Lamont Everett Rhodes

The first thing I notice about Gabriel, the retail associate in Pittsburgh, is that his feet hurt. It's the afternoon and he has stood on them since the store opened. I have been him for two hours and forty-nine minutes. In that time a woman returned a jacket with the tags cut off and swore she had never worn it. Gabriel's face smiled at her, and I stood behind it like a man holding a door for someone he despises. I am not telling you why I came back to the wheel. The jacket is part of it. So is the way his hands kept straightening a row of folded sweaters that was already straight. I recognized the habit. It was mine once, in the first body, and I had hoped to be done with it.

I pay. I spin. The wheel clicks down through its names and settles.

Sheet. I am holding a sheet, a heavy white weight of it between two yellow gloves, and I am bent over a bed. The room smells of bleach and old carpet, with a sourness under it that I decide not to follow. Light is coming through a tall window. My back is bent, my knees are fine, and my breath is slow, a working man's breath. One of my hands has done something wrong. I felt it go wrong, a corner pulled the wrong way, and I do it again slowly, correctly. Then I do the next ten checked, each one, like a man proving a thing to himself.

The gloves come first. The rubber is damp inside and clings, and when I flex my fingers it gives me a morning: a bathroom sink, a woman's voice through the door asking if he has seen her keys, and his patience, soft and practiced, worn smooth by use. He says they're on the dresser, where they always are. He says it kindly. He has said it a thousand times. I feel how much he loves her under the weariness, and it embarrasses me, because I did not pay for it.

The shirt is gray, zipped to the collar, and it sticks between my shoulder blades with sweat. It gives me the zipper, his thumb running up it at the mirror, and the pocket flap he smooths twice. The black pants are stiff at the knee from washing. He ironed them on the board in the kitchen, standing in his socks while the radio talked. The shoes are heavy and the left one pinches. They give me the marble steps outside his door, worn into hollows by a century of feet, and the first sun coming down the block while he sat with a cigarette. He is a pack-a-day man. My lungs know it already, a faint tightness, a wanting low in the chest. He is also sober, by decision. I feel that too, a locked door he walks past every day without looking at it. Whatever it cost him, he paid it, and I'm standing in the change.

My hand goes to my face. I did not send it. It rubs the stubble along my jaw, the coarse black stubble of two or three days, and with it comes an old ex, her laugh, a car, an argument he still carries unfinished. It does not hurt him anymore. It sits in him like a stone in a pocket, handled so long that it is warm.

There is money, too. I find it in the way he lets himself stop at a window: a little put away, patient, built a dollar at a time. There is no god in him anywhere. When he is tired he doesn't pray. He folds towels.

I am short and compact, and everything in me is calibrated for work. The sheet feels light to him and heavy to me, and I stand and let it hang.

Then I lift my hands out of the sheet. The yellow gloves shine in the window light. I turn them over, palm and back, and press the fingers wide. They are broad, capable, and not mine.

Down the block, past the open door, a rowhouse step waits in the sun. I look up and say, "Well. Hello, Lamont."

I don't know how long you last. It could be years. It could be before this sheet is folded. I find I am already listening for the wanting to come back.