Hilario Mendoza

You are standing at a window on a high floor in Brickell, in a man named Samir Haddad, and you have been him for less than a minute. His beard is still strange against your collar. His phone is in his hand with the page open, the wheel sitting there ringing like a coin on a table. He is thirty-six and good at his work, and he cannot do the thing you wanted. You had it in your mind all through the first elevator ride: to be small, to be quiet, to be somebody no one is waiting on. Samir is a man people wait on. His calendar is a wall. You press the button with his thumb, and the thumb is steady.

Then the rain.

It is already on your face. You are standing under a roof of glass and you have stepped out from it, a beat early, and the water comes down on your upturned face and you do not turn out of it. Hood falling back. Cold running into the beard, into the collar. The ground is wet and gray, a sign above you says 3 MIN, and the body you are in has not been cold in a long time and is glad of it.

Your hand goes to your face. It does that without you, wiping the water off the cheek, then the jaw, then the brow, where your fingertip finds a ridge running through the eyebrow, smooth and old. Under the touch, a rush of it: a bicycle, a curb, a boy of nine, blood in his eye, and his mother laughing and crying at once with a dish towel pressed to his head.

The jacket is heavy with water. The zipper tab is cold under your fingers and it gives you a morning: a hook by a door, a woman's voice saying take the green one, it's actually raining, and him saying it's only rain, and taking it anyway. Her name arrives in his mouth, soft, before you have a face for it. The pants are old cotton, soft at the knee. They give you a desk, two screens, fluorescent hum, and the number he keeps not looking at, a number with a minus in front of it, the size of a house. He carries it like a stone in a shoe. Three children, and each of them has a lunch he packed. One of them is a girl who rolls her eyes at his cardigan. His chest goes tight, and you let it.

The shoes are wet through at the seams. They give you the stoplight on Main, the diner with the chairs up on the tables for good, and a woman from before, years ago, who once said he was the steadiest man she knew and meant it as an apology. He thinks of her more than he should, standing at this curb.

His body is small and solid. Your weight sits low. There is an ache in the lower back and a stiffness in the right knee that the cold has found. His breath comes slow and full, and his heart is calm. His hands know how to hold an umbrella he is not carrying. They want a pen.

You have stood in forty-eight men. None of them has stood in the rain like this on purpose.

You lift your hands and look at them, the backs dark with water. You turn them over. Palms, creases, a callus at the base of a finger from some tool you cannot name yet. They are his. They are yours. You look up into the gray street where a bus will come in under three minutes.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, and kind. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere behind your ribs the wheel is already turning, quietly, without a date.