Daniel Pak

You are standing in Kevin Brennan's kitchen in Philadelphia, and the only thing wrong with him is that he works. Thirty-two years old, shoulders like a closed door, a knee that has never once complained. You have been him for less than a minute. The coffee he made is still too hot to drink. His phone lies face-up on the counter and you do not pick it up, because you do not want what is in it: the schedule, the sister, the name of the manager who says "buddy." You rub the stubble on his jaw. It is a good jaw. It is wasted on a man who is only a good body, and you are already tired of being easy to please.

What sent you back was small. The mirror by the door showed you smiling at yourself, and the smile came from him, effortless, and you could not tell whether you had done it. A body that gives you everything and asks nothing starts to feel like a room with no walls. You want one with some weight in it. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Cold. Your breath comes out in front of you, white, and the ground is hitting your foot before you have decided to be on it. Mid-stride. One step lands wrong and does not fall, and the other foot takes it, arms dropping low, and you are running along a canal with the sky the color of a bruise going blue. A watch buzzes against your wrist. Mile four. A split you never ran.

Then the body starts telling you what it is. Lungs scraped raw, a pack a day at work in them, a rasp under every breath. Forty-six years in the hips and the left calf. Short legs, steady. The earbud in one ear is playing something you did not choose, a man's voice reading slowly in Arabic. The recitation comes up through the bone behind your ear, and with it a morning: a hallway, a small rug unrolled before it was light, his knees remembering the floor. He did that an hour ago. His forehead still knows it.

The jacket drags at your shoulders, fleece gone hard at the cuffs, and the zipper pull taps your chin. Under it, memory. He bought it at a farm store in March, the year the wheat failed, standing in line behind a man who owed him a favor and would not mention it. Then the shirt he is not wearing, the light blue one hanging on the door at home, the tie his wife straightens without looking, saying his name the way you say the name of something you have kept. Two children asleep down the hall. He stood in their doorway this morning with the hall light behind him, and the loving of it comes up through your chest so suddenly you almost stop.

Your right hand wants something. The fingers curl and click, click, against nothing, a pen that is not there, a habit that has counted a thousand pallets in a thousand aisles before the store opens. Store manager. The keys on his belt loop in the dark at home, waiting. The cigarettes in the jacket's zipped pocket: you feel their flat weight against your ribs and your mouth knows the first drag before you do. Under all of it sits a woman from before, a girl in a car in a different town, rain on the windshield. He never told anyone how often he thinks of her, and the memory sits there in him as quiet and small as a coin.

Money is thin. You feel that too, a dull habit of arithmetic behind his eyes. The soles of his shoes are nearly through and the gravel hits you in the heel with every step.

Ahead, the horizon is going yellow along the bottom. The thin steam off the water drifts between you and the light.

You slow. You stop, breathing hard, and lift your left hand. A plain gold band. A mole you can feel on your cheek when you frown. You turn the hand over, palm up, and it is not yours, and then it is.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and rough, with a Kansas flatness in it you did not expect. "Okay. You."

The watch buzzes again, asking you something. You do not know how long this one will let you keep him.