Martin Feldstein

You are standing in a machine shop with a micrometer in your hand, and the man you are wearing, Samuel Prewitt, has been yours for under a minute. His reading glasses are pushed up into gray hair. His front teeth have that gap, and your tongue keeps finding it. The part on the bench is a small bracket, and he would have known what was wrong with it. You don't. You turn it over and the number means nothing, and the whole competent body around you waits for you to say something an engineer would say.

That is the reason, and you wouldn't call it a reason out loud. He was good at a thing, and the goodness was all in him, not in you. Nobody had told you the wheel hands over the body and keeps the knowing. You wanted the sureness, and what you got was the shape of it. So you set the micrometer down, open the page on the phone in his shirt pocket, and let the wheel turn.

It turns.

Then you are sitting, with your weight on your forearms, which rest on your knees. There is a concrete floor, cracked, and a water bottle sweating beside one shoe. Your breath is going out through your teeth in a long hiss, and you stop it. You are a minute early. You stand, and the bar is above you on its hooks.

Your hands go up to it two inches wider than they have all year. The knurling bites the calluses. You lift it off and your shoulders, narrow and stringy, take it with a complaint, and the grinding starts. It is slow. Your face does nothing at all.

The gray shirt against your back is damp, and it gives you the first thing: a drawer in a bedroom, the shirt being the one he always took because it was soft. Two fingers hooked under the collar, a woman's voice from the kitchen saying she was leaving by eight. Then it is gone. The bar is cold. Under it something older comes, a Friday night, candles, his father's hands on his shoulders, a blessing mumbled over bread. His chest goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with the weight.

The rep ends. You rack it badly, steel on steel, and your right hand goes by itself into the pocket of the navy sweats and finds a lighter. Your thumb flips the lid, shut, open, shut. He never smoked. A man gave it to him once, a store owner who retired, and the metal is worn smooth. You see him standing in the aisle at dawn with pallets waiting, the earpiece cold in his ear, keys on the carabiner, thinking, this is enough, this is plenty, and not believing it.

Sixty years sit in the knees. The skin on the nose and cheeks feels tight and sun-warm. There is a daughter's name you almost reach, and a son's, and the ex, a door closing with care. Every bit of it arrives wet and half-finished.

You look at your hands. They are long, freckled across the backs, and they turn over without being asked. You lift your eyes to the dim glass of the window and the face in it, bald and freckled and clean-shaved.

"Hello, Martin," you say, and his voice is dry and kind.

You wonder how long, and whether tomorrow you will still be him.