Efraín Lozano

You are Vincent Marchetti, and you are sitting in a break-room chair that fits you badly, with a paper cup going cold in a hand that is not yours anymore, or will not be in a minute. Fifty-one years of someone else's knees. The beard is itchy. You have been him for less than a minute, and already the wheel is open in your head.

He was supposed to be enough. A guard, big, heavy, a man the doors opened for. But you stood in a corridor with a ring of keys and nobody to lock in, and the quiet of it went through you like a draft. Something in you wanted to be small, wanted a job where the work was in the hands. You could not say it out loud, so you pay.

The wheel turns.

You are walking. The floor is concrete, cool through the soles of boots that have been resoled once too often. Somewhere beyond the racking a forklift beeps its backing-up tune. Your right hand is in the middle of a reach toward a carton, and you get it wrong: your fingers close an inch short, brush the cardboard, miss. Half a second. You do it again, slowly, and it is right. The scanner on your left wrist chirps. You check the label. You check it again. You do ten more, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years.

Then the body starts to tell you things.

The vest first, mesh rough against your forearms, and with it a morning: a kitchen with the light not yet on, a woman's voice from the next room saying *llévate el almuerzo*, his hand finding the lunch bag by feel. He does not look at it. He never looks. Love, in him, is a bag already by the door.

The polo, collar worn soft. A flash: a daughter's graduation, three rows back, this same shirt ironed, his chest so full it hurt and he said nothing, because he does not say it. He claps too long instead.

The ring on the left hand, turning against the bone when you flex your fingers. Thirty-some years. A fight once about money, a door closed gently, which is worse. And under it, older and smaller, a girl in a parked car on a summer night, a radio, her laugh. She still matters to him in a way he has never examined, a lit window on a street he does not walk down.

Your back aches in the low middle, a dull, patient ache. The belly rides ahead of you, a weight you carry like a tray. The knees complain on the step. The hands, though. The hands know everything. They know the weight of a case before they lift it, know where the tape will peel. Sixty-five years old and they still do not ask.

He does not drink anymore; his mouth remembers wanting to, once, and then a morning he decided. He prays to nothing in particular, only sometimes, in the long aisles, he feels listened to.

You stop. Fluorescent light hums. You raise your hands and look at them: broad, hazel-eyed man's hands, the ring, the knuckles thick, a stranger's life folded into every crease. You turn them over. Then you lift your head toward the white square of daylight at the end of the aisle.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Okay, Efraín."

It sounds like a name you are borrowing. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, whether you will still be him when the beeping stops, or tomorrow, or at all.