Page 128 of Soft Erasure

He reached out and put two fingers on the inside of my wrist, on the strip of skin nobody had touched in thirteen months because there had been a machine over it.

He didn’t take my hand. He didn’t pull. He left them there.

Nothing interrupted it. That was the part my body couldn’t process. A hand arrived and went on arriving. No dome ended it. No number moved anywhere to price it, and I stood in that kitchen waiting for a stop that was not coming.

The skin under there was paler than the rest of me and it didn’t feel like mine. It felt like a place on somebody else’s arm where a thing used to be. His fingers were the first honest information it had ever had, and my whole arm went stupid with it.

“Ask me to stop,” he said.

“No.”

“Ask me anyway.”

“No.”

He held still. A year of learning to read that stillness off him, and there was nothing in it now I could reach.

“I know,” he said.

He did. That was the entire trouble with him and always had been.

He had built a woman who reads a hand by whatever stops it, and then he had lived long enough to stand in the one room where nothing would.

I noticed that he let go before I did, and filed it, and couldn’t decide what it proved.

He left before one, and he used the door.

I watched him go down the corridor past two open units and a stack of crates with numbers chalked on them. Someone at the folding table wrote a time next to his name. There was no version of next week in which any of that stayed true.

I went out into the hallway after him and stood in it with my hand down at my side.

The door behind me didn’t check anything. It would open at any hour now, and close after me, and never ask what my number was. I could walk out of Crownhill this afternoon and nobody left in that building had the standing to write it down.

I’d wanted that for thirteen months.

I stood there a long time working out where I would go.

There was one address in this city I wanted. There was a boy inside it with a name in my mouth now and no idea it was there. There was a family that had lost every asset it ever owned except him, and a court that had not yet said one word about which of us he came home to.

The door opened for anybody. It didn’t open for that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Three Names

Monday, and my hand still checked.

Five mornings now. It went to the wrist before my eyes opened, closed on skin, and reported nothing. There was nothing to report, and I had stopped correcting it. A body that spent a year learning an object does not put the object down because a stranger in a glove did.

Two pale rectangles in that kitchen, one on the wall and one in the ceiling. I hadn’t painted over either. A room with nothing watching it had turned out to be only a room. I spent the weekend inside it and never walked out through a door that would have let me.

The card came out of the sugar dry. A year in a kitchen they could have searched any hour they chose, and nobody had ever thought to look there. The folio came up from under the bedroom carpet, flat, where I had stood on it. Willson’s plastic came off the closet shelf with the shirt still folded cuff-out beside it. I put all three in a drawer that had never locked and didn’t need to now. Not to use. Because they were mine, and because not one of them had ever been written down.

The metronome was still on the counter. Nobody had crated it. It had done the work it was set there to do, and the count it left in me was the one thing in that apartment nobody could carry out in a crate.

Saturday the door opened and I stood in the frame with my coat on. I couldn’t name one place in the city where I had standing to be. I hung the coat back up.

Sunday I got as far as the lobby.