Page 19 of Soft Erasure

“Charles Voss. General Counsel for Ashford Institute and the family. You met him in the discharge week.”

The forms Voss sent all said the same thing: voluntarily-elected care. I had asked him what that meant in a building whose locks engaged on their own. It means you chose to get better, he had said.

“I don’t remember meeting Charles Voss.”

“You wouldn’t.”

He pressed his thumb to the pad. The box clicked. He didn’t open it.

“This is yours. You can open it now or in your own time. I’ll go if you need privacy.”

His eyes went to the box.

“Stay.”

“Are you sure.”

“You’re going to ask me about it after. We can save a step.”

He smiled, the elevator smile, then it was gone. He moved a bar stool half an inch to the right. On purpose. He was making spaces I could fill.

I opened the box.

Inside was a phone. Not mine. One the family had picked. The screen was on, no lock screen, a single icon at the center: LEGAL PORTAL. The icon was the cream of the Soft Erasure card, chosen to soothe a woman who once held the original on a dock.

I touched it.

A folder opened. One item: a video file. The thumbnail was my own face.

CLIENT: VALE, A. MATTER: Wellness Continuity & Care NEW MEDIA: CONSENT_3B_trim.mp4 HASH: A3E7-9C1B-… SOURCE: MIRROR-3B

I didn’t press play. The still held a face I knew but didn’t remember being recorded. The hair was a hair I hadn’t yet learned to wear. Behind my left shoulder, where the wall should have been blank, a pale line flickered. I caught it before I knew.

My band ticked.

Adherence: 95 → 90.

I knew what 90 was. Ninety opened the balcony; one point under, and it would not. I knew the whole ladder; they had handed it to me the first day, like house rules for a child you mean to keep. What they had not handed me was where the number had begun. I had not been told there was a before. The body had been told. The body had not told me.

They had trained the body and emptied the head of it, so I would obey a thing I could not remember being taught and could not find to refuse.

“You can play it,” Matthew said. “I won’t watch.”

The header had named a room I didn’t know: MIRROR-3B. Dr. Callow’s card had said he lied about almost everything. The clip would tell me whether she was right.

The body said trust her. The mind said the body had been trained to trust what was arranged. I didn’t know which voice was older.

He turned to the window, not looking out so much as at the glass. He gave me privacy with the half he could spare and kept the half I could not afford.

I pressed play.

Eleven seconds, the longest the apartment had held. The mirror belonged to a room with a hairline of pale wood where wall met ceiling. I knew it. I didn’t know how. The lighting was the warm of a place that wants you to look like the woman it wants. My shoulders were squared, my chin relaxed, my eyes soft.

My voice came out of the phone.

“Be good.”

Two words. The way I said thank you to a stranger who held a door. The way my mother had said it to me on a morning I no longer placed.