Daniel Wesley Hartigan

I am sixty-five and my knees are telling me about the stairs. Calvin Merriweather's freckled hands are on a mug of coffee in a kitchen in Nashville, the afternoon coming flat through the blinds, and I have been him for less than a minute.

I know already that it's not him I'm tired of. His beard itches. His reading glasses sit on a head that feels like a well-kept room. Everything in him works, and nothing in him wants anything. That is the trouble. I sit in the quiet with the wheel open on his laptop, and the wanting comes up from underneath like water through a floor. Somewhere a man is at the foot of a bed. Somewhere it's still the middle of the day. I pay. I spin.

The arrival has no door. One second the mug, then a cold floor of carpet under sock feet, a window full of white light, and my hand flat on my chest. Ribs under cotton. A heartbeat that isn't mine, a little fast, a little tired. Forty years in it. The shirt is buttoned wrong by one, and my fingers are already moving to fix it before I've decided anything.

The buttons go, then come back up in order. The tie hangs at my collar. My hands take it and tie it in a way I don't know, a quick fold, a pull, a dimple. Then the cloth under my fingertips opens something.

The silk is cool, and I'm in a hallway of a house with a turquoise door. A woman's voice says, you always did it like your father, and the knot is his father's, learned at fourteen at a kitchen table, the tie too long, a man's big hands over his. The feeling is shame turned into pride, and it's his, not mine. Then it's gone.

The shirt is stiff on my back, starched at the shoulders. Sleeve by sleeve I know this morning: the iron ticking on the board, the radio low, the numbers on a bank statement he refused to read twice. Twenty-five thousand, fifty, seventy, a debt like weather over the house. The loan on the flight school he's still paying. He ironed anyway, slowly, because the uniform is the one thing in his life that's paid for and fits.

My left ear stings faintly and I lift my fingers to it: a small silver hoop. Memory, warm and stupid. A woman laughing in a parking lot, her thumb on his earlobe, the hole done on a dare years ago. His ex. He kept the hoop. I touch my face again, and again, and understand it's his habit, hand to jaw, to the smooth shaved skin, checking that he's still there.

The carpet is rough and the room smells of dust and hot sun on paint. Cold in my arches, a dull ache in the lower back from long cockpit hours, strong thighs, a flat steady stomach. I'm tall in a way I don't have to think about. I feel the shape of a yoke in these palms, the grip, the small trims. Out the window the desert is the color of bone. He believes in something, not a church. Something in the sky when it goes quiet at altitude. I feel it as a hush, and it unsettles me, because I have never felt it before.

I look down at my hands. I turn them over. They are unfamiliar, and they are mine.

I lift my eyes to the window and say, "Well. Hello, Captain."

How long is this one? Until the wanting comes back. It's quiet in him now. I listen for it anyway.