Lyle Anders Haugen

You are standing in a kitchen that is not yours, in the body of a man who drives coal trucks, and you have been him for less than a minute. He is fine. He is strong in the forearms and bad in the left knee, and the coffee in his hand is the only thing you've touched that gave you nothing, which is how you know. Nothing is wrong with him. Something in you has already set the cup down. A body that works is not what you went to the page for, and you are not going to say what is. You put the cup on the counter, and your thumb leaves a print in the ring of wet.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is cold, and a rope in your fingers, and the deck moving a little under your boots the way a deck does at the dock. The light is gray and early, a lid of cloud over the water. Your chest is bare and the air finds it. A neoprene seal sits snug around your throat, and the suit hangs from your waist, heavy and wet-smelling. Your hands are halfway through a knot. They have done it ten thousand times and are doing it now without you, and for half a second you are in the way and the loop goes wrong. You stop. Your hands do it again, slowly, and it comes right. Then you check it. Then the next one, and you check that too.

The rope is first. It is rough and damp, and it gives you a boy on a different dock with a man's big hand closing over his own, saying again, slower, and the boy being furious about slower. Slower is the rule in this man's life. Nobody has needed to say it to him in thirty years.

The wedding band is next. It is cold on the left hand, worn thin on the inside, and when your thumb turns it you get a kitchen with a woman's back to you, running water, her humming something flat, and the plain animal comfort of not needing to speak. Two grown children are in it somewhere, a phone on a counter, a name on the screen. Under the comfort is an older ache, another woman, a house sold, and a signature he does not regret and has never entirely put down.

The suit is last, and it gives you the morning. He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark so as not to wake anyone. He rolled the undersuit up his legs, one and then the other, the bad hip complaining. He pulled the seal over his head, hated it, and was grateful as always for the small choked second before his chin cleared it. He never drinks. He never did. He is a man who likes his own mind exactly as it is, and so he shaves every morning, a smooth jaw, the cleft in his chin catching the bathroom light, a habit he keeps because a tight seal needs a clean face.

Your belly sits warm and soft above the waistband. Your shoulders are older than they feel. The knuckles ache, and without asking you, your fingers curl and crack them, one by one, a small private sound. It is the only part of him that is idle.

Somewhere above you a gull. Somewhere behind, the helmet, yellow, waiting.

You lift your hands and look at them. Weathered, freckled, the ring catching what light there is. You turn them over. They are steady. They are not yours.

You look up, and you say, in his low, salt-roughened voice, "Let's go slow."

Underneath it the question is already there, quiet as the water: how long.