Informed Consent - chapter 3 (with images) (Patreon)

The buyout email has been sitting unanswered since the fever and Vicky finally opens it at the kitchen table with me watching from the counter.

"Twenty-six hundred," she says. "Second and last month, since I won't be there. And whatever your half of the deposit was. Eleven hundred? Twelve?"

"Eleven seventy-five."

She writes it on the back of a CVS receipt because neither of us knows where the checkbook is, if there still is a checkbook. She writes slow, pressing hard, and when she slides the receipt across the table the numbers have dented through to the front.

The lease is in both our names. I tell her I'll talk to the management office about taking her off it. She says she'll do it, they like her, they fixed the disposal twice for her without charging. There's a pause after that where we both wait to see if it's going to be a fight and it isn't.

Her sister found her a place off Colfax, second floor, parking in back. I haven't seen it. I'm not going to see it.

"The bed," I say.

"Keep it."

"Vicky."

"You bought it. I paid for half of one mattress in the whole time we lived here and it was the one in your…" She stops. Starts again. "I don't want it, Marcus. I'm not sleeping on it and I'm not putting it in a U-Haul."

"Okay."

"You can sell it."

"I said okay."

The dresser is hers and there's no dispute about the dresser. The mid-century one, walnut, that she found on Marketplace and made me drive to Boulder for in the rain. My nightstand sits next to it, the cheap one, and we both look at the pair of them and don't say the thing about how they never matched.

She makes the list on the fridge whiteboard in blue marker. Her handwriting tips forward, all the letters leaning right, and I know it better than my own. Dresser. Kitchen table, though she circles it and writes maybe in the corner. The bookshelf from the hall, which is mine but is full of her paperbacks, so we spend twenty minutes taking books off shelves and putting them in two piles on the floor and her pile is bigger and that's fine, that was always true.

"Kitchen," she says, and opens the cabinets.

The dishes are the least of it and take the longest. She takes the good plates, the heavy white ones her mother gave us. I keep the mismatched four we had before that. The Austin mug sits on the counter between us, price sticker still on the bottom.

"You bought it," she says.

"We bought it. It's from the trip."

"I'm not going to use it."

"So I keep it?"

She looks at the sticker on the bottom. "Leave the sticker on," she says. "That's the whole…" She doesn't finish it. She puts the mug on my side of the counter and opens the next cabinet.

The bathroom takes ten minutes. Her grapefruit shampoo, her razor, the good tweezers, the dryer. I keep the beard trimmer and the rusted nail clippers and a half bottle of two-in-one I bought out of spite and have been using since hers ran out. Standing in the bathroom doorway watching her pack a tote bag, I think about the tub, about her washing my hair, and I let myself think it once and then I take the trash out of the bathroom bin because it's full and it's something to do with my hands.

She's left a bag of pads under the sink. She doesn't mention them. I don't mention them. The tote zips over everything else.

The couch is the real problem and we both know it going in. It's hers. We bought it together but she picked it and paid the extra hundred for the faster delivery and it's, by any honest accounting, her couch. It also doesn't fit through the bedroom door, we learned that the day it arrived, which means it's lived in the living room the whole time, which means whoever leaves leaves it.

"I'll get a futon," she says.

"Take the couch."

"I'm not putting a couch in the U-Haul on top of the dresser. Take the couch. Watch your movies on it."

"I don't watch…"

"Sell it if you don't want it. I don't care." She uncaps the marker and writes couch under her name and then crosses it out and writes it under mine. The blue ink bleeds a little into the board. "There. It's decided by the board."

The joke is almost an old one. Not quite.

Her sister's fiancé comes for the dresser on Saturday morning. His name is Derek or Eric, I've met him twice, and he's polite in the way of a man who has been told the broad strokes and is working out the rest from my forearms. We carry the dresser down together, me on the bottom, and the weight of it settling onto my hands on the stairs is the first time I've felt the change in them, the fingers shorter against the wood than they should be, the grip coming up shy of where I reach for it. I adjust and don't let go and he doesn't notice.

