Gordon Lindqvist

You are leaving Casey's brother's brother, which is to say you are leaving Casey's body's cousin in the chain, the dad-bodied man from Honolulu, and no. Start again. You are leaving Jonathan Yoon.

You are nineteen and your knees are fine and your face has dimples that a girl on the bus smiled at, and none of it is why. It is the dark before a Thursday in Detroit, the radiator ticking, a textbook open to a page you have not read, and the thing that sent you back is small and stupid: you cannot sit still in him. He is all hurry. Everything he wants, he wants by noon. You wanted a man who has already stopped hurrying, someone whose sleep is deep because the mortgage is paid.

You pay. The wheel turns. It slows on a name you have never worn.

Then the dark is a different dark. Streetlight through a gap in the curtains, laid across your shoulder like a strap. You are face-down. Your right arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has drained out of it, so the fingers feel borrowed. Your breath was ragged a second ago, his breath, and now it is even, because you are the one breathing it.

The body rolls. You do it, or it does it for you: the dangling arm draws itself up, you turn onto your back, your hands fold at your chest. He has never slept like this. You can tell, because the body resists the posture like a coat on the wrong shoulders.

The shirt is cotton, soft from a thousand washes, and it brings the first memory. It is a gray tee pulled from the second drawer, in the dark, his wife already asleep. His wife. Her name arrives with the feeling of it: a warm, tired gratitude, thirteen years deep. He folded the tee the way she taught him, and then never again.

The sheet under your heels is cool and then it is not. Your feet know this carpet. Under the nose, a pillow smell, her shampoo and his own sleep. And the nose itself: you touch the bridge of it with a knuckle and feel the crooked set, and the memory comes hard. A pickup basketball game at thirty, an elbow, the white flash, a friend driving him to urgent care while he laughed through the blood. He liked the nose afterward. He thought it made him look like he had lived.

The band on your left hand is warm and loose. You turn it with your thumb and it gives you a morning in a county office, a small daughter on his shoulders, years later, asleep against his ear in a parking lot while he carried her to the car and did not wake her, though his back ached and his arms shook.

Six monitors. A spreadsheet that will not balance until it does. The quiet pride of being right about a number in a room where nobody claps. The money, one to three million, sitting under him like the floor, and how he never once spent it to feel big. One big night a month, a few whiskeys with men he trusts, home by one. No cigarettes, never. His body is lean and a little sore in the lower back, the shoulders strong, the heart slow and steady.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and look at them, turn them over. They are not yours. They are very much yours.

You look up, into the dark, and say it low, in his voice, a voice with gravel in it: "Okay. Hello, Gordon."

The ceiling says nothing. Somewhere down the hall a child turns over in her sleep. You lie there wondering how long this one holds, and when the wanting comes back.