Page 21 of Soft Erasure

CONSENT CONFIRMATION

Patient: VALE, AMBER A.

Then the still. My eyes downcast in a way they had not learned on their own. My mouth softened into the parted shape of the word. Under it, in quotation marks I had not used:

“I consent.”

In finer print:

Prepared by Charles Voss, General Counsel. Methodology by M. C. Caldren, MD. Protocol © Ashford Institute, all rights reserved.

And in the finest print, almost a watermark, visible only by tilting it to the light. Which I did, because I had cleaned counters once and knew how light came at paper:

Service Bulletin: Clock/Camera Drift acknowledged 02:00-02:20.

They had not needed my yes. They had needed a frame of my face and a line beneath it. No word of mine was safe from being cut clean and filed as consent.

The page moved in my hand.

It moved because my hand moved, because something in my chest had started and had not asked me first. The band didn’t log it. It read cortisol; the cortisol was steady. This was lower than cortisol, somewhere it was not built to read.

“Amber.”

“Yes.”

“You’re tilting.”

I was. I’d held the page at the angle for the watermark and my body had followed it. It was the angle of a woman about to fall.

“Sit, please.”

I sat.

Matthew didn’t steady me. He stood behind me and laid the flat of his palm at the base of my skull, the place a midwife’s hand rests on a woman about to push.

He didn’t push.

He didn’t pull.

He was a metronome with a hand instead of a tick.

“Roll the shoulder back. Two clicks.”

I rolled.

“Drop the chin. Half a click.”

I dropped.

“In, four. Hold, three. Out, six.”

I went in for four, held for three, out for six. He stopped at six. My body counted the seventh.

His palm didn’t move. It was warm. It had been on me before. I wanted his hand to stay. Not for the number it fixed, but for the plain animal fact of it. I leaned back into it a half-inch before I caught myself, and the leaning was the truer thing.

“Good,” he said.

He took the palm off at three seconds. The same retreat he had used on my wrist the day I left the clinic. The same count.