Adrián Soto

You are standing in a kitchen in Chicago at the hour when the refrigerator is the loudest thing in the house, and the man you are wearing has a glass of water in his hand that he has been holding for some time. Patrick Lindqvist. You have been him for less than a minute. His skinny forearms, his blond stubble, the blue eyes in the dark window over the sink. A foreman's body, built for stairs and rebar, and it works. Nothing is wrong with it. That is the trouble. You stood in his hallway a moment ago, outside the door where his people sleep, and you understood that the house was full of a life that had a shape, and that you were a draft in it. You put your thumb on the phone. The wheel is already turning against the glass, a thing you know the sound of by now. This is the 1084th time. You set the water down on a counter that is not yours, and you do not finish what you were going to say to the dark.

You pay. You spin.

Then the floor is gone and there is a mattress under your whole front, and breath scraping in and out of a chest that is full of gravel. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet. One arm hangs off the bed, heavy, the fingers asleep. Your breath is ragged and then, in a single pull, it is even. You draw the arm up. The body rolls over onto its back, and the hands fold themselves at the chest, a way he has never once slept. They lie there like a stranger's at a wake.

The sheet is under your palms, worn thin, and it gives you a flash. A hand on the other side of the bed, patting flat cotton, and the feeling of a bed that stopped being shared weeks ago and the habit of reaching anyway. Not a wife's absence. A decision, and the guilt of the decision.

The gray T-shirt is damp at the collar. It gives you the morning, the one before this, the long hours: the left sleeve first, because the right shoulder aches, then the hoodie over it, the wet-cold of rubber boots stepped into by the door. You feel him love the boots. They are the one thing that keeps his socks dry.

Your hand comes up to your face without being asked. It rubs the beard along the jaw, then the bridge of the nose, and the bump in it, where something once met it hard. A fence post, a boy named Chuy, thirteen years old, a summer on a street of marble steps. The pain was white and then funny, and his mother wept and laughed in the same breath. You feel the nose and you feel her.

The wedding band is cool and loose against the knuckle. You turn it with your thumb. A church, a hot day, a veil caught in a car door. Then a smaller thing: a girl asleep on his chest, a child, one, her whole weight like warm bread, and he did not move for two hours because he could not bear to. Under it, quieter, something that is not the wife. A recent ex, a name that stays just outside the light, a phone he keeps face-down. You do not get the name. You get the shame of how his heart still turns.

The pill bottles on the nightstand tick against each other as the bed settles. Money, then. A number that sits in him like a stone, the exact figure he is underwater by, and the way he says it only to the ceiling. The knees ache. The back is strong, a back that has bent over ten thousand fenders with a towel. The green eyes open into the dark and they are yours.

You lift your right hand into the streetlight and look at it. The knuckles are chapped, the nails clean at the edges and stained at the roots. A hand that knows what a chamois weighs. You turn it over. The palm is creased and cracked and warm, and it is not yours.

You look up, and you say it to the ceiling, to the gap in the curtain, to whatever is listening in a body you have not yet finished arriving in:

"Okay, Adrián. Show me."

Somewhere under the question there is already another one, and it will not stay quiet. How long does the wanting take to come back. Whether you are still him tomorrow.