I erase people for a living. It's cleaner than it sounds — the clinic is all pale wood and tea, and by the time clients reach my chair they've already decided; they just want a professional to hold the scalpel. Name, face, the specific ache. I map it, I lift it, they walk out lighter and a little confused about why they wore their good coat.
The man in my chair today had booked under removal of former partner. Standard. I asked, as I always do, for the name of the person to be removed.
He said mine.
I laughed, because you have to. He didn't. He slid a card across — our card, a restaurant I'd never been to, dated four years ago, my own handwriting on the back. He said we'd had eleven months. He said I'd been the one to book my own procedure when it ended, that I did it to myself first, the way I always tell clients not to, and that he'd been paying for the appointment slot ever since just to sit in this chair once a year and be forgotten by me on purpose.
"Then why come back at all," I said, "if I won't remember it."
"Because I do," he said. "One of us should get to keep it."
I looked at the map on my screen — the clean grey field where he should have been, scarred at the edges the way self-inflicted lifts always scar. I have erased four hundred people. I have never once been the thing erased.
I turned off the scalpel. I didn't remember him. But I wrote the restaurant on my own hand, in my own ink, the way I apparently once had, and I told him to book it for Friday — and to bring the card, in case I'd talked myself out of it again by then.
