Hernán Escobedo

You are standing in a stranger's kitchen in Chad Boudreaux's body, and you have already decided. Chad's feet ache from the concrete of the warehouse. His thumbs are sore from the scanner trigger. The blond stubble itches, and his pulse is slow and dull in the heat of the middle of the day. Less than a minute of him, and he is already a room you have walked through. You wanted something that was not a loading dock. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and you pay.

Then the lamp. White, enormous, directly overhead, and a paper mask pressed over a mouth that was saying a number. Six. Seven. The number stops. There is no one left to finish it.

You are flat on your back and the air through the mask is cold and tastes of plastic. The bed is hard under the shoulder blades. Your eyes move once, left to right, because you are checking the room, and the room is a window of frosted light, a dark monitor, a ceiling. Your left hand lies on the paper drape. You open it. You close it. Again. The fingers answer.

The gown is thin cotton, printed with small blue flowers, and where it touches your chest something opens that is not yours. A morning: a kitchen table, a laptop with job listings, a wife's hand setting down a coffee. He had put on the grey hoodie that morning, pulled over a bare scalp's worth of cold, left sleeve first because of the shoulder. He tugged the cuffs down over his wrists. His wife said, "Eat something before they starve you," and he said, "I'm not hungry," and he was lying. The fear is in his feeling, not yours: a small, tight, ashamed fear of being put under.

The ring is warm on the finger of the hand on the drape. When you press your thumb to it, a year comes. A hotel in the cold, a wedding at forty-one, his second try at it, his wife laughing at his speech. Thirty years of being hired, praised, let go. Money made and kept, a house with a stoop. A drink or two in the evening, the glass sweating in the same hand, and the old cigarette craving that still comes up like a tide at the end of the day. Your fingers, without being asked, drum the paper, a slow patient rhythm, the way he waits.

The pillow rasps against the thick, lumpy ear, and the cartilage there is tender from pressure. A boy on a mat, a coach's palm on the back of his neck, a pop, a year of that ear swelling and never being drained. He was proud of it and never said so.

His body is skinny in the arms and soft at the middle, sixty years old, a little cold, a little ache in the knees even lying down. Nobody has noticed yet. The monitors hold their long sleeping rhythm.

You lift the hand into the lamp's light and turn it over. Brown, broad, the wedding band, the knuckles thick. Then you raise your eyes to the ceiling, and past it, and say, quietly, "Hello, Hernán."

Somewhere a drug is still working. You wonder how long this one lasts, and when the wanting comes back.