Page 49 of Soft Erasure

Behind Jess the Garden Room ran the front of the building in a curved wall of glass. A window from inside, a mirror from the circle below, until the lights changed at five and it was a window from both sides. The five o’clock walk was on the schedule Penelope’s office kept. For the light, it said.

Something from Wednesday turned over in me, a thing that had meant nothing until now.

He had said we would do the elevator again on Wednesday. On Wednesday he didn’t come near me.

He came with a small framed photograph face down on the tray, set it on the counter without turning it over or naming it, and watched the band.

The green seam of the platinum caught the light when his hand left the frame, there and gone.

The number moved on its own, and he saw it move and stopped his hand a half-inch from the frame.

At the end of the hour he took it with him. I never saw the face. It was the size of a photograph of a child.

He had not been testing my memory. He had been reading me for the response the family wanted found, so the program would know which women went soft at a face and which softness to close.

He stopped at six, and left the seventh to me.

“I don’t—”

“Five-oh-eight,” Jess said. “That’s all you hold tonight. Don’t go to the window. Don’t lift your hand. Be in the room.”

The meeting was mandatory. The building had brought the residents down floor by floor to the Garden Room on two, the ride not mine to start. A woman in Penelope’s colors stood at the door with a seating chart and walked me to a chair in the second row, a place already chosen for me.

Chairs in three rows, the Danish chairs from the discharge room.

The women in them were the residents of Floor Six and Floor Five, all of them blond, not as women are blond but as Penelope was blond, the salon shade.

Penelope at the podium with a tablet and the same lipstick.

Caleb one row ahead and across, aisle seat, in the blazer he wore for cameras, the friendly one. The one the body catalogued before he turned his head and would not name, the count starting low and wrong in me.

A man at the back, by the door I had come through. Tall. Silver hair paid to stay silver. A closed leather portfolio on his knees.

I didn’t know him. He didn’t look up when I passed.

And Matthew, on the far side, in the row behind the chair they had put me in.

I sat facing the screen. It set Matthew and the man with the portfolio at my back. Caleb it left in front, up one row and across, the one man in the room I could watch and would not.

I shouldn’t have been able to feel where he was. I felt it, the way I felt the camera.

The screen at the front was cinema-sized. The clip was queued.

Penelope smiled at the room. “We’re committed to transparency,” she said. “We’ll review the lobby footage from last week’s Welfare Confirmation.”

The clip played.

It was the trim. The lobby trim, the same cut in the same place.

The me on the chair said I’m choosing, and the cut was clean.

The me on the chair smiled and folded her hands in her lap, and the screen didn’t show the reflection in the coffee-table glass, because someone had taken the reflection out of this version.

Without it there was no hand on the screen at all.

A woman in a chair, a consent logged in the same minute, and a room that would put the two together without being asked to.

The me on the chair pressed I AGREE.