"Appreciate you, man," he says at the truck, and man stays with me the whole way back up the stairs, and I say yeah, and he drives off with Vicky's dresser roped to the bed.

Vicky comes back at four with the U-Haul. I help load because it's my stuff too, half of it, going to a place I haven't seen. We get the bookshelf in sideways. Her paperbacks go in liquor store boxes, the flaps folded in. She's quiet through most of it. In the bedroom she takes the sheets off her side of the bed, the good ones from her mother, and leaves the plain white pillowcase on mine.

"Keep those," she says about the stripes, and then they're in the bag anyway.

The last trip is the lamp from the living room, the good one with the linen shade, and a box of cords neither of us can assign, so we split them by the practical test of whose devices they fit. She gets the USB-C brick. I get the long HDMI I bought for the TV she's taking.

She stands in the bedroom with her keys. The room looks bigger. There's a pale rectangle on the wall where the dresser kept the sun off the paint. My nightstand is in the bedroom, next to the bed she didn't take, and through the doorway I can see the floor where her dresser was, the dust line around it, a bobby pin in the corner.

"The check's Friday," she says.

"Whenever."

"Friday." She says it like an appointment, and then she's looking at me, and the room is empty enough that there's nowhere else to look. "Are you going to… does it get…"

"It keeps going," I say. "A few more weeks."

She nods at the floor. She doesn't ask what the weeks bring. She knows. She was there for the fever and she's figured the rest of it, or she hasn't, and either way she's not asking.

"Take care of yourself," she says, which is a thing you say to someone you're not going to see for a while, and we both hear it that way, and neither of us corrects it into something with a date on it.

She hugs me at the door. Brief, both arms, her chin over my shoulder where it's always fit, except my shoulder is lower now than it was and she has to bend a little and she does. She smells like her shampoo, the travel bottle she must have used at her sister's. I keep my hands flat on her back and don't move them.

"Text me when you're in," I say.

"It's Colfax. It's eleven minutes."

"Text me anyway."

She goes. I don't watch from the window. I wash the four mismatched plates and put them in the rack and I leave her cup where it is in the cabinet, because it's mine now, by the same logic as the mug, and I should put them together and I don't.

My mother calls on the first Sunday of the month and it's the third Sunday so not this week. My father won't be on the call. He hasn't been on a call since the year I stopped coming for Christmas, which is a stalemate we both find restful.

The apartment makes different sounds with her furniture gone. The bedroom door doesn't catch on its bracket anymore. She took the rug that used to catch under it, and the door swings free now, all the way open, all the way shut. 

I get in bed at nine because the bed is the only thing in the apartment I still want to be in. The bed is too big. It's been too big since I started changing but now it's officially too big, it's the whole reason the room looks wrong. My nightstand. The pale rectangle. The white pillowcase on my side.

My chest aches. It's been aching for days, a dull pressure under the nipples. Tonight, lying on my back in a bed I'm keeping by default, I press the heel of my hand against my sternum and feel the heat there, the tissue gathering underneath, and I take my hand away and put it under the pillow.

Her side of the closet still has the wire hangers she didn't want. The door is off its track at the top and I don't fix it. I leave it hanging crooked, the way we left it for two years.

The soreness starts the week the fever breaks, the same days I'm learning to sit down, and the sports bra is Vicky's. Or was. She stopped wearing it a year ago, the band stretched too loose for her, the straps gone gray where they were black. It lives at the back of her drawer under the ski socks, and the Tuesday after the email I dig it out and put it on, because rolling over in bed that morning felt like lying on two golf balls stitched under my skin.

That was the start. Soreness first, a deep ache I kept diagnosing as a pulled muscle I'd never pulled. Then fullness. Then, the week she moves out, shape.

This morning I take the bra off in the bathroom and stand at the mirror and look.

