Brandon Keith Sorensen

You are standing in a hallway in Queens, in the body of a man who has been yours for less than a minute, and you are already tired of how well he works. Thirty-four, athletic, a good clean engine. The airman's knees don't hurt. His lungs take the cold morning like water. It is not what is wrong with him. What is wrong is that you came out of the last spin with a pocket full of his things and a phone that would not stop, a woman's voice on it asking where he was, and you could not answer in his voice without hearing that it wasn't. You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks over its last notch and the hallway is gone.

Fluorescent light, flat and cold. You are standing, mid-motion, and your right hand is on a mouse, and your left is rising to your chin. There is a thin plastic arm against your cheek, a voice in your ear saying *yes, I understand*, and the voice is yours, or his. The click you just made was wrong. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, on something he has done so many times that his thumb knows it in the dark.

The hoodie comes first. Its cuffs are worn soft, and the fabric at your wrists gives you a morning: a closet door, a gray sweatshirt pulled from a hook because the building runs cold, a wife's voice from the bed, *take the other one, that one's got a hole*, and his small stubborn pleasure in wearing it anyway. You feel the sleeve go over the hand with the ring. Under it, a blue T-shirt that smells faintly of detergent and fry oil. Jeans, stiff at the knee. Brown shoes he resoles instead of replacing.

The lanyard swings. Its card is cool against your sternum, and touching it opens a whole afternoon: a parking lot at dusk, the heat standing in the air like a wall, his daughter small in the back seat, asleep, and him sitting with the engine off for four minutes because he cannot make himself go in and be tired in front of anyone. Four minutes. You know that number the way you know your own.

Your fingers reach your mouth. The thumbnail is already ragged, and the teeth know the angle. It is his oldest habit. Sixth grade, a church basement, somebody's funeral, his mother's hand closing over his to make him stop. It never stopped.

The neck. The portrait inked under your jaw throbs faintly when you swallow: a face, black and gray, a man in his thirties, and the grief comes up in you like a swallowed stone. His brother. Not yours, not even a feeling you are entitled to, but it is the warmest thing in the building, and you hold still inside it. On the back of the hand, the bird with its wings spread. A girl before the wife, a name he does not say. She still matters. You feel him not texting her.

He prays. Five times, even here; there is a rug folded in the trunk of a car outside, and his forehead remembers the carpet. He has never had a drink. His body is soft in the middle and heavy in the shoulders, forty-eight years of sitting. His lower back aches in one exact place. The nose, broken once and set a little off, whistles faintly on the in-breath. The hairline has retreated into two bays above his temples, and the beard under your fingers is thick and warm and coarse.

The voice in your ear says, *Sir? Are you still there?*

You lower your hand from your mouth and turn it over. The ring catches the light. The bird lifts its wings. Then you raise your eyes and say, quiet, to nobody:

"I'm still here."

You wonder how long that stays true, and what will come back to you, wanting, before he is old news.