Page 60 of Soft Erasure

A clause no one had opened in years let a patient name an observer to any in-residence session. Voss could not refuse a clean request without saying out loud why he wanted to.

Irene was at the door because of a paragraph.

I sat in one of the two chairs.

Caldren came in at ten on the second. The gray sweater. He carried a clipboard, which was the way he told a room it was not on the record. The room was on the record.

Pembroke’s lens was live, and Willson’s recorder, and the panel on Irene’s clipboard. The dome in the corner. Three phones in bags.

The room was filming itself, and he had walked into it holding a clipboard.

He sat.

“Good morning, Amber.”

“Good morning.”

“You’ve asked for a public session. That’s the first time a patient has done that. I want you to know I take it seriously. I want this to be useful for you.”

Useful was not his word. Someone had handed it to him to warm the air, and it came out of him and dropped on the floor between us and lay there. At the door, Irene wrote something down.

“Thank you,” I said. “Please go on.”

He took me into the count. The same count. In, four. Hold, three. Out, six.

The count he had built in the SUV and at the breakfast bar and in the elevator, his finger at my collarbone.

I didn’t stop at six. My body went where it had gone for thirteen months and gave the seventh, where all of them could see it, and that was the thing I had come to do.

I opened the most private thing I owned in a room full of cameras, because a thing done in front of witnesses cannot be done to you in the dark.

He saw the seventh. His face did the small thing it did, the one-millimeter set of the muscle at the eye. He had a face for a private session. He didn’t have a face for a woman performing his own conditioning for a gallery, and for one beat the private face was the wrong one.

“Amber. We’ve worked on this a long time. The count settles to six. Six is the resting count. Six is where the body holds if you let it.”

“My body holds at seven.”

“Your body has held at seven since the elevator. That isn’t holding. That’s resisting.”

“My body is a body. My count is my count.”

I held him at the distance he kept in the elevator, and he went on.

The next part was the touch. Jess had told me, and Mateo, and Irene through the spout of his watering can, that this was where the hand came up. To the collarbone, or higher.

The room would read the hand as care. The body would read it as what the count was built to make it ready for.

The system would log observed therapeutic touch, and the band would warm.

He raised his hand.

It came up the way it had come up in the elevator, slow, meant to give the cameras nothing. He didn’t bring it to my collarbone.

He brought it higher, to the soft place under the jaw where the throat begins, the place a hand closes on when a hand is going to, and stopped a half-inch short, thumb hovering, not yet skin.

Jess had written that the throat was the third time. There had been no second. He had taken two rungs at once, and whatever ran him had not asked him first.

Half an inch is nothing. Half an inch was the whole distance I had been climbing since the courtyard bench, where my own reach had gone to my throat and found no hand and been stopped by the tick of the band.