Elias Mansour

---

You know the room before you have eyes to see it with.

You know the lamp because he described it to you over the phone two weeks ago — *there's a lamp that makes the whole place look like a diner at closing time* — and you know the clock because he complained the second hand ticked loud enough to keep him awake, which was, he said, an irony a lesser man would have made a homily out of. You know the gown, the flowery little print on it, because he said he looked like a bad sofa.

You know all of this from the outside. Now you are inside it, and the first thing that is yours is the weight.

God, Elias. Twenty-five pounds. You feel it as a fact before you understand it as one: the belly resting warm against the sheet, the pull of it when you come up off the pillow, the way the chest is heavy and the arms have gone soft where they used to be ropey from hauling traps with his uncle in the summers. You knew he'd gotten bigger. He'd made jokes about it — the *pastoral spread*, he called it, *the parish feeds you and then talks about you* — and you had laughed and you had never once asked him whether he was eating at ten at night because the rectory was quiet.

You sit up. The wires come off the chest in a fistful, pads peeling with a little tack of adhesive, and you drop them over the rail like something you took off. Behind you the monitor is having a small crisis: the trace goes flat and level for a beat, then bolts, green line scribbling upward, numbers climbing. 84 to 121. You watch the number climb and think: that's my hurry, not his. He never hurried in his life.

The clock says 3:12.

Here is what nobody at his funeral is going to say, because you were the only one there for it: the last time you saw him he was standing on the porch of that shingle house — silver as a fish, the traps stacked in the dooryard because he'd never gotten around to giving them back to the estate — and he said, *You should come up in August, the water's almost bearable.* And you said, *Yeah. August.* And you meant it the way people mean it. You had four months of Augusts left and you spent them the way you spend money you don't know is your last.

He wore the black shirt at your funeral. He did the whole thing himself, they told you, which was against about three kinds of good sense, and he got through it and then he sat in his car in the parking lot with the engine off for an hour and a half.

That's why you're here. You have been *wanting* for eleven months in a place where wanting has nowhere to go, and tonight there was a machine humming next to his head, reading him, mapping his sleep in colored lines — and a machine that reads you can be read *back*, apparently. Science went one way. Something came the other. You'd apologize but you wouldn't mean it.

Your feet find the floor. Cold tile. The floor is cold and you have feet and you can feel it, and you have to sit there a second with your hands on your knees over the fact of that, hands with pale islands scattered across the backs of them, the map he's had since he was nineteen and never once tried to cover. He'd caught you looking at it, that first week of rooming together, and held out his forearm like a man showing off a fish. *Continents,* he'd said. *I'm drifting.*

You turn the hands over. Turn them back. The pale creeps up the left forearm; there's a patch at the temple and cheekbone on one side, soft-edged, like something bleached in the sun. You know this body the way you know the front door of your own childhood house. You have just never been on the inside of it.

The tech doesn't come. Down the hall someone is watching a screen with his name on it and thinking *arousal event*, thinking *movement artifact*, writing it in a log. You have until he sleeps. That's the shape of it — you understood the terms the way you understand which direction is up. Until he sleeps. So you don't sleep.

You get the clothes out of the plastic bag on the chair: the black shirt, the black trousers, the collar in its little slip of stiff white plastic, folded in a pocket like a bookmark. You dress the body carefully because it isn't yours. The shirt closes over the belly and pulls a little at the button placket and you stand there absurdly moved by that, by the ordinary indignity of it, by the fact that he has a stain on the sleeve he never noticed and a shine on the front where he's ironed the same spot too many times.

You put the collar in wrong. You laugh, and it comes out in his voice, lower than yours ever was, a rasp at the bottom of it, and you have to put a hand on the bed rail.

Then you walk out past the desk and the woman there says, "Father — you okay?" and you say, "Couldn't settle," and she says, "It happens, first night," and you say, "It does," and she lets you go, because he is a man people let go.