They're there. Small, yes, nobody on the street would call it anything, but there. The chest I had was flat muscle over ribs, and this isn't that. There's a rise from the ribcage now, a slope that starts higher than I'd expect and rounds outward, and at the end of each one the areola has spread wider and darkened, and the nipple itself sits differently than it did, pushed slightly forward by the firm disc of tissue underneath. I can find that disc with two fingers. It's hard, rubbery, and it hurts when I press it. I press it anyway.

The skin at the sides itches where it's stretching. Faint lines run vertically along the outer edges, thin and pale pink, the beginnings of stretch marks. I put my thumb on one and trace it and feel the itch answer.

I lift my arms over my head. They shift. Not much. A small weight that redistributes itself when I move and settles back when I stop. I put my arms down and they settle again, and the settling sends a small sore throb through the tissue that I feel in my teeth.

In the shower the water hits them and I turn away from the directness of it. The spray on my chest used to be nothing. Now it's a sensation I have to decide what to do with, and standing in the shower deciding what to do with water isn't how I want to spend my morning.

The shaving has been stretching out on its own. Right after the fever it was every day, a week of growth coming off in strips that stuck to the side of the tub. Then it was a two-day thing. Then four days, and what came in came in soft, lighter, like the color was going out of it. The last real shave was a Thursday. I ran the beard trimmer over my jaw and it came away with something on it, less than usual, and I did a second pass out of habit and got nothing. I didn't know it was the last one. You never know a last one when you're standing in it. The razor is still on the edge of the tub, and some mornings I pick it up only because it's there.

The sports bra goes on over my head and the band rolls up and catches under my arms and I have to pull it down with both hands, and the cups, which were too loose for Vicky, compress me flat enough that a loose t-shirt hides the rest. The straps dig in. By noon there's a red line across my shoulder where the elastic has been cutting all morning, and I shift the strap to the other side and the line stays.

Sleep has new rules too. On my stomach there's a pressure now that I can't find a position for, the tissue objecting no matter how I arrange the pillow, and I give the position up after one bad night. On my side I wake with my arm dead under me, numb to the fingertips, my hips rolled forward and the pillow between my knees migrated to the foot of the bed. I start tucking it against the mattress edge to hold it in place. It works.

At work I wear the scrub top a size up and I hunch. Appurva asked if my back was still out. I said yes. My back isn't out. My back is fine. My chest is doing something my back has nothing to do with, and the scrub top is doing a worse job of hiding it every day, and yesterday I caught myself pulling the fabric away from my sternum while I charted, a reflex, my hand doing it before I'd decided to.

The pin on the jeans came open this morning while I was pouring coffee. I found it in the grout with a fork. The jeans were the last pair that still buttoned, and they button at the hips now, and the waistband gaps at the back, and the pin was holding the gap closed. I put the pin back in and wore them to work under scrubs and the whole day I could feel it, a small metal tooth against my hip bone, waiting to give.

So I'm here, the day after the U-Haul pulled out. The store off Colorado. The escalator carries the perfume counter's smell three floors up, something floral and chemical that sits in the back of my throat. I take a basket. Downstairs first, socks. I stand in front of the sock wall longer than the socks require.

The women's section is on two. I ride the escalator up and my reflection slides past in the mirrored panels along the side, a person in gapped jeans and a loose t-shirt, and then the second floor opens out into racks organized by color story and mannequins holding poses nobody holds.

I know my numbers. This morning, against the bathroom doorframe with the tape measure Vicky left in the junk drawer, I measured around my ribs, then around the fullest part. Thirty-two. Thirty-four and a half. I wrote both on my palm in blue pen, after I wrote them in the notebook. The notebook is new. It's a pocket one, the kind I used to carry for shift notes, and the first page has columns: date, ribs, fullest, weight, notes. Soreness, left worse than right. Skin itching at the sides. It lives in the drawer of my nightstand, the cheap one, the drawer that sticks. A nurse keeps records. That's what I tell myself the record is. The numbers on my palm are the copy. The numbers are data. They don't tell me what to do with them.

