Emmett Kruse

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You knew him first as a shape in the cold of the warehouse at five in the morning: tall kid, six foot two, hair combed over so hard and so wet it looked painted on, standing at the belt with his hands in his armpits for warmth. You worked the same route board for fourteen months. You loaded beside him. You know how he stacks — heavy on the floor, irregulars up top, everything squared like it offends him otherwise — and you know that when he's waiting on the scanner to sync he cracks his knuckles one hand at a time, thumb to pinky, the same order every time, a little rosary of sound.

Fourteen months and he never once asked you a real question. That isn't a grievance. It's just the fact you kept turning over while your own body was busy failing on you in the little house off the main street with the one stoplight and the diner that's been dark since March. He didn't ask because he was nineteen and the world was still mostly ahead of him and he didn't know yet that some people's isn't.

The trial paperwork went out to everyone on the depot's insurance roll. Phase II, neurological, compensation for travel. You watched him read it on the tailgate of the van with the back rolled up and the morning coming in flat and gold behind him, brown shirt, brown shorts, the boots he never replaced, and you watched him do the math that nineteen-year-olds with under five thousand dollars to their name do: three hundred a visit is three hundred dollars.

You signed too. Different clinic, different arm of the study. You did not tell him. That was the first thing you kept from him and it was not the last.

You don't have the words for what the drug does — no one does, that's the point of Phase II — but you can tell it what to the extent that you lived it: two months of blood draws and a taste like batteries in the back of your throat, and then the nights where you lay in your bed and were somehow also on the belt at the warehouse, in the cold, with your hands in your armpits for warmth, feeling the way his shoulder blade sat against the seat of the van. You went somewhere in your sleep and it was always him. Not his thoughts, never his thoughts. Just the weather inside him. The ache in his low back. The way his jaw felt with that deep split down the middle of his chin, a groove you'd notice on him across a parking lot, across a lifetime.

You should have said something. You had a hundred chances at five in the morning and you said *cold enough for you* instead.

Here is the last honest thing you'll ever be able to tell anybody: you didn't decide. Not at a table, not on paper. You just stopped resisting the drift, the way you stop bracing against sleep. Your body was going. Six weeks, they said, maybe eight, and the word they used was *palliative*, and you were forty-one and had done nothing with any of it, and every night the drift took you to a warehouse at five in the morning where a tall kid stacked boxes like he was angry at gravity and had his whole life in front of him.

He's got a bottle in one hand tonight. You know the room. You've been in it in the drift a dozen times: his grandmother's living room, the shelves of paperbacks nobody's opened, the oil painting of somebody else's mountains, the lamp with the brass base that throws everything gold, the recliner with the arm worn down to the batting, the coffee table crowded with mail. He sits on the edge of the couch in a grey t-shirt and jeans with the knees gone pale and he holds the pill on his tongue for a second the way you hold something you're not entirely sure of, and looks at nothing, and thinks — you'd bet the last of your body on this — *three hundred dollars.*

He swallows.

He waits. Everybody waits. That's the study protocol: dose, then sit twenty minutes, then log symptoms. He does what he does when he's waiting. Cracks the knuckles on the right hand, thumb to pinky.

And the drift comes and it does not go back.

There is no door and no hand and nothing touches him. It is more like the whole room tilts one degree and you fall the direction you were always leaning. You come up behind his eyes the way water comes up in a boot. His pupils go enormous — the lamp is suddenly a nail of light, everything too much, the paperbacks a smear of color — and then all at once they narrow down and the world sharpens and you are looking at the little mirror hung by the coat hooks, and it is him, and it is you, and it is going to be that way for good.

The first thing: he is *warm.* You had forgotten warm. Forty-one and dying is a cold thing, a room-temperature thing, and this body is a furnace, all this stupid unearned nineteen-year-old heat running in it, blood you did not pay for, and the shame of it hits you before the joy does and then the joy comes anyway, obscene, enormous.

The second thing: he is *quiet.* You brace for him — for a voice, a fight, a boy screaming somewhere down a hallway — and there is nothing. Just the lamp humming and the furnace kicking on and your borrowed heart moving faster than his ever did in this chair.

Possession got you nothing but the body. You still know every day of your own life and you're still going to know it at eighty. You have his hands and none of what he knew with them — not his mother's phone number, not his route sheet, not which of the two Kruse aunts he sees at Christmas, not what he said the last time he confessed anything to Father Bill at St. Anne's. He was Catholic. You know that the way you know he took his coffee black: from the outside, from the parking lot of him. You've got the muscle memory in the shoulders and the stack pattern in the arms and you'll pass at work by Monday and that's the whole inheritance.

You look down at the right hand. Turn it over. Big and dry and cracked across the pads from cardboard, a callus ridge along the base of every finger, a nail on the middle finger gone dark where something heavy caught it, a scrape on the knuckle from the van door — his weather, his wear, all of it earned in fourteen months you watched from six feet away and never once helped with.

You crack the knuckles. Thumb to pinky. It comes out right the first time and that is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to you.

Then you go to the mirror by the coat hooks and stand there being six foot two, and look at the chin — that split, that groove, the one thing anybody would notice, the thing that made him unmistakable in a crowd and will now make *you* unmistakable — and the face does something in the glass that his face never did in fourteen months of five-in-the-mornings. It ages. Not the skin. The eyes. Forty-one years land in a nineteen-year-old's face and settle there like silt.

Somewhere in the house the clock in the kitchen ticks over. You have to log symptoms in twenty minutes. You have to be at the belt at five. You have to figure out what a boy with nothing to his name eats for breakfast.

And you have to live in this room, under this lamp, next to that mirror, in front of a God he believed in and you're no longer sure doesn't exist, for however long a healthy nineteen-year-old body lasts.

Sixty years, maybe.

You crack the knuckles again. Left hand this time. It's still right.