Glenn Hayashi

You have the page open and nothing else to do with the night. The house is asleep, the feed has stopped giving you anything, and the wheel sits there in the dark, all its slices lit. You have loved this for as long as you can remember: the films where someone wakes up in another man's body, the threads at two in the morning, the long wish of it. You never believed anyone could sell it. You pay anyway. You spin, and the wheel ticks down slower and slower and stops.

Wet street. You are in the fall of a step, off a kerb you did not see, and the world tips. Your hand slaps the cold roof of a parked car and holds. Whiskey sits sour at the back of the throat. The body is light, skinny, loose with drink, and every breath is yours now. Rain hangs in the air. Somewhere a single stoplight changes for nobody.

You stand. The scuff in the left shoe is gone, because you are not scuffing. Forty steps land even and quiet on the wet pavement.

The jacket comes first. Its collar is rough against your jaw, and the canvas is stiff at the cuffs. Memory arrives through it, and it is his, not yours: a hook by a back door, a wife's hand pulling the zipper up under his chin on a cold morning. *You'll lose your ears.* He laughed, and the dimples came. You feel them now, deep in the cheeks, an ache of habit.

Your left hand finds the ring. Thumb to band, turn, turn. The metal is warm. Then the whole of a kitchen comes up: two kids shouting over cereal, a girl with a missing tooth, a boy sulking at the table. He loved them with a helpless, tired love, and it floods you, and it is not yours, and you carry it anyway.

The shirt moves against your back, soft flannel gone thin at the elbows. He dressed in it this morning, in a dim bedroom, one button at a time, sleeves rolled twice, a pen clipped in the pocket because a bookkeeper's pocket is never empty. Your fingers find the pen. A back-office desk, a shoebox of receipts gone soft, the long adding-machine tape curling to the floor. Numbers that never quite came out. Eleven thousand dollars in the savings account, and the fear of it.

The trousers, heavy and damp at the hem, give you something older. A porch, a woman laughing before she left town, his throat tight over what he never said to her. It is not about his wife. It is the other life, the one that did not happen, and he has carried it like a stone in a coat for years. Nobody knows. Now you do.

The beard under your thumb is trimmed close. Your mouth tastes of old cigarettes he quit, and he still wants one. Your knees ache a little. Your feet are tired. At the corner there is a left and a right, and home is right, and his body turns left because you want to see where it goes.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Thin fingers, the ring, a faint ink smudge on the side of one finger. You turn them over. Then you look up, and you say, quietly, to the empty street:

"Okay. Hello."

Then the question comes up under the breath and will not leave. How long is this? A night, a year, four minutes. The wanting is already stirring, and you do not know when the wheel will call.