Erasure is not a deletion. It is an appetite. It starts soft—missed greetings, a barista forgetting your usual, a professor's puzzled smile in place of your name—but the hunger is patient. When you try to redraw yourself into the world, the lines you make go faint, then thin, then vanish. And beneath every vanishing, something waits, humming with the pleasure of a clean sheet.
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He began that Thursday as he always did: with small routines meant to anchor the soul. Alex brushed his teeth, counted the strokes. Toasted bread, leaned against the window as the sun tipped dilute yellow over the roof-slats, and told himself: Here is a day, drawn solid in time. The letter to Maya must have arrived by now—somewhere out there, a chain of custody, a truth carried in postal hands. He pictured her opening the envelope, reading the story he'd bound so tightly with his own certainty that it should have made her home heavier. He pictured it again, and a tremor ran through his confidence.
The day didn't gel, right from the start. At his favorite coffee shop, the barista—a senior who knew his order—asked, "What can I get for you?"
He gave his usual ("Medium drip, room for milk, charge it to my student account?"), expecting the ritual smile. The barista frowned at the screen. "Sorry, card's not scanning. Do you have an alternate payment?"
Alex ran the stripe twice, flipped the card to double-check the worn sticker with his initials. The terminal beeped red, an unhappy, warbly note. He stepped aside, paid in cash, took the coffee anyway, but in the press of the line, the barista had already forgotten him. At the milk carafe, he stood a moment, waiting for someone to ask about his day, to nod with that "see you at the paper" camaraderie campus used to breed. Not a single backward glance. He felt the blank blooming behind him.
His first real appointment was a seminar—Digital Media Ethics. Professor Gale was brisk, a terrier with graying stubble, reams of press cuttings tacked above his desk like battle victories. Alex came in early, sat second row, pulled his notes: two bluebooks, a news clipping, and three annotated articles. He set his pen on the desk and watched the room fill. Every other seat filled but his left. At two minutes past the hour, Gale swept in, clutching coffee in one hand and a state-issued iPad in the other.
Gale began attendance, his gaze tracking rows like a scanner, each name receiving the quick up-down of recognition. When he came to "Winters, Alex," he paused. "Do I have an… Alex here?"
Alex raised his hand, voice dry-edged: "Here, Professor."
Gale blinked twice. His gaze skidded over Alex's face, didn't hook. "Sorry, don't recognize you. Must be a registrar error." He moved on. The students on either side didn't look at Alex. Behind him, a girl whispered, "That's Jordan's seat," and a friend shushed her.
He waited for the attendance list to circle back—sometimes Gale doubled up, checking for misprints—but the class went on, a rolling monotony of examples and legalese, citations that blurred past Alex's understanding. He took notes, but when he looked down at the end of the hour, the page was half-empty, the handwriting faint, the impression left in the paper but not the ink.
His phone buzzed. He checked it: Property Mgt: Lease Reminder: Unit 4C due for signature update.
Reassured by a digital trail he hadn't prompted, he left class and walked to the campus property office. The agent was someone he'd met twice—a tidy Asian-American woman named Denise, precise as an accountant crossed with an ice queen, usually brisk, usually tolerant of his late paperwork.
At the desk, she glanced up, her professional smile poised. "Can I help you?"
"Alex Winters. Unit 4C. I got a lease renewal email."
"Year and building?"
"Stonegate. 4C. Winters—A-l-e-x, last four of my SSN—"—he gave the digits.
She tapped keys, then frowned. "We don't have a Winters listed on file for Stonegate in any of the apartment units. Did you sublet? Or was the agreement through a third-party?"
"No, I—" He checked his phone. The email was there, timestamped that morning: Lease Reminder: Unit 4C. He clicked open the message to show her. But the inbox loaded blank, the message title disappeared, the list reordered itself—old, familiar spam and a long-ago reply from Maya now at the top, the lease reminder missing.
