Page 98 of Soft Erasure

It was that the after was still us, and it was the only trace outside my own body that any of it had happened. The one inside my body had started coming back wrong. Not gone. Wrong in small amounts, in the places I went to check first.

Two days I’d been trying to hold the exact weight of his hands and getting the shape a little wronger each time. The small of my back went first. His palm had sat there, warm across the whole width of it, and I could still say where and I could still say warm. What had gone was how much of me it covered. What came back now was narrower, and cooler, and had my own measurements in it.

I couldn’t reliably call up his mouth anymore. There was a place on my throat it used to go and nothing arriving there. I could call up the half-inch.

I could call up the stopping. Every day for a year his hand had come to the edge of me and gone no further, and what my skin did in that gap was the whole of being wanted. It was still doing it. Nothing was over me in that hallway and the skin came up anyway, along the forearms, at the back of the neck for a hand that was not there.

I wanted the tape to survive. I wanted it to survive for the exact reason it would end me.

Both of those were one wanting, and I stopped trying to pull them apart.

The footage that could burn the family was footage of me.

There was no frame on any server in this building that indicted Edward and didn’t, in the same two seconds, show a resident walking out of an unlogged seam beside the man who ran her file.

It cut the family.

It cut me deeper, and in the same frame, and there was no angle I could tilt it to that showed one and hid the other.

There was a session in a file somewhere with a physician’s name on it, approved and logged and unspent, and a woman at the end of it who didn’t answer to anyone in this building.

Ask yourself who wanted me in that room.

I had read that line four times since Saturday and gotten a different answer each time.

Standing in the hall with the tape running in my head I got a fifth.

If Irene Callow was in that room because somebody upstairs wanted her there, the session was not a door. It was a frame.

And I had asked for it myself, in writing, and paid the points to send it.

Matthew would have known which way to point all of it.

For thirteen months he had caught the family’s hand in the air before it came down on me. A tape that cut two directions was exactly the problem he took apart before I knew it was mine to carry.

His hand was the one that would have known whether to pull the frame or bury it.

His hand was also in the frame.

I kept coming back to that. And to the yes that seated Callow, and the label with no name on it, and the reel nobody had pulled yet.

Somewhere in this week was a hand I couldn’t find, on the harm and on what might have been help, and every place I reached for it, it was already gone.

The band warmed against my wrist with the sheets still in my arms.

Adherence: 68 → 69.

One point.

It had watched a woman sleep a full night for the first time in a week and priced the sleeping.

I had swallowed the thing I spent thirteen months refusing out loud, and the machine had paid me for it, the way it paid for everything it wanted more of.

He would be in the room on Wednesday, or he would not, and I no longer had a way to know which.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Thursday Night, Late