Page 10 of Soft Erasure

Dr. Irene Callow

If you are reading this, you have between four and six weeks. Do not tell him you have it. Do not tell anyone you have it. The seam in the cameras is real. He is not lying about that. He is lying about almost everything else.

A woman in a white coat had pressed it into my hand on the way out of the clinic, fast, while no one was looking. She had broken a rule to put it in my palm. That was the part I held onto. Someone had broken a rule for me.

I sat on the closed lid of the toilet. I held the card. I counted the tiles between my feet. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Then the breath. The seven was the conditioning that felt like freedom because it was the only choice left.

What frightened me was that I wanted it to be mine. That I had started wanting the seven. That I had started breathing to a rhythm that meant he was the only one who had ever noticed I knew the number.

The band on my wrist was where his fingers had been. The number on the band said 95.

Safety tastes like surrender.

He had given me the seam in the cameras because he wanted me to trust him. The worst thought was the one I couldn’t put down: that the rule Dr. Irene Callow broke for me had not been broken at all. That she had followed it. That the card was not something he had failed to catch. It was a door he had left open. She had not broken a rule for me. She had been bait.

I counted to seven anyway.

CHAPTER THREE

The Inventory

The floor was warm under me, and I was awake to feel it.

Neither was an accident.

It was radiant heat under engineered hardwood, warmth a woman was built to thank instead of fear.

The waking was the part that should not have happened.

Every night at the clinic had ended in four medicated hours I had stopped calling sleep, the same as I had stopped calling Amber a costume.

The first night in 6B, the dose didn’t come.

I waited for it.

I sat on the warm floor with my back to the door and waited to go under, and the going-under didn’t arrive.

Somewhere near midnight I understood it was not coming. No one had come to put me under.

The dose that ran my nights had been held back from this one, and the holding-back was a decision, and the decision was his.

Matthew wanted me awake for the first night in his building. Every other night they had needed me gone. Tonight he needed me present.

I had grown up inside a different warmth, in a kitchen with a yellow stove, where my mother had held me and sung what I spent my life mistaking for a lullaby.

She had married for love instead of Ashford money. The family had folded her out like a letter they didn’t mean to open again.

The yellow kitchen was hers. This floor was bought.

I made an inventory. It is what I know how to do.

I didn’t write any of it down. There was nothing to write with, and writing is for what you mean to keep.

So I kept the inventory the only place they could not photograph, which was behind my own face.

The band tracked my cortisol, my skin temperature, my heart rate, the sweat on my palms, how close I stood to a door I was allowed to use.