Gordon Pfeiffer

You are standing at a bathroom sink in Las Vegas, in the middle of the night, and the man you are wearing has a toothbrush in his mouth. Hector Ybarra. You have been him for less than a minute. You've got his height, which keeps catching the top of every doorway, and his black hair, and his brown eyes in the mirror, which look back at you like a landlord.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. The foreman's body is a good machine, and it hums in the dark house while his wife's family sleeps down the hall, and you realize you did not come here to be a man who is fine. His phone is on the counter. The wheel is one tab away. Your thumb already knows.

You spit. You spin.

Then the dark is a different dark. Streetlight comes through a gap in curtains, thin and orange, and you are face-down in sheets that smell of someone else's detergent. Your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone warm and damp. Your breath is ragged, and then in one pull it goes even, and the arm hanging off the mattress draws itself up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest. A dead man's way to lie. It isn't his. He never slept like that once.

The weight of him settles on you like a coat. Heavier through the middle, softer, a belly that rises under your folded hands. Forty-three years sit in the lower back as a dull coin of ache. The beard is coarse against your jaw when you swallow.

The T-shirt is the first thing that talks. Cotton gone thin at the collar, and you feel him pulling it over his head some other night and tossing it at a chair and missing. The sheets under your calves: the memory comes of him standing in the aisle of a linen department, deciding between two grays, tired, and picking the cheaper because who is there to see. Single. Nobody was there to see.

The mattress dips toward the left side, and your body knows why. He sleeps on the edge. Years ago there was a woman on the other side, a long argument in a kitchen, and the sound of a car pulling out in the morning. It arrives as a feeling in the chest, not a picture, a plain tiredness with no anger left in it. His ex-wife. You don't have her name yet. You have only the habit of leaving room.

The keys. They aren't on you, but the waistband of the sweatpants has a drawstring knotted the way he ties it, and your fingers find it and a whole morning opens: a store before opening, fluorescent lights ticking on in banks, pallets of paper towels shrink-wrapped in the aisle, and the box cutter in his palm, the particular satisfaction of the blade parting plastic in one clean stroke. He likes breaking pallets down. He would never say so. Forty people think he's the boss, and what he likes is the quiet before they come.

You lift your right hand from your chest and it goes, without being asked, to your scalp, over the long gray top, down to the harsh clipped edge at the side, and back. A thing he does when he's thinking. He is not thinking. It is only the hand. The skin of the arm is warm from sleeping on it, the old ink faded under the streetlight, anchor and heart and ribbon in bold lines gone soft.

You turn the hand over. It is wide, nicked across the knuckles, a hand that lifts boxes and signs for deliveries. Nothing in it is yours.

You look up at the dark ceiling, then at nothing.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower and rougher than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere under the sound, the wanting is already warming, small and patient, like a pilot light.