.

There is another where it is the only thing she is allowed to say and she is trusting me to hear the rest.

There is a third where she is what I decided she was on my second night in this building, which is a door somebody left open on purpose.

I stopped trying to settle it somewhere on the fifth floor.

I understood the rest of it on the stairs going back up.

I’d spent four days reading that approval as my one clean move. Nobody had argued because there was nothing in it worth arguing with.

A resident asks for a physician. The physician is granted, in the file, the same day, in their own font.

The physician then sits through a standard session and observes a cooperative woman answering printed questions in a room where nothing happens.

Somewhere now there is an outside name attached to an hour of nothing.

I had asked for a witness and they had given me one and then emptied the room she was witnessing.

The chair had always been going to be empty. Refusing me was never required. All it took was a Wednesday he didn’t fight to be in, and that had been decided before I ever sent the request.

The panel woke a little after four. Penelope, pleasant about it.