Page 101 of Soft Erasure

I wanted it plainly, in the body, the way you want water.

Out past the courtyard and onto the avenue, walking in a direction nobody in this building had cleared for me first.

A morning where nothing on my wrist decides which floors I’m allowed to stand on.

Then I did the arithmetic anyway.

A woman who goes out that door at four takes herself out of the building and leaves the reel behind her. The reel is on a server with a key that belongs to a detective I have no number for and never have.

Everything I hold of hers is under the carpet in the next room, and the arrangement has only ever run one direction.

I do not get to reach her. She reaches me.

A woman on the far side of that courtyard at four in the morning is a woman nobody can reach at all. Friday comes. The answer lands. The last bar outside their reach gets counted with nobody left inside to put anything on it.

And Ben isn’t on the other side of that door.

That was the part I sat with longest. Three hours a day, four days a week.

Cora at one o’clock, the four days, taking him home and not letting them keep him a minute past it. As of four o’clock this afternoon there is no Cora at one.

Two years, Caleb said, both hands flat on the marble like a man steadying something already going over.

Two years is the whole window. Better than half of it is spent. They have just taken out the only person inside it who was counting the minutes on his side.

There is no version of me on a road that puts one hour back into that window.

Leaving takes me out. It has never once taken him out.

It would only mean that when they come for him in the fall, there is nobody left in this family standing on his side of it at all.

And him.

I thought of him last, and the order was its own confession, and I have stopped denying it even to the tile.

He hasn’t been in this building since Cora’s kitchen.

If I go through that door I’ll never learn what Wednesday cost him, or whether the empty chair was the family’s decision or his own. Or whether the silence is a door he closed himself or one that closed while his hand was still on the other side of it.

That stays open forever. On other nights the not-knowing has felt like the last free thing left in here.

It didn’t feel like that on the tile. My whole body wanted him with a plainness that has stopped bothering to call itself anything else.

The weight of his hand. The hold of it in my hair. The low register he only ever used in rooms with no lens. The six he always gave me before my body gave him the seventh.

Staying is the only version of tonight where any of that has somewhere to go.

The count came up while I sat there with the matchbook closed in my lap, unasked, the way it does now.

Six, and then the seventh, arriving on schedule into a bathroom with the fan going. It went through me start to finish, no hand on me anywhere, nobody in the room to have wanted it.

His absence has not closed one thing in me. It only proved what his presence never had to.

I put the matchbook back against the spine and the book back on the shelf. Third from the left. Two finger-widths.

The band warmed with my hand still on the shelf.

Adherence: 69 → 70.