Edmund Haswell

The evening has no shape to it worth describing. A screen, a chair, the particular fatigue of a Tuesday that started badly and never corrected itself. You have read about this kind of thing for years — threads that go quiet after three replies, old forum posts with broken image links, a documentary you watched twice because you didn't believe the people in it. Waking up as someone else. Not a costume, not a dream. The actual thing. You always assumed it would stay a thing other people almost had. Then there is a wheel on a screen, spinning under your cursor at an hour when the sun is high wherever you are, and a line of text that says it will give you a man, and you pay before you can talk yourself out of it, because the wanting is old enough that it doesn't ask permission anymore.

It stops on his face for less than a second before you are behind it.

Breath first — his breath, ragged going into the turn, then suddenly even, like a held note resolving. Weight next: more of it than you expected, spread long down a mattress, one arm numb and hanging into the dark past the edge of the bed. You feel that arm fold itself up without being told to, feel the whole body roll onto its back and the hands come together at the chest, fingers lacing, a posture this man has apparently never once chosen for himself in his sleep. Streetlight comes through a gap in curtains that don't quite meet. Somewhere outside, nothing — the particular nothing of three in the morning on a residential block in a city you've never stood in.

The sheets under you are cool and balled from a worse night than usual, and that's the first thing that comes through: not an image, just a mood, something tired and low-grade and chemical — a man whose sleep hasn't been simple in a long time. Then the mattress gives a flash of itself, a whole queen bed bought nine years ago with someone, the frame still the one from the marriage because buying a new one felt like a decision he didn't want to make alone. The ring finger on this hand — you can feel it before you can see it, a thinner band of skin ghosted around it — carries its own small current: a woman's voice saying his name the way only she said it, years of it, and then the specific quiet of the apartment after she took the rest of her sentences somewhere else.

You lie there a moment longer than the body wants to, just holding what's arriving.

The cardigan isn't on him now — he went to bed without it — but your mind finds it anyway, hanging off the closet door, and touching the memory of it is enough: gray wool, buttoned that morning over a plaid shirt with cold fingers in a kitchen that still smelled like last night's coffee, because the heat in the rowhouse takes forty minutes to catch up with October. He'd stood in front of the hall mirror doing the buttons from the bottom because his mother taught him that once, fifty years ago, and some things just stay. Khakis worn soft at the knee. Boots by the door he didn't put on because there was nowhere to go that wasn't the desk two feet from his own bed, a second monitor throwing cold light at a face that didn't register as tired until it was midnight and then one, the leg under the desk bouncing the whole time the way it always does, a motor that runs independent of anything he's thinking about — bouncing through tax season, bouncing through the divorce papers, bouncing now, faint, a tremor in a sleeping shin that is still running when there's nothing left to be anxious about.

Sixty-one years in this frame and you can feel the account of it: a back that announces itself when he's been sitting too long, a left shoulder that clicks on the reach, hands too big for his own pockets, big enough that strangers used to ask if he played ball and he'd say no, just grew that way. A body built for standing in doorways. Lungs that remember twenty years of cigarettes he quit decisively on a Thursday and never once discussed with pride, because pride wasn't the point, just the having stopped. No drink in him ever, not one night of it, a thing that set him apart at every office party and he never minded being the one who drove people home. Mass most Sundays, less out of certainty than habit, a pew near the back, hands folded then too, the same fold they're making now on his own chest, maybe where he learned it.

There's no one thing wrong with this man and that is its own kind of memory — no scandal, no limp, no scar you can find, just an unremarkable, solvent, careful life: good firm, decent money, nobody depending on him, nothing left in the house that isn't his. The ex-wife is the only ongoing ache, and it arrives whole and complicated — not hatred, nothing close, something more like missing a language he used to be fluent in.

You surface out of it the way you'd surface out of deep water, and the room is exactly as it was: dark, streetlight through the gap, his breath even under your control now.

You bring the right hand up off his chest and hold it in front of his face, turning it slow in the thin light, the big knuckles, the pale band of skin where a ring used to sit.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, your voice low and unfamiliar in your own ears. "Okay. Let's see how long this lasts."