Denise was waiting—impatient, mask-held. "Do you want to leave your contact info in case something comes up?"
Alex shook his head. His tongue felt numb as he tried to speak, nausea nestling behind his molars. He left the office, the click of his shoes on the tile a little too loud, every step like a stamp on ground nobody wanted to claim.
Back outside, the air smelled of ozone—rain somewhere close—or else he was just hyperventilating. He pressed his hands into his jeans, thinking: These are mine, I remember the weight of the coins in the left pocket, I remember the last thing I bought. But his keys, when he checked, were not there.
He found them in the other pocket. He'd never put them there. There must be a bruise from this—he pressed at the hip, waiting for pain, but only dull pressure responded.
Alex cut through campus green, seeking faces he knew: classmates, friends, someone to name him, fold him back into belonging. He spied Ben—not quite a friend any more, but a person he'd argued with about narrative and authenticity in a way that made him certain Ben was real. Alex sped up, arm half-raised.
"Ben, hey!"
Ben turned at the sound. His eyes genuinely puzzled, mouth squirming for the right polite disengagement. "Sorry, do I—?"
"Alex. Journalism. You helped with the Black—" He bit his own tongue and said, "—with my feature last month?"
Ben blinked, stepped backward in reflex. "You must have the wrong guy, sorry." He looked at his phone and was gone, feet scissoring away into the flow.
Alex's cheeks pulsed with blood. He put both hands on his own chest, felt the drag of breath that belonged to him, felt his name inside it, tried to recall all the alias games he'd played as a kid—spy, secret agent, hiding places left with tokens to prove he'd been real. Today, the campus was a world of people who'd never named him, never even erased him because he'd never been drawn.
He walked back to his apartment. He swiped his student ID at the lobby door. The lock beeped red. "Card error," the screen read, cold and certain. Alex tried again, then three more times, scraping the magstripe, each time: DENIED. He banged the door, teeth set, until finally a resident he didn't know—maybe even someone new—opened the door to come out. The woman eyed him with a measure of worry. "You live here uh—?"
"Yes," Alex lied—no, he told the truth. "Unit 4C, I'm on the lease."
A pause, longer than necessary, her eyes catching the red of the denied swipe. "Just… put in a maintenance request," she offered, voice flat, then slipped away.
Inside, Alex checked his own mailbox: stuffed, same as always—flyers, overdue reminders, the usual junk—but one of the letters had changed. A cable bill addressed to "A. Winters" was now addressed to "Current Resident."
He climbed the two flights, unlocked his door with the metal key that, at least for now, still worked. He stood inside the threshold, sweating and trembling. The world outside his apartment was starting to shed him like a molted skin.
Anchoring, he thought. The therapist, years ago, in the sessions after his mother died, had urged "grounding"—writing out your name, date, time, pinning yourself to the present. "Write it. Read it. Touch it. Speak it." He dug out a Pilot G2, uncapped it with his teeth, and scrawled on his left forearm:
"Alex Winters, 4C Stonegate, October 4, 2025, 1:16 PM"
The writing felt permanent the way only things inscribed on the body can. He pressed the ink down until it left a shallow groove. He watched as the first "A" in "Alex" lightened, then grayed, as if sucked into the skin, then vanished. "Winters" faded next, the S going first, then the rest. By the time he reached for his phone to photograph it, only a faint gray trail curved beneath his elbow, the time and date all but erased except for the "1" of what had once been "1:16."
Shaking, he tried again, this time with a thick laundry marker, sometimes used to label Tupperware. The lines looked oil-black at first—a warning—then paled, congealed to ash in less than a minute, leaving behind no adhesive, nothing sticky, nothing at all. He pressed at the spot and felt nothing, smelled nothing, as if even the memory of chemical had been drawn out, made palatable only to the blank intelligence that now governed his fate.
