Andrés Gil Navarro

You are Patrick Dolan, and Patrick Dolan's mop bucket is still sitting in the hall where you left it. The floor is half done. It is the middle of the night in the building, and the fluorescent tubes hum like something that has been waiting for you. You have been him for one minute. The unibrow is the thing you cannot stop feeling, a weight across the forehead. You came back to the page with the wheel on it because of a sound. Down the corridor, a door you had just buffed closed behind a man leaving, and he did not look at you. He looked through the janitor. You knew then that this body was a door people walked past. You paid and spun.

Now there is a ceiling, close, and a lamp's warm light on the right side of your face. You are lying back on a bed with a phone held up in both hands. The screen says IT'S A MATCH, the letters fading. A woman's photo still looks at you from the glass. You swipe, and it does not clear. The screen dims to black, and in the black glass a mouth arrives at a smile that is not yours. You try it once. Then again.

The pillow is packed hard behind your skull, and the sheets smell of detergent and a little of sweat. Under the collar of the dark polo, the air touches ink on your chest. You press your thumb to the phone's edge, and the case gives you a flash that is his, not yours. A coworker, laughing in the lab, says *just download it, man, it's a joke, it's nothing.* You feel his embarrassment, how he shrugged it off and then did it anyway, alone, wanting it.

You pull at the polo's cotton and the morning comes. He stood in the closet in the dark, picking this shirt because it was clean. His fingers did the buttons without his looking. It is the hands that know things here: the right one rises to his scalp and rubs the tight faded side, the stubble rasping, a habit older than the job. In the lab there is a machine half-assembled on a bench, and calipers in his palm cold as a coin, and the quiet pride of a tolerance held to a hair. Then comes the weight of drink, whiskey in a glass on a night like this one, and the Sunday his mother made him kneel in church and he did it, because he still believes. Under all of it is a girl, an old girlfriend, her laugh in a car with the windows down. He still opens her name sometimes and closes it again. Your chest knows that ache better than you do.

The body is long, six-one, with legs that run over the end of the mattress. The shoulders are loose and strong. There is a small ache in the lower back from standing at the bench. A pouch of nicotine sits against the gum, a dull burn. The heat outside presses on the window, thick enough to see.

You lift your hand and turn it over. It is brown, broad, and a little scarred at the knuckle, and it is yours. You look up into the dark glass at the freckled stranger.

"Hello, Andrés," you say, in a voice that is deeper than you expected.

He does not answer, because nothing of him is left to answer. Somewhere the wheel is still turning, and you wonder whether you will wake in him tomorrow.