Page 37 of Soft Erasure

There were other doors in this building. I didn’t have their number. A recognition could be spent more than once. The key was his, and every door in the building had been taught to open for him, the same as mine. When he wasn’t at my door he was at another, and the building had been built for exactly that.

Six floors down, on the clipped grass of the front circle, a man in a tan vest knelt at a flowerbed and changed the orchids. The orchids in the apartment were changed by someone who came when I was elsewhere. The orchids in the flowerbed were changed by the man with the basket.

Nothing at Crownhill was meant to last. The orchids were proof the building could afford to replace anything the moment it began to wear.

The man looked up, careful not to look at my window. He looked instead at a window on the same floor, two over from mine, held it three seconds, and went back to the orchid. He had been told where the new resident lived, and told not to look. Two windows over, on six, a morning was getting what mine had gotten first.

I watched him until he was done.

The bathroom was the one room without a lens, the one window the size of a paperback. I took the book down. Third from the left, two finger-widths from the lip. The matchbook from The Greenroom was against the spine where the binding was tightest, Callow’s card folded inside it. I read the card.

If you are reading this, you have between four and six weeks. Do not tell him you have it.

I didn’t tell him.

What I had was the card, and a number in pencil inside the matchbook, and a count my body finished without me, and a song it sang at one-fifty-two, with someone’s shape cut out of the middle of it.

The agency in that was small. It was mine. It didn’t belong to the song, and it didn’t belong to him.

The let-down hadn’t stopped. It had been there since the video ended, under the refusal, under the orchid, and it would be there under the tray and the metronome and Wednesday.

The body had a let-down for any infant. That was physiology. It had no owner.

I was not going to build a case on eleven seconds of video and a boy who could have been any boy with pale hair.

If Ben were mine they wouldn’t have let Marissa send me a video of him laughing. They would have kept him out of sight, the thing held back until the morning they needed it.

The math was close.

I didn’t let myself call it planted. Not yet. That was work for a morning I had more than a video and a song.

I folded the note in with the card. I set the book back. Third from the left. Two finger-widths.

I carried the phone to the breakfast bar and sat where I could see the door.

In my first days I had sat here to learn the cameras. I had mapped them like exits. I knew them now. That wasn’t what the breakfast bar was for anymore.

I listened for the building to tell me which kind of morning the next one would be: the morning he carried the tray to the door himself, or the morning the building carried it in his place.

I told myself I was listening for information. I was not.

The fear I had walked in with had gone down to wherever the count went, and the wanting had moved into the room it left. The wanting had no line on the rate card.

They had built a woman to be watched at a locked door, and the woman had started watching the door for the man who locked it. The watching had changed direction.

The hum was on my mouth. I let it stay.

The band warmed.

M. CALDREN (07:21): I heard the song this morning. You didn’t know you were singing.

I had hummed at the breakfast bar. Once, under my breath, in the one part of the morning I had thought was mine.

A second message stacked under the first.

M. CALDREN (07:21): Don’t stop on my account.

CHAPTER TEN