Dominic Ray Thibodeaux

You are standing at a window forty floors over a city that has gone orange, in a body that has never once let you down. Peter Joseph Hallahan has good knees. He has a jaw that people trust. Nine minutes ago you were him for the first time, and already you have found the thing in his pocket: a phone, lit, a calendar full of other people's Mondays. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Every door in this life opens on the first push, and you are standing in front of one, bored enough to feel it in your teeth. The glass shows you a man who looks like he has never been hungry, and you are hungry. You open the site. The wheel is already turning before you decide to let it.

Then the floor goes out from under the evening, and the evening is gone.

Dark. Heat, and a heavy wet air with a sweetness in it, something rotting and something blooming. You are on your face. Your arm hangs off the edge of a mattress and the blood has left it; your breath is ragged, and in one pull it evens out, and the arm draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. He has never once slept like this. A thread of streetlight comes through the curtains and lies across the sheet.

His memories come through what he touches.

The cotton shirt, thin at the collar, is against your chest, and it gives you the morning he put it on: the sleeve turned inside out, his arm going in to the elbow, the cuff catching on his watchless wrist, and his own mouth tasting of coffee gone cold. Under the shirt, the soft weight of him, the belly he has stopped apologizing for, rising and falling. The work pants are still on, stiff at the knee with dust, and the dust is a ceiling: a half-finished one, the joists open, conduit running overhead, and his arms burning from holding a length of pipe against the bracket while the bender sat on the ladder out of reach. His hands know the move before you do. The right thumb is already rubbing the pad of the first finger, finding the groove a wire stripper leaves.

The sheet under your palm is rough and old. It gives you a different year: a small voice on the other end of a phone saying Daddy, are you coming Saturday, and him saying yes before he had checked anything, and the ache of it, the arithmetic of what he owes and what he makes, a number hanging over him like a fixture he can't reach. A woman's name sits behind it, warm and sour at once. He was a husband. He kept the church part, the Sunday part, long after the rest went; the cool of the pew comes up through the mattress, the smell of wax, his knees on the kneeler, asking for something he was embarrassed to name.

One leg is already bouncing, under no instruction of yours. The ring in his nose is a cold little point when you breathe in. The beard is thick against your neck. The ears carry their small metal, each one a decision somebody else made at some hour you will never see.

Your heart is a drum in a body that is slightly too tired to be afraid. Everything aches in the honest way, hips and shoulders and the long muscles of the back, a day of reaching.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are broad, scarred with work, and entirely yours for now. You look up, and you say, to the dark, to no one:

"All right, Dominic. Show me what you've got."

Somewhere under the question is the other one, quieter: how long, and when the wanting comes back.