Grant Pruitt

You are Russell Kvamme, and Russell has been yours for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. It is early, the Los Angeles dark still on the window, and his chair has the give of a man who sat in it for twenty years. The steno machine sits in the corner under its cover like a bird. His beard itches. His knees ache. His breath comes heavy, and a whole career of other people's worst days waits in his wrists, and none of it is yours. You wanted to be a man who could be anyone. You are a man who transcribes. So the page opens, and the wheel turns, and you let go of him mid-yawn.

Houston lands on you in the middle of a word.

You are standing, one boot crossed over the other, leaning on a desk edge. A phone is pressed to your left ear, and a voice in it is waiting for you to finish a sentence you did not begin. Glass behind you, a fogged parking lot, a strip mall's grey shapes. Paper under your right arm. Your right hand was doing something in the air, shaping a thing for the caller, and it falls still.

The sweater is first. Wool, coarse, the weave catching at your forearm, and the cuffs are pushed up the way he always pushes them. It gives you the morning: his hands, not yours, pulling it over his head in a dark bedroom, a woman's breathing still slow on the other side of the bed. He had ironed the collar of the shirt beneath it the night before, standing at the board in socks, because she had said once that he looked like himself with a collar. He did not feel like himself. He felt like a man who is relieved to have been told what to wear.

The folder under your arm is soft with handling. Paper edges, the dry smell of toner. Memory comes up through your fingers: the corner office behind you, the man inside it who never learns a name right, and ten thousand mornings of filing, answering, rerouting. A grind. Under it, quieter, the pride of never once losing a thing. You do not want that pride. It arrives anyway, warm in your sternum.

The ring is on your left hand, and when your thumb finds it, you are in a church parking lot, a small girl asleep on your shoulder, damp-haired and heavy as bread, and his wife is searching the car for the keys, laughing. He prays in the dark, short and plain. It is not a performance. His shoulder goes sore under the weight. He would have carried her forever.

The sleeve on your right arm hums when you move it. Under the wool, script, a name and a date. You do not need to look to know whose name. Your skin remembers the needle, and it is nobody you are allowed to know. The silver hoop in your left ear is cool against your jaw. The wheel gave you that too. Another flash, thin and sharp: a woman before his wife, a dock, a summer, a train he did not take. It is gone before you can hold it. It hurt him for years.

The floor is hard wood-look vinyl, and your soles, in old leather shoes, feel the long standing of a day that has barely begun. The body is forty-two and carries it fine: the back a little tight, the legs willing, the lungs clean, no smoke in them, no drink ever. His throat is dry and wants water. The curls on top of your head are heavy, and the sides are short against your fingertips when you raise a hand to touch them. Your jaw is smooth.

"Grant?" says the phone. "You still there?"

That is the name. It comes out of the receiver and into your chest like a key. Grant. You lower the phone and look at your right hand, then turn it, palm up, the wedding-band hand's twin, the ink running down to the wrist. It shakes only a little. Behind you the parking lot sits in fog, and the corner office door stays shut.

"Yeah," you say, in a voice you are still learning. "I'm here."

How long, you wonder. The wanting always comes back. Maybe tonight, maybe not for years. You close the hand, and open it again.