MAREN CROSS adjusted the blinds in Conference Room B before anyone else arrived.
She did this every Tuesday. The slats needed to angle upward, catching the light at the ceiling and diffusing it across the room so that no one sat in direct sun, so the fluorescents did the real work. She’d learned this in March, when the sunlight had turned Priya Okonwo’s fading forearms into something the whole room couldn’t stop watching: the visible bones, tendons moving like puppet strings, and Priya’s voice going thin as she realized where everyone was looking.
The silence that followed had lasted four seconds. Four seconds of a room full of professionals staring at the inside of a colleague’s arm, then everyone looking away in unison, and the meeting continuing as if the quiet hadn’t happened.
So Maren fixed the blinds. She fixed things. That was the job.
The nonprofit occupied the fourth floor of a converted warehouse on Hennepin Avenue. OpenGrid, six years old and founded on the precept that public institutions should be an open book to the masses. Glass-walled offices. Public-facing calendars. Meeting minutes posted within the hour.
Little did Maren know how viral and how terrifying the term transparency would become.
Their building certainly still revealed its secrets. It smelled like the warehouse underneath the coffee and the carpet. Brick and old lumber, the mineral tinge of a place built to hold grain now holding notions of accountability. Maren had designed the space herself, had insisted on the glass, and had written the transparency clause into the lease. Every wall said: We have nothing to hide. She had believed this. She still believed it. Belief and habit had fused somewhere and she no longer cared which one was doing the work.
Maren’s office sat at the northwest corner where the morning light was weakest. Glass on three sides, a whiteboard on the fourth. This hadn’t been the plan when she chose it. She’d picked it for the view of the river, the way it caught the sunset in the evenings when she worked late. But the weak morning light had become useful in the past two months. She hadn’t moved and she hadn’t explained why.
Maren set her bag on the desk, pulled out her laptop, and pressed her palms against the surface while the screen loaded. The wood was cool under her fingers. Under the skin of her left hand, which had gone the color of wax paper in certain light, she could see the grain of the desk. Not clearly. Not yet. But the shadow of it, the suggestion. As if her hand were becoming breath on a window.
Maren pulled her sleeves down. This was a gesture she performed now eight or nine times an hour, so practiced it no longer registered as a decision. The cuffs of the slate blue blouse, high-collared, a style she’d never worn before January, settled at the base of her thumbs.
The staff meeting was at nine. Seven people around the table, four of them faded enough that it showed, two barely affected, one—Derek, the new communications director—fully solid in a way that made him conspicuous while everyone pretended it didn’t. There was a social contract now about these things. You didn’t stare. You didn’t measure. You didn’t compare your transparency to the person across the table the way you might once have compared clothes or watches or the quality of someone’s skin. You looked at faces. What remained of faces. And you talked about work. Maren talked about work.
“COUNCIL SESSION THURSDAY,” Maren said, and the room oriented toward her voice. This happened reliably. Her voice hadn’t changed. Still the same register that had filled auditoriums, that had made city officials shift in their chairs, that a Star Tribune profile had once called “the kind of voice that makes you feel like you’ve been caught.” She still had that.
“Hennepin County’s withholding the facilities audit. Again,” Maren said. “Dara, where are we on the records request?”
Dara Chen was sixty percent faded, maybe more, and wore a green silk scarf that was not a fashion choice but a point of reference, something for the eyes to fix on when the head and neck became difficult to track. Maren still noticed how people managed their visibility, the way an alcoholic notices what everyone at the table is drinking.
“They’re stalling on page counts,” Dara said. “Claiming the volume makes the timeline unreasonable.”
“Please, it’s only two years of inspection reports. They figured out how to write them,” Maren said. “Surely they can figure out how to release them.”
The room shifted. A half-laugh from Tomás in the corner, Derek nodding.
Maren lingered for affect, but without emotion. Then she moved through the agenda. Funding. Outreach. The gala in June, whether it was still appropriate to hold a gala, given that over half the attendees were partially or entirely invisible. Since the onset of the Fading, logistics of formal events had become exponentially harder when you couldn’t reliably see who you were talking to.
The last gala Maren attended had devolved into a two-hour exercise in clumsy confusion. The event planners had since started requiring name tags with audio chips that announced the wearer’s name when touched.
Maren had an opinion about this. She had opinions about everything. Her sentiments were well-structured, evidence-based, and delivered with the confidence of someone who had spent fifteen years being right about public transparency and saw no reason to stop being right now that transparency had become a little too literal.
“We hold the gala,” Maren said. “The whole point is we don’t retreat. That’s the brand.”
The brand. Maren used that word now — had started using it in the past year, when Open Grid’s mission had collided with a world where transparency was no longer metaphorical but physical, where the thing she’d spent her career demanding of institutions was happening to human bodies without anyone’s consent. Open Grid’s relevance had exploded. Speaking requests had tripled. Donations surged from people who heard “transparency nonprofit” and felt that someone, somewhere, was working on the Fading itself.
Maren was not and never claimed to be, but the confusion was useful and she hadn’t corrected it as firmly as she could have.
The meeting ended. People dispersed into the glass offices, visible to each other through the walls Maren had insisted on, doing the work of transparency while their bodies slowly undermined the concept.
Maren stood at the whiteboard in her office and wrote the words COUNCIL PREP in block letters with a blue marker. The marker felt slightly wrong in her hand, too loose, as if her grip had lost a little of its certainty. She squeezed harder and wrote the date, and moved on.
