Marcus Delrio

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Manuel Osorio's classroom smells like dry-erase marker and the orange peel someone left in the trash can over the weekend, except it's not Monday, it's the middle of the night, and you are standing in his kitchen instead, in his boxers, in front of the refrigerator light, forty seconds into being him for the — what, the second time now, barely — and already the itch has started under his sternum like a held sneeze. You spun him six hours ago. You liked the beauty mark. You liked that the school pictures on his fridge were not your business and never would be, that his ex-wife's number was still saved as "DO NOT" in his phone, comedy you didn't have to live through to enjoy. But he sleeps like a man who has given up negotiating with his own body, and lying down next to that surrender for even one night, feeling his lower back complain, feeling the specific tiredness of fifty-five, is already more of him than you wanted. Bald men make you restless. You go back for the wheel because six hours in this skin has taught you that boredom is a texture, not an absence, and this one has a grain you don't like the feel of.

You are asleep, then you are the sleep of someone else. The breathing that was jagged — a small congested catch on every fourth inhale — smooths into something even and unhurried. The arm that hung off the mattress, fingers just brushing the cold hardwood, lifts itself without any decision you make, folds up and over, comes to rest with its twin at the center of a chest that is not Manuel's chest — narrower, harder at the shoulder in a different way, a wedding band catching what little streetlight gets through the gap in the curtain. You did not do this. The body did it, the way a hand pulls back from a stove before the mind has finished the word hot. You are lying on your back now, composed, hands folded like a man laid out for a wake, and somewhere behind that stillness is a person who was never asked.

The room announces itself in pieces: the rattle of a train somewhere close and elevated, close enough that the windowpane hums faintly on its rails, then quiet, then the particular hush of a Chicago bedroom at an hour when even the streets under the L are holding their breath. Cold coming up through the floor. A radiator somewhere ticking as it cools. You are five-four in this and it registers immediately as a kind of compactness, a body that has learned to take up exactly the room it needs and no more — shoulders you can feel are used to standing very straight for long stretches, hands that ache faintly at the knuckles in a way that isn't injury, just the ordinary erosion of forty thousand handshakes and as many small blessings traced in the air over strangers' heads.

The t-shirt against your back gives first, because it's touching the most skin. It is soft in the specific way of a shirt washed two hundred times, and it opens onto laundry — not this morning's, but a Tuesday months back, folding it warm out of the dryer in the rectory basement while Deacon Whitfield complained about the boiler, the smell of fabric softener and old hymnals stacked in a box nobody had labeled. Then further: this exact shirt, black, unremarkable, pulled on last night — no, call it what his body calls it, pulled on after the ten-thirty confessions when his collar came off and his shoulders finally dropped two inches he didn't know they'd been carrying. He remembers, in that skin-deep unbidden way, unbuttoning the clerical shirt in the sacristy, the little plastic tab of the collar clicking against the sink edge, thinking about nothing, thinking about everything, thinking mostly about how his daughter's recital is Tuesday and he has a baptism that morning and he will have to leave the reception early and he already feels guilty about a thing that hasn't happened yet — that's the shape of him, you understand suddenly, guilt arriving ahead of schedule and staying late.

The sweatpants at your legs bring back the walk home, six blocks, the wind doing what it does under the tracks in February, a kind of physical insult, and him ducking his chin into his collar out of habit though there was no collar last night, just his own coat, his own scarf, a man off duty and still walking like someight ask him something on the way. He carries a nicotine pouch tin in his coat pocket most days, tucks one under his lip during the second reading sometimes when the homily's running long in his own head and he needs the fifteen minutes to not want a cigarette so badly it shows on his face. Nobody in the parish knows. His wife knows. His wife knows almost everything, which is either the marriage working or the marriage's whole cost, he's never fully decided which, not in nine years, not through the ADHD diagnosis at twenty-nine that explained so much backward — the sermons written four times, the car keys lost weekly, the way silence in the confessional booth used to feel like drowning until he learned to let it be a kind of prayer instead of a gap he had to fill.

The mattress under you gives up the deepest thing, because he is lying on it and has been lying on things like it, badly, since seminary — a body that runs hot with thought at eleven at night and stone-cold empty by six, awake in the collar again, present in the pew again, present at the hospital bed again, present, present, the job is presence and the job never fully clocks out. There was a marriage before this one. Nobody at the parish knows that either, not really, not the shape of it — a quick, young, wrong marriage in his twenties, over before it had children to complicate it, and an ex-wife he still calls on her birthday, out of something that isn't longing anymore so much as bookkeeping, an old debt paid on schedule. This marriage, the one with the ring, is the real one — his wife's laugh coming back to you now off the pillow itself, some private joke from the vestibule after the six o'clock, still shaking her head at something he'd said to old Mrs. Alvarez about her hat.

And under all of it, plain physical fact: you are thirty-three in this, and thirty-three feels like nothing is broken yet but everything has opinions — a shoulder that clicks reaching overhead, feet that know the exact worn grain of the rectory floorboards without looking, hands that have learned, without your asking them to, the motion of a blessing, a small economical arc, muscle memory older than any single memory attached to it.

You bring your hands up in front of your face in the dark, palms first, then turn them, and even in the almost-no-light you can see the ring catching what there is of it. Downstairs a train goes by close enough to hum in the glass, and you say, to the ceiling, to nobody, in a voice that still has an unfamiliar Chicago flatness to its vowels:

"Not yet, Lord — just give me a minute in this one."