Dennis Pruett

The jacket on Jesse Halvorsen's body hangs on a hook by the door, and I am looking at it when I decide. It is almost midnight in San Francisco on a Wednesday. The airman's boots are lined up, his alarm is set for 0500, and his knees are good. I have been him a day and five hours, and he is a fine thing to be. But he has a shift at six, a sergeant who says my name wrong, and a body that will have to be signed for in the morning. Somebody there already expects things from him, and I have never wanted to be expected. I open the page. The wheel turns. My thumb goes down.

Then there is a mattress under my chest and the breath in me is ragged, and then it is not. It evens out in one pull. My arm swings off the bed and I draw it up, and the body rolls over and settles on its back. My hands fold on my chest, a way he has never once slept. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket. It is the middle of the night here, and he is somewhere inside it.

The first thing is the sheet under my fingers. It is washed thin, and it knows a hand that used to lie across it. A woman's back, turned away, in a bed that was never this narrow. Her name comes up in his feeling, warm and tired, and it does not come up in mine. I push my palm into the mattress edge and get the springs. Then a winter, and a hospital corridor with a vending machine humming. Two children, small, asleep in the back of a car on a long drive home. His chest tightens with something that is not mine and I let it.

The shirt on me is soft cotton, gone slack at the collar. He put it on last night in the dark so as not to wake anyone, one sleeve and then the other, and sat on the bed's edge a minute with his elbows on his knees. His feet were sore. Sixty years is in the feet and in the lower back, a dull rod I can feel when I breathe. My right hand goes up on its own and runs over my scalp, over the blunt fringe, and I feel him in it, a habit older than any thought. I don't stop it.

I lift my left arm into the light. On the inner forearm there is script, a name and a date. The skin under it remembers the needle, the buzzing, a man saying hold still, and then a graveside in thin rain with a hymn going flat. His grief is a clean, old stone. The wedding band is warm and a little loose, and it turns when I turn it. Under that there is a long run of nights on an electric bike with a heavy square bag, rain on the visor, neon bleeding into an alley behind the bars, a stranger's door opening onto a stranger's kitchen. He is good at it. He is quiet and he is never late. He hasn't had a drink in eleven years, and his palms still remember the glass.

I turn my hand over. It is long and spotted, and the knuckles are thick. I look at it and then up at the dark ceiling, and I say to it, softly, "Well. Hello, Dennis."

The room says nothing. The wheel is a page on a phone I am no longer holding, and I do not know how long he lasts. It could be years, or it could be the time it takes the streetlight to move off the blanket. Already something in me is leaning toward the door.