Maren’s phone buzzed.
Nadia: did you transfer grocery $
Maren looked at the text. The screen was sharp. Her vision was fine, whatever the news kept saying about the Fading and eyesight. The words on the screen were perfectly legible and completely insufficient as a representation of her daughter.
Maren: Done. Sorry.
Nadia: k
Maren set the phone down. She had sixteen things to do before Thursday. She pulled the laptop closer, opened the facilities audit file, and began to read. The hands on the keyboard were the hands of a woman who was disappearing. She did not look at them.
BY NOON the light in Maren’s office had pivoted. The river threw reflections onto the ceiling that crawled like something breathing. She closed the blinds on the east wall. She was closing blinds more often now, in more rooms, a slow territorial retreat measured in slats and angles.
Through the window Maren could see the construction crew on the Hennepin Avenue bridge, installing tactile railings. They’d been at it for a week. Half the crew was faded enough that they looked like hard hats and safety vests operating tools by themselves, and the effect from the fourth floor was surreal and ordinary at the same time, which was what everything was now.
Maren ate a salad at her desk. And answered eleven emails. And did not think about her hands.
MAREN thought about her hands.
The way you think about a noise you’re pretending not to hear. Constantly, peripherally, with an alertness that takes more energy than normal listening would.
Maren’s left hand was worse than her right. The Fading had started there, in the fingers, working in from the tips like frost from the edges of a window. Her fingernails were the last solid thing, pale, ordinary, ten small leaves at the end of ten
vanishing stems. She could see the tendons when she flexed. Not the bones. Not yet. But the form beneath the skin was emerging, as though she was unveiling her true self.
Maren wore the sleeves. She wore the high collar. She kept the lights warm, not cool, because warm light forgave. She arrived at the office before everyone else, not out of devotion, though she let people read it that way, but because the early light was dimmest and she could settle into her space before anyone saw her settling. She left after everyone else for the same reason. Her days were bookended by management: light, fabric, the distance between her body and other people’s attention.
None of this was seen by Maren’s staff. What was visible was a woman working harder than ever, showing up earlier, staying later.
When the city council chair returned Maren’s call within the hour, he spoke to her with the respect of one who had learned the cost of ignoring Maren Cross. She heard it in his voice. She’d built that. Fifteen years of making
people uncomfortable until they changed. That discomfort had outlasted her body’s willingness to stay solid.
She caught the edge of her reflection in the glass wall as she hung up. It was thin. Not the reflection—her. The glass gave back less of her every week.
She looked away.
At four o’clock she called Greenridge. The call was ritual.
Tuesday: office, meeting, work, call Greenridge, go home.
Wednesday: visit Greenridge.
Thursday: council session or board meeting or press interview or whatever the week requires.
Friday: the same as Tuesday, minus the Greenridge call.
The ritual was the frame that held the days. Without it, Maren was sure the days would collapse.
Maren called Greenridge because it was four o’clock on a Tuesday and that was what four o’clock on a Tuesday meant. She went to the office because that’s where she went. She ate the salad because that’s what she ate. Her desire had drained out of the routine year two of the divorce, or somewhere around year three of the nonprofit, or the year after David died.
Or some combination of them.
What was left was a woman who steadied herself on the balance beam of her schedule.
“Just checking on my mom,” Maren said.
“Ms. Cross had a good afternoon,” said Marcus. He was June’s favorite aide, or the aide
June resisted least, which in dementia was the same thing. He called her Ms. Cross. He was the only one who did. “Ate lunch. Most of it. Walked the hall twice. She’s in the common room now.”
“Is she wearing the shawl?”
A pause. “She pulled it off about an hour ago. I put it back.”
“She hates it.”
“She does. But it’s hard to tell who’s who from across the room without it.”
Maren closed her eyes. The orange shawl. A Greenridge solution to a Greenridge problem.
In the common room, half a dozen residents sat in chairs, all of them faded, all of them wearing clothes that stayed visible while the bodies inside did not. A gray cardigan in one chair looked like a gray cardigan in another. The shawl cut through the problem: bright, unmistakable, the one piece of fabric in the room that meant this is June Cross.
She hated it.
On bad days she didn’t understand what it was. On medium days she only understood that something was on her shoulders that she didn’t choose. But the woman who spent seventy-four years choosing her own clothes believing that every outfit was a statement, that woman hated it.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Maren said.
“She’d like that.”
Whether her mother would like or remember five minutes after Maren left, was a question Marcus answered the same way every time: with the present tense, and certainty, as though gratitude was constant even when memory was not.
Maren hung up. She looked at the river through the blinds she’d angled to keep the light out. The light came through anyway. Thin bright lines across her desk. Across her hands.
Maren pulled her sleeves down. She opened the next email. She closed the next email. She sat in the glass office with the weak light and the river and the sixteen things she needed to do before Thursday. Then she pushed both sleeves up to the elbow.
Everyone had gone home. Maren was alone with the brick smell and the humming lights. She held her arms out in front of her and saw what no one else had seen. Her left hand. This morning it was the hue of wax paper. Only a hint of the wooden desk through her palm. Now, she could clearly see the lines of grain. And Her wrist was starting to go.
It was accelerating.
THE SEEN & THE GONE
New Chapter Every Wednesday
Nicely envisioned. Spread with metaphor of an uncomfortable future, locked into routines, and losing identities.