The lullaby grew clearer throughout the day. In the apartment, through the vent, it began as a wordless hum but soon acquired a shape, phonemes not English but meaning undoubtable, the message arriving beneath language and logic:
Stop speaking. Stop making lines.
He wrote the phrase into his notebook—it belonged among his warnings, his attempts to find a surviving phrase that had not yet been eaten. It persisted for a while, then the pencil lead broke, and when he sharpened it, the note had shifted: St maki l. Only after a full minute did the "Stop making lines" reappear, pale but legible, as if the notebook was negotiating how much could be said before the process of saying it became too dangerous.
He called Dr. Lee, unwilling, now, to let the thesis slip away without testing the boundaries. The call connected—he heard the click and a hum not unlike the one in his vents. For 43 seconds (he counted; he timed it), nothing passed between them but air. Alex spoke: "Dr. Lee, I need to talk—I have questions about Blackstone, about what happens to people who know too much." No reply, but he knew the call remained live, that someone waited at the other end, soaking up his plea, chewing the syllables as a rat chews paper. The call dropped mid-breath, as if the line had been cut with a guillotine.
Checking the call log, all he saw was a flat "0:00"—the call, as far as the phone was concerned, had never outlived its own dialing tone.
He wanted to shout. Instead, he bit his thumb, hard enough to leave a mark. He tried writing his name in steam on the bathroom mirror, but the glass refused his condensation, the surface too cold, the breath pooling in odd geometry, refusing to coalesce, as if his very exhalation had been trained to avoid anything resembling narrative structure.
It occurred to him, in a moment of wild defiance, to test every way a person might mark their world. He grabbed a needle, a trick from the years of teenage rebellion, intending to scratch his name on the underside of the kitchen table. Five careful letters: A L E X W. The grain of the wood lifted around the cut, the lines bright as bone. He traced it with a thumb, blinked, looked away—blinked again. Already, the marks grew fainter, wood swelling to erase the vandalism.
Emerging into dusk, determined to reach someone, he walked to the university newsroom where he'd filed a hundred drafts, left twenty coffee rings, and once, in a burst of fury, had branded the under-lip of a desk with his initials—a teenage superstition, but one felt real now. The glass entryway reflected his face behind the double doors: too pale, slightly offset, as if the light itself refused to hold him steady.
He punched the old keypad code—a sequence drilled by years of repetition: 93, 17, 36. Red light. Again: error. Again: no entry. The code, he knew, had not changed; it had been passed down from seniors before him. But the panel was adamant. Unauthorized. You are not on the list.
He knocked, pace urgent, but the corridor inside was empty. At last, a motion-sensor light in the alcove clicked on, illuminating the tangled cords behind the photo desk. For half a second, it revealed the corkboard he'd built over a month—full of pins, notes, photos. Then the board blanked. Not deliberately; not in a dramatic cinematic erase, but a simple refusal of memory. The light blinked again, and the wall was bare.
He pressed his forehead to the glass and mouthed his own invisible name. The light inside pulsed gently, as if to say, there are no shadows here, only clean new space.
Something—someone—watched from a room at the end of the intersecting hall. He tried to name them, but the word tasted like static. The lullaby slipped from the dark, closer and sharper now, its cadence smooth: Stop making lines.
Cold dread, more primal than panic, swept through him. His body remained, but more and more, it seemed, belonged to itself less and less, as if the world were a page being erased to ready it for someone else's story.
He returned to his room that night and found that it, too, was starting to grow cleaner. Drawers unfilled. Labels wiped from food. On his arm, a faint smudge of where Alex had once been.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Alex, unable to mark or anchor himself, begins to haunt the campus he once called home—only now finding public spaces morph in geometry, staircases leading to familiar doors that lock behind him, clocks slightly out of phase from each other. He follows the old music to a corridor filled with picture frames—all empty save for one, where a hand-carved circle has just been scratched into the glass. His own face, reflected, lags—echoing a voice that finally speaks back from the silence.