Part Three: The Gray Hour

Entry 21. June 13, 2028. The knock.

Two gap years stand between the last entry and this one, and I will account for them in one paragraph, because they were the two most uneventful years of my biological life and the record has learned what my uneventful means.

Between April 2027 and June 2028: replacement proceeded, patient, triaged, from around two percent of me to something my own instruments put near eleven. My sleep settled at two hours and did not fall further. The library shelved everything and returned everything and had, as yet, presented no invoice. The inclination came four more times: twice at security equipment, once at a highway merge that would have killed the man in the other car, once, inexplicably then and explicably much later, in the produce aisle of the H Mart, where it turned me gently away from a bin of oranges with a wrongness I obeyed and could not diagnose; a recall notice ran in the county paper nine days after. I taught. I lied. I ate at my mother's. Caduceus, the public project, crossed a whole-organ scaffold milestone and Renata put my name on a patent that has since outlived four legal systems. Terrance and I played racquetball thirty-one more times. He won sixteen. I was managing my wins the way I managed my palm (curated, plausible, maintained) because by 2028 I could have taken every point from him without breathing hard, and the first casualty of my condition, I want it entered, the very first thing it killed, was honest games with my friend.