The bra wall is bigger than it needs to be. Hundreds of them, organized by a lettering system I understand from the other side, from unhooking, from Vicky saying the clasp is in the back, idiot, with her mouth against my shoulder. I stand in front of the wall and look at the tags and my palm is sweating around the blue ink.

A clerk finds me. Younger than me, tag that says BRYN, measuring tape around her neck like a stethoscope.

"Do you know your size?"

I show her my hand. She looks at my palm, then at me. The whole picture. Gapped jeans, loose t-shirt over a dead sports bra, a face I ran a razor over this morning out of habit, a jaw that's going soft. She makes a decision in under a second and it's the kind one.

"Let's measure you properly, just in case."

The fitting room is the big one at the back, the accessible one with the bench and the grab bar. She puts me in it and says she'll bring a few to start. The door closes. The latch slides. I'm alone with the mirror. The room is warm and smells of new cotton and sizing, and through the door I can hear the store's music and a register beeping.

I take the t-shirt off. Then the sports bra, pulling it up over my head, the band catching where it catches now, rolling over the new tissue with a drag that makes me hiss through my teeth. It comes off and I drop it on the bench and I look.

In the flat bright fitting room light they're undeniable. Two small breasts sitting on a chest that used to be mine. The skin over them is stretched thin enough that I can see a faint blue vein running along the underside of the left one. The areolae are wider than they were last week. I put my hands under them and lift, just barely, and feel the weight in my palms. It's not much, but they're mine.

I turn sideways. The slope is real. From the side it's clearest. The profile has gone from a flat plane to a curve with a direction. I turn back. I put my hands down. My waist has come in enough that the natural resting place for my hands is different now, higher, at the new curve where my ribs end and my hips begin, and I catch myself standing that way and it looks like something Vicky would do.

Bryn knocks and comes in with an armful. She measures briskly, tape snapping flat against my skin, and the briskness is a mercy. She calls a size and goes out and comes back with four in that size and one a cup up. "For later," she says, and doesn't explain. She doesn't need to. We both know what later means.

She leaves. I try the first one. The band is stiff and new against skin that has never had one before, and the cups gape like bowls. The second one is wrong the other way, too tight, the band digging into the soft new skin at my sides. The third one goes on and I hook it behind my back on the first try, which I want to be proud of and am, and I look up.

The bra fits. The straps sit in the divots below my shoulders and the cups hold a shape that's mine, that I've been carrying around for a week under a dead sports bra and a scrub top, and in the mirror my chest is a woman's chest. Small. New. The skin still faintly pink at the sides where it's stretching. The rest of me falls into line around it, the waist, the hips, the jeans sitting now without the gap showing because the shirt I took off isn't hanging anymore. I turn sideways. I turn back.

I stand there longer than the bra requires. My eyes do the thing and I stop them. I'm not doing that in a fitting room.

Bryn knocks. "How are we doing?"

"This one works."

"Great. Try the t-shirt on the door, it's on sale. I just want to see the line."

The shirt is cut differently, narrower in the shoulders, easing in at the waist, and when I pull it down it lies against me the way clothes lie against women. It follows the new slope and comes in at the waist and the fabric touches the small of my back where nothing used to touch. I look like someone who was always going to look like this.

I buy the bra that fits and the one for later and the t-shirt and two more and a pair of jeans off the women's wall that button at the hip with no gap. At the register Bryn folds everything into tissue paper I didn't ask for.

"Do you have our rewards card?"

"No."

"Want to sign up? It's ten percent off today." She's already got the form out, the stylus. "Just name, email and birthday. I'll do the rest."

I take the stylus. The cursor blinks in the first name field.

When I was fifteen I made a list of names on the back of a math worksheet and then tore the corner off and put the corner in the bottom of my backpack and carried it around for a month. I don't remember all the names on the list. I remember the tearing. My hand writes Mara.

