Julian Barrientos

You are standing in a kitchen that is not yours, in a hallway that smells of boot polish and cold coffee, and you are done with Ruben Salazar. Fifty-two years old, five-seven, a belly that rides over the belt, goatee gone silver. A set of keys that weigh a pound. You have been him for less than a minute and already you know his knees. The trouble is not the knees. The trouble is the house: every light off, every person in it asleep, and you at the counter with his glass of water, understanding that nothing is going to happen here. Nobody is going to look at you. Whoever he was, he was a man things had stopped happening to. You wanted to be wanted by a day, and the day is a Thursday that doesn't start for hours. So you put the glass down and open the page with the wheel on it. You pay, you spin, and Ohio goes out like a pulled plug.

Weight first. It comes down through the mattress into your chest, because you are face-down, one arm hanging off the edge, the blood gone thin and prickling in it. Your breath is ragged, then you take one breath and it is even. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your cheek. Salt in the air, and a cold you can hear: the sea somewhere near, working at stones.

You do not open your eyes yet. The shirt is damp at the collar and soft from a hundred washes. Where it bunches under your ribs, something comes up uninvited. Not yours. His hands pulling this shirt on in a dark closet, late, the dryer buzzer still going, and the feeling is hurry, a low steady hurry like a motor idling. His leg, even now under the sheet, is bouncing. You did not tell it to.

You drag the hanging arm up. It comes along the mattress edge and the skin of the forearm brushes the sheet, and the sheet gives you her: a woman's laugh in this room, a heel hooked over his calf, her hair on this pillow smelling of lemon. Girlfriend. Warmth, and under it a worry he has not said aloud, because there was someone before her and the before is still in his phone. The phone is on the nightstand. You do not touch it. You are careful with what you do not yet know how to feel.

You roll onto your back. Your hands fold at your chest on their own, a posture he never once slept in, and the folding gives you something else: a church folding chair, his mother's hand over his, a hymn sung flat and loud, and the shame and comfort of being known by a whole room. He prays in the car some mornings. He does not tell anyone that either.

The mattress is old and sags toward the middle. Your back loosens against it. Thirty-four years of it: a lower spine that aches when he stands too long on steel grating, thighs strong from stairs, the soft heavy ease of the belly rising and falling. On the mezzanine above the floor he walks the rail all day, clipboard against his hip, forklifts beeping underneath like patient insects, and he is good at it. He is the one who knows where everything is. The pride of that comes up through your palms like heat.

You turn your wrist in the streetlight. The portrait on the inner forearm looks at you, black and gray, a man's face, shaded with infinite care. The ink drags up the oldest thing in the body: a funeral, a hot room, his father's name said in Spanish, and a needle six weeks after, and wanting to carry him somewhere that could not be sold or lost. It aches like a bruise pressed on purpose. You did not expect to be handed someone's grief with the body, but there it is, paid for.

You lift both hands in front of your face. Broad, a little swollen from sleep, one knuckle scarred white. You turn them over. Your tongue finds the crook of the nose he broke at sixteen, and you think of a ball, a gym floor, a laugh. Then you look up into the dark and say, quietly, in a voice that is deeper and softer than any you have worn:

"Okay. Hello, Julian."

The leg bounces. The sea works at the stones. And under the sheet, under the name, the question is already awake, small and patient: how long. Until the wanting comes back, until some Thursday you can't see. Whether you will still be his tomorrow.