Julian Mateo Arroyo

You are standing in a dark hallway in Anchorage, in a man's socks, and you have been him for less than a minute. Sixty years old, silver beard, a finance director's soft belly under a gray T-shirt. His wife is asleep down the hall. His phone is in your hand and the page is already open, a wheel on it, the way it was open before you took him.

You paid before you thought about it. That is the answer, and it is not the one you would give. He had a good life. He had a mortgage paid off and a daughter's voicemail you did not play. Something in the house hummed, a refrigerator or a furnace. You stood there with his thumb over the glass and knew that being given a man was not the same as wanting to be one. The wanting had gone out of him the moment you arrived. You spin.

Heat, then a floor. Cold at your ankles instead of carpet. A fork stops halfway to your mouth, and the stopping is yours now. Your arm holds it there, thick through the forearm, a wool cuff against the wrist. A coat. You are wearing a coat indoors. Cardboard-warm container under your left hand, rice and something brown in it. Light is coming gray through a window, early, before anything has started.

Your eyes will not agree with each other. One looks where you tell it. The other drifts off toward the window, a small outward lean, and you stop fighting it.

Then the coat. Your shoulders feel its weight, and the canvas cuff against the wrist opens something. A wet morning, last week or last month. He pulled this coat off the hook by the door because his husband's was already gone, and he stood with the zipper in his fingers listening to the truck back out of the drive. Joy, small and domestic: a mug left on the sill with the tea bag still in it. Under it, a bruise of a different kind. Another man's name, a recent one, which he has not said aloud in this kitchen. His jaw clenches. You feel your own molars press together without being asked. It is what the body does when it does not want to think.

The plaid shirt under the coat has a button loose at the cuff. He sewed it himself badly, once, with his husband laughing. He rolled the sleeves this morning, left then right, because the left one sticks over the tattoo. You look down. Script on the inside of the forearm, a name and a date, ink gone soft. You do not read it. You know it anyway, the way you know a hymn: the date is an ending he stands inside every day, and the name is not the husband's. The ring on your left hand is plain and a little tight at the knuckle.

Under the shirt, a small cold weight of metal against the chest, the piercing, a private thing that nobody in the church parking lot would ever guess at. He prays on Sundays in a folding chair and means it. He drinks hard once or twice a month and pays for it the next day. He quit cigarettes eleven years ago and his fingers still look for the pack.

His boots are heavy. Your knees remember a thousand hours standing at a counter. Your back is wide and tired, and the keys in the pocket press a ridge into your thigh. They open the store: hinges, nails by the pound, the smell of cut keys and oil. You know, without wanting to, which drawer sticks. Your hands know how to thread a pipe. A year back, a woman cried at that counter over a leak and he gave her the part for free and told no one.

You lower the fork. You set it on the counter. The coat comes off your shoulders and the kitchen is quiet, a coffeemaker, a loaf of bread, and sea light going from gray to white.

You turn your right hand over. Broad, scarred across one knuckle, hair on the back. Not yours. You look up at the window, then at nothing, and your voice comes out lower than the last one, with the salt of this coast in it.

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."