Harlan Gaines

You are standing in a kitchen in Coastal Maine, in the body of a forty-year-old clerk, and the house is asleep. His nose, broken once, whistles on the left. The stubble on his jaw itches. His stomach is sour from the leftover chili he ate standing at this counter. You have been him for less than a minute. You came back to this screen because of the wall clock in the hall. It ticks, and you have been hearing it for sixty seconds as a count of how long you must stay in a man who gets up for a nine o'clock desk and a lanyard. You will not say it was that. You will say you were bored. You hit the button anyway.

The wheel turns. Your thumb is warm on the glass.

A wet street at night, and the weight comes down through your heels. You are heavy, and the sidewalk jolts up your shins into your hips. Your left foot has been dragging, scuffing the wet every third step. You stumble off the kerb and your palm lands flat on the cold wet roof of a parked car. The metal bites. Your breath comes out thick with bourbon. The scuff stops. You push off the car, and the next steps land even.

The jacket is first. Heavy canvas, stiff at the cuffs, and the collar rubs the back of your neck. A kitchen opens in you that is not yours: a client's counter, pill organizers lined up, Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. His thumb knows the lids. A woman named Mrs. Cobb calls him Mister Harlan and he never corrects her. Under it is a tiredness that has nothing to do with the drink.

The flannel is next, soft and worn and a little damp. Your hand finds the button at the throat. This morning, or some morning, he did these buttons from the bottom up, because his wife once told him he looked sharper that way. She stood behind him and straightened the collar with two fingers. You feel his gladness, plain and unguarded, and under it the shame of the bottle in the truck.

Your left hand closes. The wedding band is tight on a swollen knuckle. A footbridge comes up, cables humming, a brown creek below and green shade. A small child on his shoulders is now a grown one who rarely calls. Then another woman, an old girlfriend, laughing on that bridge at nineteen. He keeps her the way you keep a stone in a pocket, never taking it out.

Your jaw is clenched hard enough to ache. You let it go and it tightens again. Sixty years sit in the knees. The belly pushes against the belt. Your head is light and your legs are steady. You are drunk in a body that has practiced being drunk, and your hands remember how to walk it.

At the corner you turn left, which is not his way home. You do not know why. Maybe he would.

You stop under the lamp and lift your hand. The band, the broad dark knuckles. You turn it over. Nothing in it is yours. You look up into the lamplight.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."