Gregory Hanlon

You are standing in a flat in Berlin with a coffee going cold in a hand that has a navy sailor's scar-knuckled competence, and you are bored of being Desmond. It is not his fault. He is tall, he is easy, the scar through his eyebrow itches when you frown. But the morning is bright on the Spree and you caught yourself, a minute in, counting what he could not do for you. He could not be nobody. He could not be a man nobody was waiting for. So you open the laptop, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb, and you let go of Desmond like a rail.

Dark. A mattress under your chest, a pillow smelling of someone else's hair, and your arm hanging off the edge, heavy as wet rope. Your breath is ragged, then it evens out in one pull, and you roll. The arm draws itself up. You are on your back, hands folded on your chest like a man laid out, and a streetlight sits white in the gap of the curtains. Your jaw is clenched. You unclench it. It clenches again.

Your fingers find the shirt first: a thin black tee, washed soft, and the cotton gives you him. He pulled it on this morning, sleeve by sleeve, from the chair, because the other shirts were dirty. He stood in the bathroom and gelled his hair up into spikes with two fingers, the way he has since he was thirty, because it makes him look like he is still trying. He pushed his thumb along the crooked bridge of his nose, the old break from a hockey fight in a parking lot, set badly by a friend, and he thought: still here.

The sheet under your palm is tangled, and it gives you the other side of the bed, cold on purpose. A ring once sat on this finger; your thumb finds the pale band of skin where it was and the memory comes, not yours, a kitchen, a man named Paul with flour on his forearms, the two kids shrieking in the yard, a good year. Then the lawyer's office, the pen. He still dials the number sometimes and hangs up before it rings. Your chest aches in a place that is not your own.

Your feet are in socks gone thin at the heel, and the carpet beneath them brings the stairs: the public steps between the backyards, wet leaves slick on the concrete, late light, his knees complaining on the way down with a mower on a dolly. Fifty-six years old, and his lower back is a hot wire, his shoulders hard from thirty summers of pulling cords. He quit drinking in a winter he does not like to look at. He quit smoking so his daughter would stop counting. He has under five thousand dollars, a trailer, a good eye for a clean edge, and a habit of standing in other people's lawns at dusk, feeling like the only honest man on the block. Your jaw clenches again. You let it.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Thick fingers, cracked at the knuckles, a pale stripe where the ring was. They do not feel like yours, and they are the only ones you have.

You look up, and you say, to nobody, in a voice gravelled by his lungs: "Well. Hello, Greg."

Somewhere a wheel is waiting. You do not know how long the quiet will last.