The M is the M I've written ten thousand times on charts. The rest of the letters follow it without asking me. I put in my birthday and my email address.

"Great, Mara," Bryn says, reading it off the screen, easy, flat, any name off any form. "All set. Ten percent saved you eleven bucks."

She says it again at the door. "Have a good one, Mara."

I make it to the escalator before I have to stop and stand right, out of the walking lane, the bag against my hip. Nobody is looking. A woman with a stroller, two teenagers sharing earbuds, a man carrying a lamp upside down. I'm one more person coming down with a bag.

In the car I sit with the bag on the passenger seat. The receipt is on top. MARA, it says in the rewards line, under the total. I fold it twice and put it in my wallet, behind my license. I sit there with the wallet open in my lap.

Mara. Close to the old one. Close enough that a loud room would mishear it. It's the same M carried down the page.

I say it once in the parked car, quiet, to nobody. It fits the way the bra fits. It holds something that's been holding itself up for days, and now that it's held, the soreness is still there, the itching skin, the red line from the elastic, all of it still there, but it's held.

At home I put the bag on the bed and open the closet, and the closet is cut for a body that no longer exists. The door is still off its track at the top and it fights me and I let it. Inside: the work polos, the button-downs with shoulders that used to strain, the jeans with the pin still in them. I take the pin out and put it in the junk drawer next to the tape measure. The jeans go in a donation bag Vicky and I had started a couple of months back. The polos go in. The button-downs I know without trying, the waist of me gone somewhere those shirts weren't built for. My boots don't fit right. I leave them anyway, and find a pair of Vicky's old shoes in the donation bag. They're a touch too small but workable.

The new things go on the shelf where her sweaters were. They take up almost no room.

One shirt I can't throw out. A blue chambray, worn soft at the elbows, that Vicky used to steal on weekends and wear with the sleeves rolled, and it smelled like her detergent for a year after she stopped. I hold it up by the shoulders and it's bigger than me now, all of it, the chest, the arms, the length. It would hang on me like a curtain. I put it back on the hanger and hang it at the end of the rod, with the wire hangers she didn't want.

Later that same day I drive to Lakewood, which is twenty-five minutes and no reason, because there's nobody in Lakewood who has ever seen me.

I get dressed twice. The first time I put on the new jeans and one of the new shirts and stand at the end of the bed with my keys in my hand for six or seven minutes, and then I take the shirt off and put on a different one. There's no difference between them. I put the first one back on.

The parking lot is a strip mall parking lot. A nail place, a Verizon store, a used bookstore with the sign painted directly on the brick. I sit in the car with the engine off and watch a woman come out of the Verizon store with a bag and get into a Rav4 and drive away and it takes her eleven seconds.

Then I open the door and go into the bookstore, and a man behind the counter says hey, how's it going, without looking up from a clipboard, and that's it. He says it the way he'd say it to anybody who came through a door.

I stay in there an hour and twenty minutes. I don't need a book. I read the backs of books in the fiction section with my hip against the shelf and my weight on one leg, the way I've watched women stand my whole life and never once tried, and it turns out it isn't a way of standing, it's just what this pelvis does when you stop holding it somewhere else. A woman reaches past me for something on the low shelf and says sorry and I say you're fine and my voice comes out where it lives now and she doesn't look up.

In an hour and twenty minutes nobody uses a word for me. No sir, no ma'am, no ladies, no guys. The man at the counter says hey, how's it going and have a good one and needs no pronoun for either.

Nobody looks. I've been looked at every day of my life by men who were checking whether I was a threat and women who were checking whether I was a threat, and none of that is happening, and what's underneath it is a quiet I've never had access to. Being unremarkable.

I buy a paperback I'm not going to read. On the way out the man behind the counter says have a good one and I say you too.

