Dennis Blackwell

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You do not know his name until you are inside it and it comes up out of the hands, the way a phone number does — Blackwell, Dennis, DOB, last four — recited to a nurse so many times this week that the body says it before you can decide to.

Dennis Blackwell. Fifty. A stranger. That is the whole of it. You did not choose him for anything. You went where the blood went.

You were in a plastic bag on a rolling shelf in Garden City, and before that you were in a vein in a church basement in a folding chair with juice and a sugar cookie afterward, and before that — long before — you were a woman named Ruthie Blackwell who is nobody's relation to this man, who sang second alto at Greater Mount Zion for forty-one years, who could not carry a note but could carry a room, and who died on a Tuesday in a bed she had made every morning of her adult life. That is the memory. That is all you brought. You do not get her knees back or her hands or the smell of her kitchen at five in the morning. You get the wanting, and the wanting is enormous, and it has nowhere to sit.

So: a hospital chair in a corner room with a window and a bad fluorescent fixture buzzing over his left shoulder. Wheat stubble out past the parking lot, cut down to gold bristle, and a thunderhead going up black and slow over the elevator like something being built. Light gone yellow — that particular Kansas yellow, the color of a photograph left in a car.

He sits with his hands folded in his lap, one on top of the other, and the line taped into his right forearm with two strips of clear tape that have pulled the hair up under them. The bag above him is half empty. He is watching it. Not anxiously. The way a man watches a game he doesn't care about, because the alternative is watching the wall.

You are in the drip. You are in the slow patient inch of it. And because there is nothing to do but wait, you spend the last twenty minutes of his life learning him — not by choice, you simply arrive in what he is thinking the way you arrive in warm water.

He is thinking about the pick list. Two aisles he never finished, forty-one line items, and Marcus on second shift will have to eat them. He is thinking about the forklift horn — you hear it in him, out of sight somewhere behind the racking, that flat beep beep beep, and it is not a sound to him, it is a place, the way a hymn is a place. He is thinking that anemia is an old woman's word and the doctor said it to him like a diagnosis and he heard it like an insult.

He is thinking about Kayla, twenty-four, in Wichita, who texted *let me know how it goes* and to whom he has not replied because he doesn't know how to type anything that isn't a lie or a burden. He is thinking about Josh, twenty-eight, who did not text.

He is thinking about Sharon.

You did not expect Sharon. She comes up in him with the force of something load-bearing. Eleven years divorced and he still runs conversations with her, still argues both sides, still loses. He kept her number under her first name, no last name, like she was the only Sharon on earth. On the ring finger of his left hand there is a pale band where the tan stops — nine years off and the sun still hasn't caught up. He notices it in the shower. He notices it now, folded there in his lap, and moves his thumb over it once, the way you'd check a scar for whether it still hurts.

And when his hands are not folded and being watched, they go up to his mouth and he bites his nails, all of them, down past useful. He has done it since he was eleven and he has never once decided to.

He does not pray. He grew up in a house where nobody prayed and he is not against it, he simply never learned the language, and so the hour goes by in silence and pick lists and Sharon.

Ruthie prayed. Ruthie prayed out loud in the kitchen at five in the morning with the radio on low, and you have that, and you have nowhere to put it in a man who has never bowed his head.

The bag empties. He watches the last of it go — the meniscus dropping through the plastic, the chamber's little pulse slowing, one bead, then another, then the tube going clear.

And you feel him decide something. Whatever it is, he decides it in the half second before you take him: about Sharon, or Kayla, or getting up out of this chair and going back to work and not telling anybody at all. You will never know which. It goes with him.

He closes his fist around the tube in his arm. The fist is decided about something.

Then the last of it enters, and you are not in the line anymore.

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His head goes back against the vinyl. Light comes out — out of the eyes, out of the open mouth, a hard white spill of it up the wall and across the empty bag — for about a second, and the fluorescent fixture stutters in sympathy, and then it cuts out all at once and the body is slack in the chair like something set down.

Then you sit up in him.

It is not what you thought. There is so much of him. The weight of the belly, the ache in the low back that has its own weather, the tightness across the top of the skull where the hair has gone thin and the scalp is doing the sweating. Hazel — the world through hazel is warmer than you remember the world being. His feet are cold. His mouth tastes of pennies.

You lift the left hand. You turn it over. Broad, red across the knuckles, the nails bitten to nothing — and there it is, that pale stripe on the ring finger, a ghost of a ring, on a hand you have to learn to use to feed yourself.

Forty-one years second alto. Eight decades of being one person in one body, and the body wore out, and this is what came after: a warehouse picker in Western Kansas with two children who don't call and a Sharon with no last name, and no way out of him, and no term on it, and no way back.

The forklift in his head is still beeping. It will keep beeping for a while yet, the way a hymn does.

You breathe with his lungs. You bring the hand down.

Out the window the thunderhead has stacked itself all the way black and the light has gone that yellow, and somewhere under it there are two aisles that never got finished.

"Lord," you say, with his mouth, in his flat plains voice, and it comes out wrong and you say it anyway. "Lord, look what You gave me."