Curtis Lindahl

You are standing in a kitchen in Queens with a cold coffee, and you are still the manager. Sixty-one, five-five, silver at the temples, and you have been him for less than a minute. You haven't put the mug down. The apartment is quiet and his keys are on the hook, and none of it is anything you want. You wanted him for the minute it took to learn he was fine. He is fine. He has a lanyard, a Tuesday, a boss who says "circle back." That's the trouble. You came out of the site with a body that worked and you stood in it and felt nothing move. So you set the mug down, open the page, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the kitchen is gone, with no hallway and no breath between.

Dark. A mattress is pushing up against your whole front. Your face is in a pillow that smells of someone else's hair and your own sweat, and your breathing is ragged, catching, then it evens out, one breath, as if a hand had smoothed it. Your left arm hangs off the edge of the bed. You draw it up. You roll onto your back and fold your hands on your chest like a man laid out, and some small part of the body objects, because it has never once slept this way.

Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains, one blade of it across the sheet. The room is warm and thick. An air conditioner ticks somewhere in the wall, and it's Houston, you can tell by the weight of the air alone.

The sheet is tangled around one ankle, cotton gone soft. It gives you a night in August with the window unit dead, a woman's voice laughing in the dark, "you snore like a Buick," and a warmth in your chest that was never yours. A wife. It gives you the shape of her back as a place to put his forehead.

The black T-shirt is thin at the collar. You remember him pulling it from a drawer without looking, because it was the one that didn't itch. Shoulder, shoulder, head, a tug at the hem. His whole day lives in that cotton, the oil he never fully scrubs from his cuticles, the shop radio, a transmission on the floor like a dead animal, rag in the back pocket. Under your fingertips the fabric at your sternum has gone stiff in one spot, and a flash comes with it: a rattle can, a Saturday, his father's garage and a father who said "measure twice" and never once said anything kinder.

The ring is cool and a little tight on the knuckle. You turn it with your thumb and it opens something small and private, a church basement, folding chairs, bad coffee, the plain gold chosen over the fancier one because she said she'd never take it off. Mainline, a hymnal with a cracked spine, singing without feeling it and then, once, feeling it.

His body: you are taller by half a foot, soft through the middle, thin in the arms, a man who lifts engines but doesn't run. His lower back has a dull ache that's a decade old. His mouth tastes of last night's beer and, faintly, a cigarette. On the nights he drinks, he smokes, and he promises himself it's the last. Your right hand is already moving by itself, thumb and finger working at nothing, a lighter's flick that isn't there, a habit his fingers keep without him. The bedside table is out of reach, but the hand knows where the lighter lives.

An old girlfriend turns up out of the sheet's smell, uninvited and brief: a car, rain, a sentence he never finished. He has never told his wife. The feeling is a bruise he presses on once a year.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Short blunt nails, a tattoo of script on the forearm, a name and a date, the ring. You turn the hand over. The palm is rough, and it's yours, and it's his.

You look up, at nothing, at the ceiling and then past it.

"Well," you say, in a voice that comes out lower than you planned. "Hello, Curtis."

The wanting is already there, quiet, under the ribs. You wonder how long this one lasts, and when it starts again.