Esteban Cordero

The body I'm in has been Octavio Lerma for less than a minute, and already I know what's wrong with him. He's standing in his own dark kitchen in High-desert Nevada, the house asleep around him, a glass of water going warm in his hand. His knees ache from the cold floor. His belly sits soft over his belt. The gray beard itches under my thumb. Everything works. That's the trouble. Nothing in him wants anything, and I came back to the page tonight because a man with no wanting in him is a coat I can't stand to keep wearing. So I set the glass down and spin.

The show cuts to a bright frame and I am sitting up straight.

The couch takes my back. The remote is in my right hand, and I set it down on the arm because it feels like the thing to do. The room is dark except for the television. Its light moves across my knuckles. Somewhere a refrigerator hums. The air smells of old coffee and dryer sheets and a wet-wool smell from the blanket piled at my elbow.

The blanket comes first. I touch it, and it's his wife's: she falls asleep under it with her feet tucked against him, and he lets her, and he lies awake rather than move. Three kids' worth of nights are folded into that wool. One of them had a fever once, and this was the blanket they carried down the stairs to the car. He was afraid then, in a way he never said aloud.

The sweatshirt is next, zipper cold against my chin. This morning he took it off a hook and put it on over the undershirt, one sleeve and then the other, because the heat in the triple-decker is always late in autumn. Before that he'd worn a navy suit and a pale blue shirt buttoned to the second button, with the office keys in the left pocket. He combed his hair to its hard side part in the bathroom mirror, using the wet comb his father used. He shaved close because the clients notice. He likes the clean jaw. It makes him feel prepared.

My thumb finds the wedding band and turns it. The ring remembers a church, candles, her mother crying in the second pew, and his own hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped it. He's Catholic the way he breathes. Mass on Sundays, the kids in clip-on ties, a rosary in the glove box that he has never mentioned to anyone.

The socks are thin at the heel, and under them the carpet is rough. Through them I get the strip-mall office, the desk, the two guest chairs that squeak, and a widow who cried while he explained her policy. He stayed an hour past closing with her. He does this often. It's the part of the job he'd never put on a card.

His body is small and solid, not tall, and tired in the lower back. The shoulders are tight from forty hours of leaning toward people. There's a little money put away. He checks it more often than he admits, the way you touch a pocket for keys.

On the screen a man falls off a ladder, and the laugh track goes up. He would have laughed. I don't.

I lift my hands into the light. The ring, the square nails, the dark hair across the backs of the fingers. I turn them over. They're warm. I look up at the glowing screen, and I say, quietly, so the house won't wake, "Hello, Esteban."

Nothing answers. The refrigerator hums. And already, underneath, a small question starts, the one that always starts: how long before I want something else, and whether I'll be him tomorrow.