Curtis Lanning

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The rain comes in sideways at that hour, before the city has decided to be loud. It comes across the open side of the landing and lands in a long dark stripe on the concrete, and he stands just inside the dry part with his boots on the wet edge anyway, because he isn't thinking about his feet. There's a bulb screwed into the wall by the door, still burning, orange and pointless against a sky gone the colour of skimmed milk. Somebody put a convex traffic mirror on a pole at the end of the landing years ago, to see round the corner of the stairwell, and nobody has ever taken it down. It has beads of water on it. In it the bulb is a small hot dot and the whole landing is a curved room, and a man is a smear in the middle of the curve.

You have been waiting outside a body for a long time. You don't remember whose you had before, only the wanting, which is the part that survives. You've never seen this man before in your life. That is the whole of your relationship with him: he is a stranger, and in a moment he will be a house.

Here is what you learn about him in the first four hours, the way you learn a room in the dark, by hitting things.

His name is Curtis Lanning. Thirty-six. He drives, and he has driven since he was twenty-one, and the driving is not here — the driving is on long flat American roads that come up unbidden whenever his hands settle on anything round. His hands do that even now, at the rail, curling. The first time he sees a truck stop in his own memory it comes with light: first light, low and sideways, the rig beside him bleeding heat off its hood into cold air, coffee that tastes like the cup, the sky doing that thing it does over asphalt where it goes green before it goes blue. That is his happiest place and he has never once said so out loud, because who would you say it to.

He is five foot nine and there is nothing to him. Not fat, not fit. The build of a man whose exercise is climbing in and out of a cab and eating what's near. Short light brown hair under the cap; take the cap off and the hair is flattened into a ring. Small studs in both earlobes, older than his marriage, from a year he doesn't talk about. A plain gold band on the left hand, thin, scratched dull. Brown eyes, and nothing in particular about the face — I looked, before I came in. There was nothing to hold on to. No scar, no crook in the nose, no distinguishing anything. A man you would not describe. That is a kind of gift, for me.

The wife's name comes up before her face does. She is aslebehind the door, behind the frosted glass, and the flat is two rooms and a kitchen corner and the rent is a marvel to him even now. They came here for her work. He never explains it properly to people back home; he says *she got a job out there* and they say *out where* and he says *India* and then there's a silence he has learned to fill with something about the roads. He hasn't got a rig here. He gets driving work, sometimes, contract stuff, freight down the coast, and it is not the same and he does not say that either.

And under all of it, in the place where a man keeps the thing he doesn't move, there is a woman who is not his wife. Her name arrives with a smell — cigarettes and a car heater. She got away. That's how he has it filed: not that he lost her, not that she left, but that she *got away*, like she was clever and he was slow. He does not think about her often. He thinks about her at first light, at truck stops, and he has never known why, and now I know why, because I'm in here and I can see the wires: she is filed in the same drawer as the coffee and the low sun and the cold. Every good morning of his life is a room she's not in.

No children. It was discussed. It stopped being discussed.

That is a whole man. That is everything he is, laid out in four hours, and it took him thirty-six years to accumulate it and it fits in a pocket.

The moment itself is nothing. He comes out onto the landing because he always does, first thing, to look at weather he can't drive in. Nothing in his hands. Nothing behind him but the mirror on its pole. The rain gets his boots. He opens his mouth to yawn, and it's a real one, a big ugly involuntary one that pulls his eyebrows up and shows his back teeth, and one hand comes up loose in front of his chest the way a man's hand does when the rest of him is busy.

I go in on the yawn.

He finishes it. That's the thing I didn't expect — the body just keeps going, it doesn't care who's steering, it completes the motion it started. The jaw comes down. The hand goes up the rest of the way and the knuckle digs into the eye and rubs, hard, twice, because that is what he was going to do next and I let it happen. Then I stop. Hand still up. Fingers spread against nothing. I hold it there because I am counting, in a body, for the first time in however long: heart, lungs, the wet cold at the ankles, the ring's small weight on the fourth finger, the two little studs like grains of sand in the ears, the ache in the lower back that he has had since he was thirty-one and has stopped noticing.

The hand comes down.

And I look at the mirror. Straight at it, no hesitation, because it is the only mirror and I want to see what I have got. The convex glass gives me a small wide stranger at the end of a curved corridor: cap, plaid, jeans, ordinary shoulders, a face I could not have picked out of two men. Water beads sit across it, so he's dotted, broken up. I turn my head, and the reflection swings hugely, and I keep turning it further than a man turns his head to check a mirror, until the neck complains.

Behind the frosted glass, the wife says his name. Twice — once questioning, once flat.

There is a year of this. I don't know that yet, not as a number; I only know the taste of a long lease, the way you know a house is furnished before you switch the light on. What I know is that I have hands, and rain on them, and thirty-six years of a man in a pocket.

I answer her in his voice. It comes out too careful, and I hear it, and I fix it on the second word.

Later — weeks in — I will find his phone and I will find her, the one who got away, still in the contacts under a first name only, no photo, not called in eleven years. I will look at that name for a long time on a hot afternoon with the fan going. And I will not press it, and I will not be able to tell you whether that is his mercy or mine, because by then we are not neatly separate; by then his hands are curling at every round thing and I am the one letting them.

But that first morning I only stand on the wet edge of the landing and look at the mirror and think: *nothing in particular about him.*

Good. Then nobody will notice when it stops being him.