Julian Ordóñez

You are Kenneth Park, and you have been him for less than a minute. The keyboard is still warm under your fingers. Somewhere in Atlanta the afternoon sits flat on the window of an office that smells of toner, and the spreadsheet is open, and the scar through your eyebrow itches the way it does when you frown. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He balanced the column and the column was balanced, and some small mean appetite in you said: this is all? You wanted a man who could be handed something heavy. The page with the wheel is already open. Your thumb is on the button, and it is his thumb, and it presses.

Then the floor is different. Linoleum, cold through the soles, a steel table edge against your hip, a syringe between two fingers of the right hand, and it is half-drawn, the plunger stopped where your thumb was going. Rain on a big window. Across the table a woman in black scrubs, her face turned toward you, waiting for a sentence you don't have.

Your hand did something wrong a half second ago. You feel the tail of it, the plunger pulled a hair too far. You push it back slowly and read the line on the barrel. Correct. You do it again. Correct. Ten motions follow, and you check each one, though it is a job his body has done for years without being asked.

The scrub top is soft from washing, and the cotton against your back brings the morning up unasked. It is his hands in it, not yours: the closet door, the shirt off the hook, the sleeve over a tattooed forearm, the little printed dogs along the pocket that his daughter picked out at a store, laughing. The drawstring knotted twice because the first knot never holds. A wedding band turned once with his thumb, a habit, a prayer without words. Then the porch of a triple-decker, a storm door that sticks, cold coming off the autumn overcast, his wife saying his name from inside, and the name is Julian.

The steel under your hip gives you something older. A clinic in a smaller town, a night shift, a shaking dog, and his own hands trembling so badly he had to wait out the tremor before the needle, a thing he tells no one. It is there now, a faint fine hum in both of your fingers. The shoes are heavy and brown, the soles worn on the outside edges. He is five-five and he has always stood a little forward to make up for it. His knees ache on the left. His mouth tastes faintly of coffee and, further back, of cigarettes he quit and still reaches for. Behind that, an old girlfriend's laugh in a car with the windows down, and a guilt so small and so loyal it feels like furniture. Incense, a low gold light, a hymn he knows the words to.

The woman says, "Doctor?"

You set the syringe on the steel. You turn your hand over. The ring, the thin geometric lines up the forearm, the tremor settling. It is a good hand. It is not yours, and it is yours.

You look up and say, "Give me one second. I want to be sure."

Outside, the rain keeps on, and you do not know how long any of this is yours.