Eliot Maguire

You are standing in a walk-in cooler in a restaurant that is not open, in Walter Brzezinski's body, and your knees are the reason you came.

They have been a argument all day. Sixty-five years of stairs and tile are in them, and the cold makes them worse. A man can be the manager and still be the one who carries the crates. You have been him for almost a full day. His heavy shoulders, his shaved scalp, the scar through his eyebrow that your thumb keeps finding. The job itself you could do. Counting, ordering, telling a nineteen-year-old to wash the mats. What you could not do was get down on one knee to reach the bottom shelf without a noise coming out of you, and tonight the noise came out and you stood there with your hand on the steel and understood that you had paid for a man and been given a bill. So the phone, in his big cracked-knuckled hand, with the wheel on it. Your thumb on the glass. Spin.

Then you are lying on your side in the dark.

The weight shifts first. It is wide and low and settled, a body that has gone soft against a mattress, and your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone warm. Blue light on your face. A phone six inches from your eyes, and your thumb, his thumb, stopped mid-scroll. Your eyes are dry. You have not blinked in a while. You blink, and then the thumb moves, quick and sure, flicking past whatever he had stopped on, because you do not care what it was.

The beard comes first, two inches of it, scratching the pillowcase. Then the T-shirt, soft and washed thin, and something rises off it: a laundromat on a Saturday, a folding table, the plastic chair, his arms full of warm cotton and a podcast in one ear, bored and fine. The sheets under your leg are cold where he has not moved in an hour. The waistband of the sweatpants has dug a line into his belly, and the belly itself is a warm, ordinary weight, resting on the mattress. You know it is his and not yours.

The glass of water on the nightstand: you reach, your fingers close around it, and it comes back like a sentence read aloud. Two a.m. thirst. Always the same glass, a jelly jar from his grandmother's kitchen in Rockaway, and the way he carries it carefully to bed so as not to wake the neighbor through the wall. Then the desk. A corner office, a door he is not allowed through unless called, a man inside who says "Eliot, buddy" and never learns the rest of it. The patience in his spine from that. The stapler he refills before anyone asks.

The charger cord under your arm, and there is a name in it. An old boyfriend. A stoop in the rain, sodium light turning the wet street orange, and the feeling of waiting for someone to come back down the steps. He did not. It still sits under the ribs, a small stone, and you hold it a moment, a stranger's grief, accurate and not yours.

The tattoos on your forearm are cool against the sheet, fine lines of triangles. Your fingertip finds one and you get a needle's buzz, a Tuesday, a friend holding his other hand. Paid for in a month of skipped lunches. He is scraping by and he spent it on that, and he never regretted it once.

Pipes knock in the wall. Rain ticks the window. Somewhere a bus sighs.

You set the phone face-down on the sheet. You lift your hand into the last of the light, the thick, freckled, careful hand, and turn it over, palm, knuckles, palm. No scar on the eyebrow now. No ache in the knee. You look up, past it, into nothing.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is softer than the last one, and it is yours. "Hello, Eliot."

You wait to find out how long.