Gerald Truscott

The bulb over the doorway swayed on its cord and then held still, the way a held breath holds still. Plaster dust hung in the light like the room had exhaled its own ghost. Gerald Truscott's arms were still out, palms flat against the frame, and for a second the whole apartment seemed to be waiting to see if it would happen again.

It didn't.

He let go of the doorframe with hands he didn't quite trust yet, the way you'd set down something that might still be hot. He turned them over, one and then the other. Fingers. A wedding band on the left, plain gold, worn thin on the underside where it had rubbed against forty years of doorknobs and steering wheels and someone else's hand. He didn't know that yet, the forty years. I did. I was learning it in real time, the way you learn a house by walking into its furniture in the dark.

I hadn't meant to end up in Gerald Truscott. I hadn't meant to end up anywhere — that's not how it works, not for me, not ever. There's a wrongness in the air sometimes, a seam, and the world rips it open without asking either side. One second I was nothing, riding the shake like static riding a wire, and the next I was behind a stranger's eyes in a hallway that smelled like drywall dust and cheap coffee, four blocks off Broadway, the neon from the honky-tonks bleeding faint pink through a window at the end of the hall.

I made him clear his throat. Old habit, his, not mine — I felt it rise up out of the body itself, unbidden, a tic looking for its owner. I let it happen. It felt polite, somehow, like answering a name you hadn't been given yet.

He worked nights. I knew that the way I knew all of it — not remembered, just there, sitting in the body like sediment: forty years in Nashville, a lobby desk downtown, motion-sensor lights and a logbook and coffee going cold at 3 a.m. A husband — Desmond — asleep two rooms over, probably still asleep, because earthquakes this small barely rattle Tennessee, and by the time you're awake enough to be afraid they're already over. A daughter grown and out in Knoxville, who called on Sundays. An ex-boyfriend from decades back, a name that surfaced without wanting to, Curtis, filed away in the part of a man that never fully closes a door, just leaves it cracked out of respect for who he used to be.

A body that needed insulin, apparently, on a schedule, in a drawer by the bed. Freckles scattered like a spray of rust across a nose I hadn't asked for. Gray hair cut close and flat, the kind of haircut a man gets because it's easy, not because he's given up.

I walked him to the bathroom mirror. He blinked hard, twice — that tic again, coming up through the muscle like a message trying to get out — and I let him have that too, because it cost me nothing and it seemed like it mattered to whatever was left of him, wherever that was now.

The face in the mirror looked back like it expected an answer.

"Okay," I said, in his voice, testing the shape of it. It fit strange, like shoes half a size off. "Okay."

Down the hall, a door opened. "Gerald?" A man's voice, thick with sleep, worried in the specific way of someone who has loved one particular body through a lot of ordinary nights and doesn't yet know this isn't one of them. "You feel that?"

I turned toward the sound, dust still hanging gold in the bulb light behind me, and answered before I'd decided to.

"Yeah," I said. "I felt it."

It wasn't a lie. Not entirely.