Page 103 of Soft Erasure

Nothing.

“Are they going to let you stay in it.”

Nothing.

I had read him for thirteen months off whatever he could not hold still. The hand at his side. The half-second before an answer. The one thing his face did when the room turned away from him. I got up off the floor and crossed to where he was standing so I could read him properly, and there was nothing to read.

He had gone still all the way through. Not the trained stillness he wore into a session, which was a performance with a man underneath it. Something else. A stillness with the man already spent out of it.

“Say one thing,” I said. “Any of it. Say a thing that isn’t true if you have to.”

He looked at me for four seconds.

“I can’t.”

Two words, and they cost him something, and I could not tell what. That was the part I took to the floor with me afterward and could not put down. He had spent a year making sure I could always read the cost. Tonight he let me watch him pay and would not tell me for what.

“Then why come at all.”

“Because you would not have believed a message.”

I would not have. He knew that the way he knew everything about me, off a file and a year of Wednesdays and a hundred small readings I had handed him for free without ever deciding to.

“Believed what.”

He didn’t say.

Somewhere below us the building ran its night cycle, the hum coming up through the floor the way it had every night since the first one. A machine that had never once needed him to be in the room to do what it did to me. It had gone on doing it all week with the chair empty, and here he was standing in the dark in it, and it didn’t care that he had come either.

He raised his hand.

For thirteen months everywhere a camera reached, that hand had stopped a half-inch short of me. I had learned that half-inch the way other women learn a husband’s step on a stair. I had measured it at the collarbone and I had measured it at the throat, and it had never closed while anything was watching.

Three lenses in that room.

He closed it.

His palm came flat against the side of my neck, under the jaw, where a hand goes when it means to hold a head still or hold a person up and has not decided which. The skin of it was cold from outside. He had come in from somewhere.

I didn’t move. I had spent a year not moving. This was the first time it was not obedience.

The band warmed at my wrist.

I waited for the number, because there was always a number.

It printed nothing.

It sat warm against the bone and gave me a blank face, the way it had failed once before on the one thing in me it went looking for and could not hold.

Three seconds. I counted them. I count everything.

Then he took his hand back, and I heard him breathe out once through his nose, and that was the only sound either of us made that I would have called human.

He reached for the door.

“Matthew.”

He stopped with his hand on it, and he didn’t turn around, and he didn’t say my name back.