Douglas Perrin

You are Raymond Echevarría for less than a minute, and already you are tired of his good chair. It is the middle of a Tuesday. The office is quiet, the glass is clean, and the town below the window has one stoplight, which is red for no one. You have a chief executive's calm in your shoulders and a quarter-century of other people's deadlines in your knees. None of it is yours, and none of it was ever going to feel like yours.

Nothing went wrong with him. That is the trouble. The hazel eyes work, the black hair is thick, and the desk has a drawer of mints he never eats. You sit there and it all runs. You think of the card he will become, the portrait and the ten seconds, and you know he is already finished. You are already reaching for the next one.

The wheel turns. It takes no time at all.

The brush stops mid-stroke.

Mint foam sits on your lip. The tap runs. A pale window is in front of you, and the morning light has come in sideways through the frosted glass. Your arm is lifted, your mouth is full, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet on cold tile. You start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars. You rinse twice. The brush goes into a cup, bristles up, out of the grey water it has always sat in.

Then the body starts telling you things.

The sink edge is cool under your palm, and a flash comes up through it. It is a Saturday years ago, and a woman laughing at the hall door because he has put the toothpaste on backwards. The feeling is not yours. It is warm and slightly stupid, the happiness of a man who thinks the thing will last. Then the feeling goes sour, and you feel him standing here some other morning, listening to a car back out of the drive.

The shirt is soft against your back, washed thin. His hands put it on this morning without thought. Left arm first, always. He tugged the hem down over the soft middle he has stopped apologizing for. The sweatpants came from the laundry basket, warm from the dryer, and they smell like his daughter's detergent. There was a backpack by the door with a zipper pull shaped like a fish. He moved it so no one would trip.

Your jaw is working before you tell it to. There is no gum in it, but the muscle chews anyway, an old habit from a hundred quit attempts. Under that is the pack a day. It sits in your lungs like a damp towel, and you cough once, shallow, and the cough knows its own way out.

You touch your left ring finger with your thumb. The skin is paler there, a groove where a band sat for twenty years. A memory arrives through that thumb. It is a courthouse hallway, a fluorescent hum, and a signature he made carefully so his hand would not shake. Money is part of him too, a quiet fact in the back of the skull. There is a lot of it, and he drives a dented car anyway, because the money was never what he was proud of. He was proud of the kitchen at ten in the morning, the dishes stacked, the small shoes by the door. He is proud of the hours between school bells that nobody sees.

Your knees ache, and your back is stiff. Your pulse is steady and a little slow. A church hymn drifts up from somewhere in his childhood, the Methodist basement and the smell of coffee. It is no use to you, but it is his, and it stays.

You lift your hands from the sink and look at them. The right one turns over, and the left. They are broad and ordinary, and the tan line is clear. Whatever was behind these eyes is gone, and he never knew.

You look up into the mirror, then past it.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected. "Let's see how long you last."