In the car I sit for a while before I start it. My hands are on the wheel and they're smaller than the wheel remembers and the whole afternoon is sitting on me like a fever in reverse. I want to call somebody. There's nobody to call. Vicky is the only person in the world who knows the shape of what just happened and she's the last person I can tell.

So I drive back down Colfax with the windows down and the radio on something I don't like, and I say my own name out loud twice at a red light, and I'm the only one in the car and I don't care, and that's the first hour of my life I've spent as myself.

Sonia's office is at the end of the lab corridor, past the centrifuge room, in a space that used to be a supply closet and still has the shallow shelves to prove it. Her door is always open. The monitor faces out, which is either careless or deliberate, and with Sonia you can't tell which and she'd never say.

Appurva catches me at the station first.

"You look different," she says.

"I lost weight."

"It's not the weight." She's holding a label maker and a rack of tubes and she gives me the same look she gives a chart that doesn't add up, quick and diagnostic. "Your hair. You did something."

She lets it go because we're both five minutes behind and she has draws at nine, nine-twenty, and nine-forty. "Sonia wants to see you," she says, and walks off with the rack.

I log in. The schedule is a wall of blue. Mr. Abernathy at nine-twenty, fasting glucose, ninety-one years old, veins like wet tissue paper. The office can wait.

The morning runs the way mornings run. I draw Abernathy in one stick because I've been drawing him since before Vicky and I know the one vein in his left arm that still shows up for work. But the butterfly sits different in my fingers this month. I've held one the same way for four years, thumb on top, forefinger along the wing, and the wing is wider than it used to be, or my finger is shorter along it. I adjust and don't let go and nobody notices. The gauze is an inch farther across the tray than my reach says it should be. I label, I spin, I hand off. At ten-thirty the waiting room is full of people who haven't eaten since midnight and hate all of us equally. I restock my tray twice. I don't look down the lab corridor.

At eleven the corridor is empty and I walk down it anyway.

Sonia is typing. Two fingers, fast, an old habit from before keyboards were quiet. Her reading glasses are on a beaded chain, purple beads, the one colorful thing about her. She has a stapler older than I am on her desk and a plant that might be artificial and might just be immortal.

She keeps typing for ten more seconds. Then she turns the monitor a quarter inch toward me. On the screen is the reconciliation report, the one she runs monthly, columns of accession numbers in green and one line in red. She doesn't point at it.

"March count," she says. "Lot four-oh-two. One accession, four tubes on the draw record. Three tubes on the receiving log."

I read the line. C. Voss. Drawn 3:40 PM, a Thursday. Tubes drawn: four. Received: three. And in the column where the fourth tube's fate should be, the system's flat red: REJECTED.

"The assay needed two," she says. "It ran on three. Results posted nine days later. Dr. Yuen has her numbers, the patient has his results, nobody was harmed, nobody was even inconvenienced." She takes her glasses off and lets them hang on the beads. "There is no problem in this line. And it doesn't reconcile."

"The tube got rejected?"

"There's a rejection record. Hemolyzed specimen. Entered from your terminal, ten minutes after close." She says it evenly. "But the lab never received a hemolyzed tube. They received three tubes, all viable. You can't hemolyze a tube you don't have."

"The courier must've lost it."

"Couriers log losses." She pulls up a second window, the courier manifest, forty pickups that Thursday, forty arrivals. "And a lost tube still existed. It got drawn, it got labeled, it went into a bag, and the bag got logged. This one exists in exactly two places. Your draw record and your rejection note. Nowhere in between. Not in the courier bag. Not in receiving."

The room is small and I can hear the centrifuge spin down through the wall, a long descending whine that takes its time.

"Who drew him?" I ask.

"You did."

She says it like she's reading a weather report. I knew she'd say it. I knew the accession had my initials on it because I put them there, because I drew Caden Voss at 3:40 on a Thursday and it was a clean stick and he looked at the label on the tray a beat too long, or I did. I don't remember which of us looked. I remember his arm.

