Daniel Sokolowski

You are standing in a Phoenix kitchen in the dead middle of the night, and the body you have is a plumber's body, and it is a good one. Jacob Feldmann's knees don't complain. His forearms are thick and warm. His beard is patchy and you have stopped noticing it. The refrigerator hums. The tile is cool through his socks. You have been him for less than a minute, and you are holding his phone, and the page is open: the wheel, the little painted wedges, the button.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you would say to anyone who asked. It is only that a minute is long enough to find out where a thing ends, and Jacob ends at the edge of what you already know. There is a hallway behind you with a door in it, and you do not open it. You press the button with his thumb.

Then you are lying on your side in the dark, and the thumb is already moving.

The light is six inches from your eyes, blue on one cheek. The mattress holds you in a slope, hip down, one knee drawn up over the other. Thirty-four years of sleeping on this one side. Your arm is going numb under you and you do not care. You flick the screen. Past a video of a dog, past a message from someone named Maren that he had stopped on, past a bank notification with a small red number. He was reading something. You don't read it. Your thumb goes faster than his did. Your eyes feel dry, because he had not blinked in a while and neither have you.

The sheet is under your palm, cotton gone soft from washing. The memory comes up through it without being asked. A Sunday, Maren laughing at the foot of the bed, a small person between you both, wet-haired from the bath, insisting on being the one to tuck the corner in. His chest goes tight with it. It is not your chest, and it is tight anyway.

The sleeve against your wrist is a cheap thermal, charcoal, gone thin at the cuff. You feel him pull it on in the dark yesterday. Left arm first, always, a habit from the stiff shoulder he got hauling a rack into a cage in a data center in Secaucus. He put it on because the radiator under the window knocks and never warms. He stood with his back to the glass and held the cuffs over his knuckles, rolling the pilled thread between his fingers.

The phone is cold at the edges. Under the glass a thumbprint, his, worn smooth. You get a flash of a server room aisle at four in the afternoon: a rack door open, cables fanned out like a hand of cards, the whole floor roaring. He is good at this. He is proud of it in a way he has never said aloud to anyone. He can feel a bad crimp through the plastic before the tester tells him.

The mustache is a weight on your lip. It is damp where you have been breathing through your mouth. You press your tongue behind your teeth and taste mint and the faint bitterness of a late glass of water. He is not a man who drinks much, one big night once or twice a month, and he is five feet three, which means that every bed he has ever slept in is the right size.

Somewhere below, a door closes and a pipe knocks. Wet street, sodium light behind the curtain. The money worries sit in your sternum like a swallowed stone: a number in an account, small, that he checks the way you check a tooth.

You lift the phone away. You turn your hand over in the blue light. Short fingers, square nails, a callus at the side of the middle finger where he pinches a crimping tool. It is a good, practical hand. You flex it. It obeys.

Then you look up, into the dark where the room is, and say, quietly, "Okay."

It is a word for nobody. The radiator ticks. Your thumb is still resting on the glass, and you do not know yet how long it will be yours.