Page 102 of Soft Erasure

Seventy. One short of water, on the exact night I declined the one door that opened onto real air.

I laughed once, short, nothing in it worth logging.

The system has no column for a woman who stays and calls it a decision.

It has a number, and the number climbs, because a body that does not move toward an exit is the only thing this building knows how to read as obedience.

Near midnight I reached for the panel by the door, the one that rings straight through to scheduling, and caught my hand halfway to the button.

I’d been about to ask a wall why. Why the chair was empty.

A panel screwed into plaster does not keep an answer. Asking does not give back one hour of a Wednesday already spent.

I set my palm against the wall instead and left it there, nothing behind it but wiring and whatever else this building keeps in its bones.

He told me once, in a doorway with the hall light behind him, that safety tastes like surrender. He set it down as homework and I’ve been doing it ever since without deciding to.

He never told me the rest, because he didn’t know yet there was a rest.

You always knew this would come to a room, I thought, not to him and not for him, only into the dark where no readout could log it.

You always knew you would have to be the one who showed me what you were.

A man like you does not confess himself standing up, in daylight, with something still left to lose by it. Telling costs you nothing you cannot take back before breakfast.

You were always going to have to show me.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Two-Forty

I was awake at two-forty because two-forty was where the body put me now. I had stopped calling it insomnia. Insomnia is a thing that happens to you. This was a schedule.

The apartment did what it did at that hour. The refrigerator cycled. Something settled a floor or four floors above me, a sound with no meaning in it that I had spent a year assigning meaning to anyway.

Then the lock turned.

Not the panel. The panel chimes, and it tells the floor below that it chimed, and a woman in an office knows before I do that my own door has opened. This was metal turning in metal, once, unhurried. The sound a brass key makes in a building where everything else is a number.

I had heard it before. Thirteen months ago, in a corridor on six, with my hand still in the crook of a stranger’s arm and my whole life in a bag somebody else had packed.

I didn’t get up.

I sat with my back against the couch and the seven-count running underneath everything, and I let the door do what it was going to do.

He came in and closed it behind him and didn’t turn on the light.

For a moment he was only a shape against the hall glow, and then he was not, and my body went hot and wanting before I had decided anything about it. It happened below the band. It happened below everything the band had ever been built to find.

He stood inside the door. He didn’t come further in.

“You didn’t come Wednesday,” I said.

He didn’t answer that.

The dark did what dark does in a room with lenses in it, which was nothing at all. There were three in this room. I knew where all three were. He had told me where two of them were himself, in another life, when telling me things was a currency he could still afford to spend.

“Are you still in the building.”