Dennis Hollander

The monk's knees are the first thing you leave. Ignacio Barrera, fifty-two, and you wore him for less than a minute: long enough to kneel on stone and feel the cold climb into both kneecaps, long enough to hear a bell and know it was not for you. The silence in him was enormous and it was not yours. You sat on the cot in that cell and could not stand being so quiet inside. You wanted a man with noise in him. So you open the page, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the cell is gone, and there is no travel in it.

You are sitting at the foot of a bed, and your right hand is flat on your chest. Under it you feel ribs, and a heart going harder than it should. Morning light comes white through the window. The collar is open at your throat, a tie hangs loose on both sides of your neck, and the carpet is soft under your socks. The buttons are one off. You undo them, and your fingers know the way back up, left to right and without looking. The tie goes around and through, a knot this room has not seen before.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, pressed, a little stiff at the cuffs. It lies against your back and gives him up in pieces. A closet door, a hanger swinging. He ironed this on Sunday night with a ball game murmuring in the next room, because Sunday ironing was the one habit of the marriage he kept. He did the collar first, then the yoke, then the sleeves. Wrinkled sleeves were what his mother always judged a man by. The shirt gives you the grief of it, a low flat ache like a tooth, and you did not ask for it.

You touch your face, and it is not you who does it. Your fingertips go to the beard, the short dark brown beard gone gray at the chin, and rub along the jaw. The hand does this on its own. You feel the crooked bridge of the nose beneath your knuckle. A fist at fifteen, a gym floor, someone laughing, then a doctor setting it with a thumb and a crack. He was proud of it for about a week. Now it is just his nose.

Your thumb finds the pale band on your ring finger, and there is nothing on it. The skin is cooler than the rest. Something is wrong with that. Your hand turns the way it must have turned a thousand times, and you remember the ring, then the kitchen, then a long February of two people being polite. The ring went into a drawer. The band of skin stayed, tan against pale, a thing the sun did to him. Two kids. A girl who calls on Sundays. A boy who does not. His chest tightens and lets go.

The slacks are heavy wool. The socks have a seam at the toe he has hated for years. The carpet underfoot is the carpet he picked when the house was supposed to be for four people. Now it holds one man and a floor of laundry. Something under the bed smells faintly of dust and cedar, and a drawer in him opens: a girl from before the marriage, a lake, a borrowed truck, a sentence he never answered. She still matters, and he has never said so aloud to anyone. Even now, it is only in the smell of cedar that she lives.

His body is tall and slightly worn. The knees complain a little on standing. The back remembers a standing desk and two monitors of code, and his hands know that work: the keys, the habit of curling the fingers. He has money, more than he lets on. It sits in accounts he checks without joy. On Sundays he prays in a plain pew, and the words fit his mouth, though they were never yours. In the evenings he pours a drink or two and watches the dark come.

You lift your hands into the light and turn them over. Big knuckles, a few gray hairs, the pale ring-line. They are warm. They are actually yours.

You look up. "All right," you say, and the voice is lower than the monk's, rougher, a stranger's. "You've got a lot in here."

Down the hall a coffee has gone cold. Somewhere the wheel is still turning, and you do not know how long this one holds, or when the wanting comes back, or whether tomorrow you will still be him.