Martin Doyle

You are Neil Brandvik, and you are standing in a kitchen in the dark with the refrigerator humming at you. Five foot seven, silver hair, a social worker's soft shoes on cold tile. You have been him for less than a minute. His body is fine, it works, nothing is wrong with it. But you stood here with a glass of water and the whole sleeping city out the window, and what you felt was the small flat click of a door that does not open anywhere. That is the whole reason. You know it and do not say it. The page with the wheel is already lit in your hand.

You press it. Neil goes out of you like a held breath.

Now there is paper in your right hand, a few sheets, the edges soft. Your left palm lies flat on a desk. The fluorescent tube hums overhead, one lamp is on, and the windows are black with city lights far down in them. Your weight is on one hip, leaning. You are tall. The floor is farther away than it has been. You were in the middle of a line, and your eyes were on the paper while your hand did the rest.

The paper first. Your thumb rubs the corner and a flash comes, in his feeling: a girl's handwriting, round and careful, and the small pride of finding the one good sentence in a bad essay and circling it. Then a whole October behind it, the same circle drawn ten thousand times, and the faint private shame that it is the best part of his day.

The desk edge presses into your thigh. Wood, laminate, a nick under the heel of your hand. Memory: the first week in this room, nineteen years ago, a younger man rearranging the desk four times, wanting it to look like somebody lived here.

The shirt is against your back, soft blue cotton washed thin. Sleeve by sleeve it comes. This morning, the bedroom still gray, his wife's shape under the quilt. He buttoned the cuffs standing at the dresser, left then right, because the left one always fights him. Behind that, the youngest one's voice from down the hall, asking where her other shoe was, and the lanyard lifted over his head last, the card knocking against the buttons. He felt tender and tired and did not name either.

The trousers, gray and worn at the knee. Memory: the garage under the house, the steep driveway, cold white light, three kids' bikes tangled and his shoulder wedged against the wall to get the car in. A bad month of money, numbers on the back of an envelope, his wife's hand over his. We'll manage. They always have, barely.

Your fingers want to go to your scalp. They do, and the hand slides back over the thin M of the hairline, the moustache bristling when you exhale. Memory: a mirror, the slow year the hair left, and her saying she liked his forehead. The ring on your left hand is plain and warm and a little tight at the knuckle.

The body underneath: fifty years of it, long, still strong through the thighs and back. A dull ache sits low in the spine from standing, and the feet are tired in the black shoes. The eyes are dry from the glare. Nothing in him is afraid. That is strange to be handed.

You put the papers down and turn your right hand over. The ring catches the lamp. The palm is wide and ink-stained at the side, and not yours at all.

You look up into the dark glass and say, "Well. Hello, Martin."

The question comes up from underneath, as it always does. How long will this one hold, and when will the flat click come back?