Brian Halloran

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You never learned his name while you were dying. That's the part nobody prepares you for — that you can be sewn into a man's chest and still not know what he goes by. You had eleven days on a ventilator in a room two floors up from his and you didn't know he existed. He didn't know you existed. Somewhere in a hallway a coordinator said *there's a match in Pittsburgh* and that was the whole introduction.

Here is what you had: forty-one years, a bad valve you were born with, a mother who lit candles for you at St. Stanislaus until she died and then a sister who took over the lighting. No wife. No kid. A truck with a bad transmission. You had wanting. You had so much wanting you couldn't lie still for it, and then your heart quit on a Tuesday in a Giant Eagle parking lot, and the wanting was all that was left over, and it went where the heart went.

So: into him.

You come up out of nothing and you are sitting on a hospital bed in a gown the color of a swimming pool, and there's a hand on your chest. His hand. Broad, dry, a workingman's hand on a schoolteacher, the nails cut short. Under it, through the shine of the fresh scar, you feel it going — *your* rhythm, not his, the four-count you carried your whole life, a little quick, a little uneven at the turn. And his breathing catches, stumbles, and then falls in behind it like a man matching stride with someone he can't see.

That's you. That's the moment. Not violence. A shoulder-to-shoulder, and then only one of you walking.

You get his memory the way you'd get a house with the furniture still in it — everything there, nothing yours. Brian Halloran. Thirty-eight. Six foot, average through the middle, brown eyes, hair he still spikes up with gel every morning like it's 2003 and nobody's told him. There's a unit insignia inked on the inside of his left forearm from a stretch in the Guard he doesn't talk about, and a band of pale skin on his ring finger where a ring sat for nine years and then didn't. A girl named Nora, eleven, who lives with her mother in Bloomfield four days out of seven. A ranch house in Brookline with a good roof and a bad furnace. Two hundred-some thousand in retirement, another chunk in a college account with Nora's name on it, all of it so careful it makes you want to lie down. World history, ninth grade, Room 214. Confirmed Catholic, lapsed enough to feel bad about it, unlapsed enough to go at Christmas. Drinks two beers at a cookout and stops. Never smoked, not once, not even to be liked.

And there is an old ex-girlfriend named Rosalie, from before the marriage, who lives in Cleveland and calls him twice a year, and whose name in his head has a whole weather system around it.

Nothing else. Nothing you'd point at in a crowd. He is a man you'd have stood behind in line and never looked up at. That's the joke of it — you spent forty-one years too impatient to sit through a movie, and you land inside the most patient man in Allegheny County.

You learn him the way you learned anything: badly, then well. You keep the gel because Nora would notice. You keep the two beers. You keep going to church because on the third Sunday you sat in the back at St. Pius and the whole building did something to your borrowed ribs and you didn't have a word for it, so you went again. You do not touch the tattoo, ever, if you can help it. It isn't yours. You wear long sleeves in August like a Mormon.

The hard part is Nora. She hugs you at the door and stops halfway, one ear flat against the shirt, and she says: *your heart sounds different.* Eleven years old and dead accurate. You say, buddy, that's the new one, and she says *I know,* and stays there listening longer than a kid should have patience for, and you stand in a doorway in Bloomfield with your dead hands on her back and understand you will spend the rest of this man's life being loved for what he was.

You do it anyway. You are good at it, eventually. You grade papers. You fix the furnace. You call Rosalie back in December and let her talk about her mother's hip for forty minutes and it costs you nothing and it is the kindest thing you have ever done. The money stays where he left it, in careful piles, because he would have wanted that and because you find, to your genuine surprise, that you want it too. There's no way back. There was never a way back. The organ doesn't come out.

And then it's a Thursday in October, last bell gone, Room 214 empty and gold with that four o'clock light Pittsburgh does in the fall, the chairs shoved crooked, chalk dust in the air like something suspended. You are at the front with your hands on the desk. Down the hill past the parking lot there's a set of public stairs that runs between two rows of backyards, concrete, wet leaves plastered to every tread, and you take them home most days because he took them home most days and because from the fourth landing you can see the whole yellow throat of the valley.

You stand there in the empty room and press two fingers to the ridge under your shirt, and feel the beat that got you in, and let your breathing find it. You never learned his name while you were dying.

You know it now. You'll be saying it for forty years.