Leonard Saul Haberman

You are standing in Isaac Fontenot's kitchen, and the coffee has gone cold in his hand. The window unit is rattling and the light through the blinds is the slow gold of a New Orleans Sunday. His body is twenty-five and soft at the middle, and his beard itches in the heat. For four hours and forty-two minutes you have been him, and you have found out what he is. He is a man who rehearses his sentences before he says them. His phone is full of messages he never sent. Twice this morning you opened the one to his sister and typed nothing. You could not make his thumbs say the thing that would have fixed it. You are not built for being the one who waits to be asked. You put the mug down on the counter and it clicks. You open the page with the wheel on it, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the sink is under your left hand, cold porcelain, and your weight is pitched forward over it. Foam is drying tight on half your face. A razor is stopped against your jaw, and the steam smells of menthol and old pipes. There was no travel and no warning.

You straighten and the whole height of him unfolds, six feet five. Your spine cracks in two places. The knees are fifty-one years old and they say so. Your left hand on the sink wears a plain band, and the metal is warm.

The shirt hangs soft against your back, washed thin, and it gives you the morning. It is his hands pulling it off the chair, because the drawer sticks and his wife is still asleep. The sleeves are short and go over the edge of the ink on his shoulders, and the cotton drags across it. He is thinking about nothing, and that is the feeling: a quiet Sunday and the building ticking as the radiator warms. Then the jeans, stiff with a hundred coats of overspray. They are the pair he swears he will retire. His knuckles remember the belt hole before you find it.

The razor handle is cheap plastic and it brings the rest. A booth, a fan roaring, a door panel hanging on its hook, and the gun in his hand going in long even passes. His forearm knows the arc without being asked. There is a pride in it he would never say aloud. Under it is something older: a girl on a fire escape in August, years ago, laughing with her feet on the rail. He still keeps her somewhere private, without guilt and without plans. Then a synagogue basement, folding chairs, his father's voice going through the prayer. He mumbles it still, with the paint-stained hands of a man who does not quite believe and does not quite stop.

The tile is cold through his boots. The air smells of soap, wet plaster, and the iron of old pipes. Your jaw is half bare and half foam, and the blade is poised at the corner of the mouth where he always hesitates. You do not hesitate. You draw it up against the grain and finish, faster than he would have.

You look at your hand. The knuckles are scarred and the wedding band is dull. You turn it over, and the palm is wide and lined with a faint gray at the creases. Then you lift your eyes to the mirror, to the heavy single brow over eyes that are not yours.

"Huh," you say, in his low voice. "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere under the water running in the sink the wanting is already quiet, and you do not know how long it stays that way.