Danny Kowalczyk

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The clock says 3:12 and it will keep saying that for a while, because you're not looking at it yet. You're looking at his face — the way it's doing nothing, the specific slackness of a person who trusts the room he's in. You've watched this face for eleven minutes on a monitor feed from the observation booth, the way you've watched it for weeks now without him knowing, without anyone knowing, finding reasons to walk past the bar on Smith Street before his shift, ordering seltzer water just to have somewhere to put your eyes.

Then the trace on the screen goes flat, and something in you goes through the flat place like it's a door, and on the other side it races.

His eyes open all at once. Not the way sleep lets go of a person — gradual, blinking, animal. All at once, like a light switch, and you are behind them.

You sit up. The wires come off his chest in your hands — his hands, warm in a way you didn't expect wanting to feel warm — and you pull them off like someone dressed you in a stranger's shirt while you weren't looking. The little sensor pads leave pink circles. Below one of them, script letters curl over his collarbone, a name that isn't yours, a date that isn't yours, someone he loved enough to put under his skin permanently, and you feel a small, ridiculous grief about it before you've even stood up.

The window shows a brownstone stoop varnished in rain and sodium light. Someone else's Brooklyn, and for one day, yours.

A nurse pokes her head in, unbothered, used to sleep-study subjects waking abruptly, confused. "Hey, you're up early. How'd you sleep?"

"Fine," you say, and his voice comes out of you rough and unfamiliar, a stranger's instrument you're already, absurdly, in love with the sound of.

They discharge him — you — by five, paperwork about a device that malfunctioned, an apology, a twenty-dollar gift card to a diner chain, forms you sign with his hand, his handwriting, a signature you didn't know until the pen already knew it.

Outside, the rain has stopped and left the streets looking rinsed. You have his phone. You have his key. You have, God help you, his life for a day, and the small ugly thrill of that is worse than you thought it would be, because you know exactly whose door you're about to knock on.

The bar isn't open yet when you get there, but you have the key to that too. Stools upside down on tables. You go behind the bar and start stocking the well because your hands know how before you do — vodka, gin, the good tequila, muscle memory older than you, borrowed like everything else today. It's steadying, this ordinary competence, counting bottles in a body that isn't yours while sun comes up gray through the front windows.

Your phone — his phone — buzzes. *made it home ok? you left so fast last night.* Signed with a heart. His girlfriend. You look at the name in the contacts like it might tell you something you don't already envy. You type *yeah, all good, weird night* and delete it twice before sending something close enough.

Then another message, older thread, unanswered: his ex. Just one word sent four days ago — *hey.* You don't answer it. You don't know if he would have. That's the cruelty of this, the thing you didn't plan for: you get the hands, the voice, the tattoo over the heart, but not the map of what he's decided to forgive, what he's still deciding.

A regular comes by at noon, leans on the bar though it isn't open, says, "You look tired, man," and you say, "Rough night," and it's the truest thing you'll say all day.

You think about the girlfriend's message all afternoon, the heart at the end of it, and you know — the way you know his hands, only from outside, only from having wanted this exact unremarkable, undramatic person for so long — that tonight you'll go to her, kiss her with his mouth, and it will mean nothing you're allowed to keep.

By evening the bar is loud and full and you are moving through it the way he does, easy, unremarkable, nothing anyone would point to and say *there, that's the thing about him* — because there isn't one, and that was always what undid you. Not a scar. Not a feature. Just a person, doing an ordinary Tuesday with his whole chest.

Somewhere near midnight, pouring a whiskey you don't taste, you feel the flatline coming the way you felt it arrive — a door opening the other direction. You want to leave a note. You want to tell the girlfriend to forgive whatever's off about tonight. You want to text the ex back just that one word, *hey*, so someone answers her.

You do none of it. The trace spikes. You go through the flat place again, this time leaving.

He'll wake up behind the bar with no memory of stocking it, hours gone, his own hands feeling, for a second, like someone else's clothes.