Sena had not come to make a wish. She was seventy-eight. She had made eleven.
The counselor was thirty-one or thirty-two, young enough that the audit process was still mostly procedural to her, old enough to be careful with it. The office was on the fourth floor of a building that had previously been something else. There were plants on the window sill that looked recently watered.
"Standard audit begins with the first wish, " the counselor said. "Whenever you're ready."
The first wish: Sena had been twenty-six, a graduate student, and she had wished for a visa result. The mechanism had produced the result and taken, she was fairly certain, some capacity for geographical flexibility. She had lived in the same city ever since. This had turned out not to matter.
She worked through the seven she understood. Seven wishes with legible outcomes and legible costs. The counselor recorded them without expression, which Sena found correct.
"And the remaining four, " Sena said.
"Whenever you're ready."
The first of the four: she had been forty-one and had made a wish about her mother's illness. Her mother had recovered. Sena had no clear sense of what the mechanism had taken. Only that something involving duration had changed, her relationship to long stretches of waiting, which had once been uncomfortable and was now simply dull. Whether this was a loss or an accommodation she had never been able to determine.
The second: she had been fifty-three. She could not now remember what she had wished for, only the date, which she had written down, and the general sense that it had been granted. The absence was a texture she noticed in certain kinds of conversations. She could participate, but something that had been present was no longer present. Like a tooth socket, she said. You know something was there.
"That language comes up often, " the counselor said.
The third and fourth: similar. Shapes of subtraction she could feel the outline of but not name.
"Is there anything you still want?" the counselor asked.
Sena looked out at the building across the street. A man was crossing the courtyard below with a bag. He paused to check something on his phone and then kept walking.
"Yes, " she said. "Forty more years."
The counselor waited.
"It isn't something the mechanism can produce."
"No, " the counselor said.
"I'll think about it, " Sena said. This was not quite true. She stood. The counselor moved to help her with her coat, which she didn't need, but she accepted the assistance. She buttoned it from the bottom, which was a habit she had carried since childhood for no reason that had ever become clear to her, and went out into the street.