Eric Vollmer

Eric Vollmer. That's the name on the dash phone, in the little gray box above the star rating. I don't know it yet. I'm still Walter, still the heavy man with the silver beard, the one sitting at the page with the wheel on it, and I'm leaving him for a reason I won't say aloud. Five hours and thirty-one minutes in that body, and tonight I put his hand to a door in his own hallway and it would not turn. Not locked. His hand just would not do the thing. A key he'd carried for years, and his fingers stood there like strangers. Whatever lives in him that knows how, it wasn't mine, and it never would be. I stood there with my forehead against the wood until the building hummed. Then I went back to the page. Walter's scar itches through the eyebrow. I press the button.

Wet air. Sodium light on the brownstones, orange on everything. I'm standing on a sidewalk beside a car with its door swung open, a black cable half coiled in my right hand, my thumb and fingers already mid-loop. The motion was a thousand motions long and I've walked into the middle of it. I get one wrong, the wrap crosses over itself, and my hand stops. Then it does the loop again, slowly, correctly. Then the next, and the next, ten of them, each one checked, because I don't trust it. The hand did this without me for years. Now I'm watching it.

The cable first. Its rubber is cool and slightly tacky, and it gives me a night in this car: a passenger's phone at four percent, a woman in a sequined jacket saying *you're a lifesaver*, and Eric's small flat pleasure at being useful for free. Then the sleeve of the quarter-zip, where my left wrist rubs the cuff. It's the blue one, faded at the elbows. This morning comes up through the fabric. He pulled it off the chair while his wife slept on her side, the zipper cold against his chin. He stood at the bedroom door a second too long, listening to her breathe. He thought, *I'll let her have the whole bed*, and the thought was tender and tired. Jeans next, stiff at the knee, the left pocket wearing thin around a lighter. His thumb knows where it is. The pack against my ribs is a hunger the lungs recognize before I do, a pack a day, a dry scrape at the back of my throat. I want one with a force that isn't mine. He never drinks. He remembers a father's kitchen, a bottle on the counter, and decided at nineteen he'd keep his hands clean of it. Smoke was the vice he allowed.

The wedding band is warm from the cable. Touch it and I'm in a courthouse hallway, rain on the windows, her laugh splitting his chest wide. My cheeks pull, and I feel the dimples carve in without my asking. They show even now, even tired. Under my soles the wet pavement pushes up through thin canvas shoes, and the cold finds a hole near the left big toe. His lower back aches from nine hours seated. His knees are good. His shoulders are loose. This body is thirty-two and nothing in it is broken. The stubble on my jaw is rough under the knuckle, and the scalp is bristle-short, cool in the damp.

I turn my right hand over. It's his, square at the knuckle, the band pale against skin that's seen too many dashboards. Nobody is left in there to ask about it. I lift my eyes to the street, to the stoop with its lit door, to everything that's mine till it isn't.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that's lower than I expected. "Let's see how long you last."

I don't know whether that's him or me I'm talking to, or whether by morning I'll still be breathing this smoke.