Page 93 of Soft Erasure

There was no hand on this counter. There was a bottle, and a label, and a line of instructions written for strangers.

I had done this before, the finding of a hand.

A schedule card with a P on it that meant Penelope, who signed everything P and called it a signature.

A sealed packet that had not come, and a man at a half-closed door asking whether it had. So I would carry the error downstairs in my own mouth and hand it to the woman who would wear it.

A man on the other side of a door who read me and told me he was reading me.

The panel woke on its own a little after five, no chime first.

A single line, white text on the dark glass, no voice under it.

WELLNESS (17:04): Wellness protocol initiated. Self-administered. Observer request approved: I. Callow, next in-residence session. Adherence: 71.

This morning I had opened that channel with my own hand and put a physician’s name into it.

It had come back approved before noon, exactly as I asked, nothing argued, nobody’s reason written into any file.

The family had printed a paragraph about protecting a resident’s stability, and then gone ahead and protected it, in the log, the same day.

My one move had been read, granted, and folded into the story they were already telling. They had not needed to refuse me.

They only needed to say yes in their own font.

And underneath it, in the same line, arriving through the same channel, a protocol I had never asked for at all.

The phone buzzed once at six and it wasn’t him.

UNKNOWN (I.C. relay): Nobody argued about me. Ask yourself who wanted me in that room. — I.C.

I put the phone face-down.

Callow had cleared in a morning, the one outside doctor the family had every reason to bury, and no hand showed anywhere on the yes.

The bottle had been coming, or my asking had brought it, and there was no instrument in that building or outside it that would ever tell me which.

I was going to carry both whether or not either was true.

The article had borrowed a voice he put down years ago and made it promise care to every doorstep that took the paper.

This was the same promise with the last fingerprint sanded off it. Penelope had at least been a person relaying a decision. This was the decision relaying itself.

Seventy-one had done this. That was the sentence I built, standing at the counter, and I had no way at all to check it.

The last hand I’d felt against my own skin was his, in a kitchen that had no lens anywhere in it, shaking once against my stomach before it went still.

My body didn’t care that he had gone dark.

It kept reaching for a version of him that existed nowhere on this floor, in this bed, in this hour. My hands did it without me, closing on nothing and opening again. It didn’t stop reaching just because the reaching hurt more than the having ever had.

Wanting him and knowing exactly what he had built around me had never canceled each other out.

I thought about the folio under the carpet in the next room, and the woman it belonged to, who didn’t answer to this building.

I had no number for her. I had never had one.

She had put a folio in my hands on a landing and told me I would know the day. The knowing was hers to hand down, not mine to ask for.