"I don't remember the rejection," I say.

"It was logged from your terminal. Ten minutes after close."

"I stay late."

"You do." She folds her hands on the desk blotter. "I've run this report every month for six years. Tubes go missing. There's always a shape to it. A courier logs a loss. A tech logs a break. Somebody calls somebody and the line closes. This has no shape. Four tubes drawn when the order called for three. One record, made after hours, from your terminal, accounting for a tube that never arrived anywhere. No patient harm. No error to correct. Nothing to fix." She looks at the screen, not at me.

There's a question sitting under all of it and she doesn't ask it. It's not a column on her screen. There's no field for it.

"I'm not closing the line," she says. "There's nothing to fix and I'm not closing it."

I turn to leave. She lets me get halfway out the door.

"And Marcus." She's putting her glasses back on, the purple beads swinging. She waits until I turn around. "The rejection record. You logged it from your terminal after close, and the physical tube never reached the lab. Do you understand what that looks like, written down, to someone who doesn't work here?"

I stand with my hand on the door frame.

"It looks like sloppiness," I say.

"It looks like a tube that went somewhere on purpose." She says it to the monitor. She's already typing again, two fingers, fast.

I close the door behind me. Down the corridor the centrifuge has finished its spin and the quiet after it is total.

The rest of the day I keep my sentences short. I don't decide to, it just happens. At two a reference lab calls about a mislabeled requisition and I answer and the first word comes out where I expect it and the second word cracks upward, splits, and I finish the call in words of one syllable. Yes. No. Tuesday. The tech on the other end doesn't know me and doesn't care. I hang up and sit with the phone in my hand.

At three I take the stairs instead of the elevator because the stairs are empty. Appurva passes me on the landing going up, carrying a box of gloves, and says, "You find Sonia?"

"Yeah. A clerical thing. A tube got logged wrong."

"Ugh, she'll be on that till June." She shifts the box. "You look tired again. The flu's going to come back if you don't sleep."

"I'm sleeping."

"You look like you're doing it wrong."

I stay until five-forty restocking, which doesn't need doing, and wipe down both draw chairs, which also doesn't need doing. Appurva leaves at five-fifteen with a wave. The waiting room empties. The lights over the chairs are on a timer and one bank goes off while I'm standing there and the room goes half-dark, and I think about an empty supply closet at this hour, the dent in the door at knee height, and I put the wipes away and clock out.

In the car I sit for a minute before starting it. Then I dial my own number and let it ring through to the message. The outgoing greeting is two years old. You've reached Marcus, leave it at the beep. Eight words in a voice I still almost have in the mornings and lose by dinner. I listen to it twice. It's the last copy of that voice anywhere, archived on a carrier's server in a building I'll never see, and I could re-record it tomorrow in the new one and the old one would be overwritten, gone for good, and I don't do it. I hang up and start the car.

Sonia's light is still on when I drive past the lab side of the building. Hers and the security desk and nothing else. She's working in there, in a converted closet with an immortal plant, and the data has been failing to make sense for a month, and now I know she isn't going to stop looking at it.

I take the long way home, down Colfax, past the turn for Vicky's sister's, past the green chile place with the name nobody uses. The car knows the way to Sully's and I almost let it go there, it's Thursday, the game is Friday, I have the day wrong. I correct at the light.

The apartment is dark and the couch is gone and my phone has one text. Giorgio: You in tomorrow? Need you. Marty's up sixty and he's insufferable.

I text back: In.

Then I plug the phone in, and I take a folded paper out of my wallet, and I stand in the kitchen holding it under the light. The requisition slip, the carbonless kind, one tube, my initials at the bottom. The order called for three and I wrote a fourth by hand and drew it. The slip never went anywhere because the tube never went anywhere, not to the courier, not to the lab, not to the waste. I put it back, and it fits there so neatly that I have to stand there a moment with the wallet open, looking at the neatness of it.