Gordon Halvorsen

The body I'm wearing hasn't slept in an hour. Caleb Vandermeer, thirty-two, five-six, skinny fat, standing in a stranger's kitchen in Queens with paint dried in the creases of his knuckles. Four minutes in him. I have the tablet of cold linoleum under my socks and a refrigerator humming, and I am already tired of how close the ceiling is, how the whole world hangs at the height of my chin.

I could say I wanted taller. That is true enough. But the truth is smaller. A minute ago I opened a drawer looking for a spoon and found a child's drawing folded into quarters, and the thumb that touched it knew it, and a feeling came up through the thumb that was not mine and was not small. I closed the drawer. I set my phone on the counter. The wheel was already open on the screen, the wedge of color ticking under the light.

I press it. Nobody in the building wakes.

*

Weight first. Then a different dark, with a different kind of quiet in it, and a cold streak of streetlight across my face through a gap in the curtains.

I am face-down. My cheek is on a pillow that smells of old cotton and a man's scalp. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it; the fingers are thick and tingling. My breath was ragged and I make it even. I pull the arm up, roll over onto my back, and my hands fold on my chest by themselves, as if I were laid out. He has never once slept like this. I can tell by how the shoulders complain.

*

The shirt is cotton, soft from a hundred washes, twisted around my ribs. Touching it at the collar, I get him: a Tuesday last month, standing at this same dresser, pulling it over his bare head, still smelling the dye of the last job's uniform, the one he was let go from. The humiliation was not loud. A manager younger than his boots, a cardboard box, a handshake. He put this shirt on afterward and did not take it off for two days.

My hand slides along the mattress and finds the seam of the jeans, the stiff denim he fell asleep in. Memory: the button, the same worn notch every time, his thumb knowing it. He was too tired to undress. He had been up till one reading job listings on a laptop at the kitchen table, the same fourteen listings, refreshing them, as if work were weather.

My leg is bouncing under the sheet. I did not tell it to. It never stops, I understand, not at funerals, not at interviews, a tick that began when he was a boy in a church pew in Wasilla, his father's hand pressing down on his knee, and the pressing never made it quiet, only hidden.

I turn my right forearm over against the blanket and the ink catches the light: bold black lines, color gone soft. Touching it brings the shop, a chair in a strip mall in Spenard, twenty-three years old, a buzzing needle, and a friend laughing beside him. The anchor, the swallow. The friend died on the Parks Highway. He has not said the name aloud in a decade. I do not say it either.

Under my feet, the carpet. Under my back, the bed's left side, the right side kept cold and made smooth. He sleeps on one half. He is single, and some nights he lays out the second pillow anyway. Nothing else comes from it. The rest is his, closed.

The ache in my lower back is fifty-five years old. The shoulders are strong from lifting freight, a long winter on the docks, and the knees remember every one of those boxes. My chest is slow and wide. I am tall, so tall, and the bed is short.

I raise my hands into the streetlight.

*

They are big, square, scarred only by use. I turn them over. Palms creased like maps. I look up at the dark ceiling.

"Okay," I say, and the voice is low, gravel in it, a man who talks to no one before noon. "Okay. You."

My leg keeps bouncing. I don't know how long before the wanting returns, or whether this is tonight's body or tomorrow's.