---

The drive north takes two hours in his car, which smells of coffee and salt and has a hymnal wedged under the passenger seat. You drive with the window down because you want the cold. You want everything. You keep catching the pale patch at the edge of your own vision, the cheek in the side mirror when a streetlight goes over it, and every time it's a small shock, like hearing your name called by a stranger.

At six you're on the sea road. At six-twenty you're at his house.

The house has gone silver the way he said — every shingle the color of a rained-on nickel — and the traps are in the dooryard, stacked four high, rope going green. There's a light on in the kitchen because he leaves it on. You knew that. You'd have bet money on it.

Inside there's a mug in the sink and a book face-down on the arm of the chair and, taped inside the cupboard door, the photo of the four of you at the beach in 2009: him and you and Rachel and somebody's cousin, and he is lean in it, and grinning, and you are alive in it, which is the part that gets you.

You sit down at his table with the sea going gray-blue in the window and you make coffee in his body and drink it with his mouth, and it's too bitter, and you drink it anyway.

Then you call Rachel.

Not because you should. Because she is the one thing in his life you were never able to fix from the outside and you have maybe eighteen hours of inside left. She picks up on the fourth ring, croaky, and says, "Eli? It's six thirty in the morning."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Are you okay?"

"I keep getting asked that."

A rustle, a lamp clicking on somewhere in Portland. "Is it — is it about him? Is it the anniversary? Because I thought about calling you last month, I honestly did, I just—"

"It's not the anniversary." You look at your hands on his table. The islands. Drifting. "I've been meaning to say something for about nine years and I'm going to say it badly."

You say it badly. You say the thing he told you at two in the morning on a beach in Wells with a beer going warm in his fist — that he'd let her go because he thought the collar was the bigger yes and he'd spent a decade unsure that arithmetic had come out right, and that he never once stopped wanting to know how her day went. You say it in his voice with his lungs and it costs you nothing and it would have cost him everything, and that's cheating, and you don't care. That's what a friend is for. Somebody has to be willing to cheat on your behalf.

She's quiet a long time. Then she says, "Why now?"

And you say, "Because I might not get to later," which is the truest thing anyone has said in this house in eleven months.

---

You do the rest of the day the way he'd do it. You visit the Pelletiers because it's Tuesday and Tuesday is the Pelletiers. You sit with a woman named Dot who is ninety-one and calls you *dear* and doesn't notice you don't know the hymn, and you hold her hand, which is spotted and pale in places itself, and she says, "You've got my hands," and you say, "I do."

You take a service at five. It's small — nine people, and the light coming through the plain windows the color of the inside of a shell. You don't know the words but the body does; it turns out a body remembers, and you let it drive the parts you can't. Afterward you stand in the vestibule with the doors open on the cold and you shake nine hands and one of them is a boy of about twenty who won't look at you, and you say, "You can come find me tomorrow," and he nods and goes, and you think: *tomorrow he'll be here. Tomorrow it'll be him.*

That's the whole arrangement, in the end. You don't get to keep any of it. You get to leave it tidier.

You go home. You sit in the chair. The sea does its thing outside, gray going black. You keep the light on and you keep the coffee coming, because until he sleeps, and you would like to be greedy about this, you would like to hold on until the sun comes up again and then again.

But somewhere around one in the morning the body starts to lean. The heaviness of it — the good, dumb, animal heaviness he's been carrying since you died, twenty-five pounds of casseroles and midnight bread and nobody asking — settles down into the chair like a dog. Your eyes go long. The book on the arm of the chair blurs.

You think: he'll wake up here and not know how. He'll think he sleepwalked out of a clinic. He'll be frightened for a day.

Then he'll notice his phone. Rachel, 6:31 a.m., forty-one minutes.

*Eli. Call me back. Please.*

You let the hands go loose on his knees. Pale islands, drifting.

Go on, then, you tell him. It's yours. Take better care of it.