Declan Mercer

You are standing at a window in Boston, in the middle of a Tuesday morning, and the man you are wearing has a bad knee. He has had it since a stair in 1998. It talks to you every time you shift your weight. His nose whistles on the left side where it was broken. His reading glasses are pushed up into his hair, and a stack of ungraded midterms waits on the sill. You have been Andre Fontaine for under a minute. You have only just learned that his wife leaves the radiator on too high.

You do not know the name of what sends you back. It is small. He is a good body and he does not fit. When you reached for a word on the shelf in front of you, nothing of his came. When you stood to teach, nothing came. You are wearing a man who is full of rooms you cannot open. You close the laptop, pay, and spin.

The board clicks to forty-eight.

His knee stops on the click, and you are in it. There is a light humming overhead. The seat is cold perforated steel through the jacket, and the paper cup is in your fingers, water gone warm. You set it down square. You fold your hands. Someone says a name, his name, and the sound slides past you like a car on another street. You do not look up.

The first thing is the jacket. Your shoulders settle into canvas worn soft, and a morning surfaces, his and not yours. It is the closet door, the sleeve caught on the hanger, the left arm going in first because the left shoulder is the stiff one. He chose this one over the nicer jacket. He didn't want to look like he was trying. He had an interview he no longer believed in, and the lining was cool against his wrists.

Then the shirt under it, thin cotton against your ribs. He ran out of clean ones and wore the olive one twice. It smells faintly of dryer sheets and of his own skin.

Then your hands on your knees. They are the hands of a man who has been waiting hard. The ink on the forearms makes a pull in the memory: a woman's face in black and gray, shaded softly at the jaw. You hold your thumb over it and the whole year comes up. A kitchen. A girl laughing with her back to the window. He could never finish saying what he meant to her. She left in March, and she was right to. You feel it as a weight under the sternum, an old stone he has carried so long it has worn smooth. It is not yours and it hurts anyway.

Then the floor under his sneakers, grit under the soles. The white leather is creased across the toes. He bought them at twenty with his first real paycheck, a warehouse job he hated. Forklift fumes, a supervisor who called everyone buddy. He saved from it, a little at a time, and never touched the money. There is a number in his head, a comfortable and frightening one.

The body is easy. It is twenty-two and long in the leg, quiet in the chest, strong in the back. Hair brushes your neck, and when you tuck it behind your ear your fingers know the motion already. Your jaw is smooth. He shaved this morning with the window open and the ocean haze coming through. Nothing in him aches, and you almost resent how little it asks of you.

You open your hands and turn them over. The portrait looks up from the skin, and you look up with it.

"Forty-eight," you say, to no one. "Well. Hello."

You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting waits for you tomorrow.