Austin Wheatley

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You know the smell of him before you know anything else. You have lived across a hallway from that smell for fourteen months — spearmint, cheap deodorant, the sour green of grass-stained polyester that never fully dries in a house with one window unit. You know the sound of his cleats in the entryway at nine-forty every night. You know he chews gum in his sleep, that he clicks it against his teeth when he's reading something he doesn't like, that the gap between his front teeth whistles a little on words with *s* in them, which is why he says *sure* instead of *yes*.

You know the number, too. The one on the folded thing on the counter, weighted down with the ashtray he keeps even though he quit two years ago. Somewhere north of twenty-five thousand and shy of a hundred. He never let you see the total. He didn't have to. You watched him do the arithmetic with his lips moving.

That's how the flyer got into the house. Paid subject, one session, no follow-up required, compensation on completion. He read it out loud at the kitchen table with his mouth full of ice, and you said *that's insane, Austin*, and he said *sure*, and laughed, and the gap showed, and he chewed.

The building's an hour out. You know the road — gravel that pings the undercarriage, barbed wire running the fence line like a stitch, and that water tower standing on the horizon the way it's stood since before either of you were born, patient as a tooth. He drove himself. He didn't know you were coming. You are not a thing that needs a ride.

You watch him sign it. That's the last minute of his life and he spends it on paperwork, bent over a folding table in a room that smells like cold oil, one hip cocked, the pen a little too far up in his fingers the way men who don't write much hold a pen. Light comes through the tall factory window in a flat grey slab and lands on the back of his neck. Behind him the machine turns over — belts, wheels the size of a truck tire, that low hum that goes into your teeth. His shirt is soaked through under the arms and down the spine from practice; he came straight here. His sleeve rides up over the script on his upper arm, a name and a date he's never once explained to you, though you've read it upside down from the couch a hundred times.

He works his gum. Signature. Date. He looks up at the tech and says something you can't hear and you know exactly what his face is doing because you've been across the table from that face at breakfast for over a year: the small apologetic smile, the gap, the eyebrows up like a boy asking whether he did the form right.

He sits into the cradle. The ring comes down over his forehead. And the hum climbs into a note you can feel in your empty hands, and then—

His face goes slack. Nobody's there for one long second. The mouth loose, the eyes half open on nothing.

Then you are behind it.

*Oh.*

It arrives all at once, all of it. The wet cotton shirt cooling on your back. The knuckle-throb in the right hand from a ball that hit it wrong at practice this afternoon. The gum, a dead grey wad flattened against your molars, and your tongue moving it without being asked. And low down, quieter than pain but underneath everything, a flat grey weather you recognise from the way he'd sit on the porch not drinking his second beer — the thing he takes a pill for every morning at seven with orange juice. You have that now too. You didn't ask for it. You take it. You take all of it.

Your tongue finds the gap and pushes at it, the little whistling doorway in the front of your own head.

You lift the hands. Look at them. Wide flat working hands with a thin white line of chalk still in the creases, and they turn when you turn them, and the second finger twitches when you think *twitch*, and it is the most obscene and ordinary thing that has ever happened.

Someone is talking to you. Sir? Sir, can you say your name?

"Austin Wheatley," you say, and the *s* whistles, and something in you goes hot with pleasure at the sound. You stand up out of the cradle. Your knees are twenty-four. Your back is twenty-four. You are five foot eleven and soft in the middle and nobody has ever asked this body to be beautiful, and you don't care, you never cared about beautiful, you cared about *here*.

They give you the envelope. You sign for it with a signature you have watched a hundred times on rent checks and it comes out of the hand right, easier than out of a hand of your own ever came.

Driving back down the gravel, windows open, wire flickering past, water tower swinging slow around the windshield. The radio's on something with a fiddle in it. There is nothing behind your eyes but you and your wanting, and nowhere to go back to, and no term on it, and you are already thinking about the house — the hallway with two doors, one of which does not need to be opened by anyone ever again.

You will pay the debt. That's the first thing. Twenty-five, forty, whatever the folded paper says under the ashtray. You'll pay it off in his name because it's your name now, and there is something almost tender in that, in inheriting a man's arithmetic along with his teeth.

At a stop sign nobody has ever needed, you check the mirror. You practise it. The apologetic smile, the eyebrows up.

The gap shows. It's yours.

You reach into the pocket of the jeans and there's a foil sleeve in there, three left, and you fold a new one into your mouth and start chewing without deciding to.