Dennis Whitaker

The man I am leaving is sixty-five and his knees ache when he stands. In Chicago the kitchen is dark and the coffee has gone cold in front of him. I have been him for thirteen minutes. He is a retiree with nowhere to be, and nowhere is what sent me back to the wheel. The quiet in him is a house with every room already seen. I pay, I spin, and the wheel stops on a man mid-task.

Then I am kneeling. The hearth is cold brick against my right knee, and the drop cloth is gritty under my shin. A rod is jointed in my left hand, gripped hard, and the brush is somewhere up in the dark. My hands have done this ten thousand times. Just now one motion went wrong. I fix it slowly, and then I check the next ten, each one, because I do not trust a stranger's hands. They do not need checking. They have not needed it in years.

The jacket comes first, because it is on my shoulders. The cloth is stiff with soot and gone soft at the elbows. I touch the cuff, and it is his morning: in the dark of a bedroom in Houston, his wife's breathing beside him, he finds the jacket on its hook and feels the old pleasure of putting it on. He does the shirt buttons by feel and tucks the collar flat. He does not turn on a light, because she sleeps. The cap goes on last, over the bare scalp. He runs his palm across his head, and my hand does it now before I decide to.

The rod is cold and ridged, and the joint threads under my thumb. I remember a garage, a boy of nine holding the end of a rod, and a father's patience, and then a different feeling, a warm one: a grown child on the phone, saying *Dad, you could stop*. He could. The money is there. He keeps climbing into other people's houses because the work is the one honest thing he has made. His knee pops. His shoulders are wide and strong, and his back remembers every flue. The air smells of old smoke and creosote. His nose, once broken, whistles faintly when I breathe. Under that comes the memory of the break itself, a ladder and a fall, and a laugh afterward.

The ring on my left hand is plain and warm and a little tight. I turn the hand over in front of me. Soot is in the creases, and the knuckles are thick. It is a good hand, and it is not mine.

I look up and say, quietly, to nobody, "Well. Let's see how long you last."

I do not know whether I am him by evening, or in four minutes.