Gordon Pietrzak

You are standing at a sink in Manhattan with someone else's razor, and the mirror has a moustache in it that you have worn for under a minute. Daniel Sokolowski, thirty-four, five-three, a network engineer. His wrists are narrow and the faucet is too high for him. The tile is cold under his bare feet. His phone is on the shelf above the toilet with the site already open, and what sends you back is plain. You reached for the top shelf in his kitchen and your fingertips stopped four inches short, and the whole apartment suddenly turned out to be built for someone taller. You are tired of looking up at everything. You dry his hands on his towel and tap the wheel.

It turns, and the bathroom is gone.

It is dark and warm, and you are on your side in a bed. Blue light sits six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll on something you have already forgotten. Your weight is a different weight. It spreads into the mattress and pulls the shoulder down, and the breath comes slower and deeper from a wider chest. Then the thumb starts again, faster than he had it, flicking past everything he stopped on.

The phone is cool and slick under that thumb, and the sheet is cotton gone soft from washing. A flash comes through it. It is a Sunday in a laundromat, and folding this exact sheet alone, corner to corner, with a quiet pride in doing it right. Then the T-shirt against your ribs, thin and a little tight under the arm. He put it on tonight after a shower, tired, too tired to find the good one. Over his head, then one sleeve, then the other, his stomach touching the hem and a small private flinch he has every time.

The khaki pants are still on him, you realize, kicked half off at the knee. His belt is on the chair, and the pants carry the day. A glass-walled office with the door left open on purpose. A younger man named Terrence bringing him a problem, and Gordon saying "walk me through it" in the patient voice he is proud of. Nobody calls him cruel. He sits through a budget review with his knee going under the table. He is forty-two and nobody asks him to lunch.

The pillow is damp where his hair has rested. His hairline has retreated to an M, and a hand that is yours now goes up on its own and touches the left temple. The gesture is old and worried. Under it he is thinking of Ellen, the ex, on the porch of a rented place with her hair tied up, saying she can't wait for him to want things. He never answered. The memory sits warm and sour, the way a tooth does.

Your lower back aches in one clean line. The knees have opinions. His heart ticks slow and heavy and sure, and your jaw is smooth where he shaved it that morning. The thumb on the glass has a ragged edge, and the cuticle is picked raw. The hands do it by themselves, and you let them. The L passes under the window and the glass hums.

You lower the phone and look at his hands, the right one first. You turn it over. It is broad and pale, with the nail bed torn. You lift your eyes.

"Hello, Gordon," you say, low, in a voice that sounds like gravel being moved gently. The wheel is still turning somewhere behind your teeth, and you wonder how long you get to keep this.