Lloyd Kealoha

Let me tell you about Colin Thibodeaux, because he is the last thing I do before I stop being him. He is a gap in the front teeth and a tongue that keeps finding it. He is a desk chair in a glass room in New Orleans, mid-morning, a Tuesday, and a simulation of a fuel line open on two monitors. He is skinny-fat, and the soft belly presses the edge of the desk. He has been me for less than a minute.

I did not spin because he failed me. I spin because I looked down at the drawing on his screen, a clean thing, and understood that I had stood in a hundred rooms like this one. Competence is a room. I wanted a doorway. I would not say that out loud to the people in this office. Someone is laughing down the hall. I pay. The wheel turns.

Then the sidewalk is under me.

I am mid-stand, weight on the left foot, and there is cold air on my face. It smells of cut leaves and wet concrete. The dawn is blue and a streetlamp is still lit orange. My right hand holds a plastic handle, and a thin cord runs from it to a small gray dog with its nose in a hedge. The dog looks up past the leaves at me. Its ears go flat.

The gum hits me first: a flat mint, worked soft, going round my molars. My jaw was chewing before I got here, and it keeps going without me.

Then the handle. The plastic is warm, and the thumb already rests on the brake button. Something comes up: a garage, years back, a boy of four or five with the cord wrapped round both fists, shouting that he could hold her. My wife's laugh behind us. His feeling is pride, worn thin and kept anyway. The dog is the old dog's successor, and he never says so.

The sweatshirt is next, the green one, its cuffs gone soft. I feel him pull it from the drawer in the dark so he would not wake her, one sleeve and then the other, the collar catching his ears. Under it is the gray tee he slept in. He told himself he would put on a collared shirt for the interviews and then did not have any.

The jeans are stiff and the belt sits under the belly. My knees ache a little going down the curb in his memory. His back is tired from the kitchen chair, from the listings he refreshes at midnight. A number in his head, bills, a roof that needs patching. Under it, steadier than any of it, three kids asleep in rooms down the hall.

On the left forearm is a face in black and gray. I do not need to look. My thumb knows the ring on my finger, turning it once. A girl before her, a long time ago, still lives in the weight of that ring. He never speaks of her. She comes as a porch and a song and a thing he decided not to mourn.

I look at my hands. They are broad, scarred at the knuckles from nothing I can name. I turn the right one over. The cord is slack.

I wind it twice around the palm. The dog stares, then the leash tightens, and I take a step.

"Come on," I say, in a voice lower than mine. "Let's see how long we've got."