Mateo Ruiz

You are standing at a sink in Philadelphia, in the dark, in Tomás Reyes Aguilar's body, with the tap running over his blue-eyed reflection and nothing in it for you. Forty-six years old. Five-five. His knees complain on the stairs and his lower back keeps a ledger. Three weeks ago you would have called this a good body, and for the most part it still is.

It is the middle of the night, the house is asleep, and you have been awake in it for under a minute. You came downstairs because you could not stay in the bed beside his sleeping wife. She turns toward the warm place where he should be. She is not yours, and you have not been able to stop knowing it.

The groundskeeper's hands know how to coil a hose. They know nothing you need. You wanted to want something, and nothing came. You dry his hands on the dish towel and open the laptop on the table. The wheel is already on the screen. You pay, and your thumb is steady.

The streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheets. Face-down, one arm hanging off the mattress, he breathes ragged and wet, the breath of a man who drank to get here. Then the breathing evens out, and you are in it.

The arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back and the hands fold on the chest. It is a posture he has never once slept in, and it makes you feel like a corpse laid out. The mattress is soft and sagging. Your mouth tastes of whiskey, and a dull pressure sits behind your eyes. One leg is already moving under the sheet, bouncing against nothing. It does not stop when you tell it to.

You pull the sheet off and sit up. The T-shirt, gray and soft with washing, is twisted against your ribs. When you smooth it down, something opens.

He is putting it on in a bathroom with a fan that rattles. The shirt is one of three, and the other two are worse. His wife is saying something through the door, and he answers lightly because the child is awake. Her voice is warm. He is dreading a day, and a feeling like swallowed sand sits under his sternum. Then it is gone, and your hand is on your own chest.

It is a skinny-fat chest, soft over the belly and narrow in the shoulder. You feel the hang of the stomach against the waistband of the jeans he slept in. He had not changed. Somewhere in him a fear lives that if he undressed properly for bed he would have to admit the night had ended.

You press your thumb to the band on your left hand. Plain gold, a little loose. At once he is in a church with a damp wool smell, standing with his shoulders pulled back, the ring cold and new. His wife's hands are shaking in his, and he is so happy and so certain he will ruin it that the two feelings seem to be one. He crosses himself afterward out of habit. His mother is watching him do it from the second pew.

You flex the fingers and see the ink in the streetlight. The tattoos are bold lines and faded color: a swallow, a rose, a dagger running up the back of one hand. The neck ones you find with your fingers. At the edge of the swallow there is a ridge of old skin. The memory is of a hot shop and a stranger's glove on his wrist, and a nineteen-year-old's pride at not flinching. Beneath the pride is the plain wish to be someone with a story already on him.

There is another man in there, further down. You touch the pillow beside you and find nothing, but the hand goes still anyway. A boy with a laugh like a dropped tray, a back seat, a summer that was almost enough. He is the ex who still matters. You have not touched anything that holds him yet, and you do not reach for it. The ache arrives anyway, with nothing to explain it. Some part of Mateo has been loyal to a door he never opened again.

You swing your feet to the floor. The boards are cold and gritty. On the nightstand sit a glass of water, a lamp, a pill bottle, and a lanyard looped over the lamp's neck. You lift it. It is damp from his hand, and the badge is printed with a company name you do not know.

He is in a hotel lobby with a lanyard bumping his sternum, sitting under a fake ficus, one leg going. He has forty minutes before a man who will not buy anything. His phone shows the balance of a loan that exceeds what he has ever had. Underwater, and he knows it to the dollar. Every morning he sells a thing he half believes in and comes home smelling of other people's air freshener. The shame is small and constant, like a stone in a shoe. He has been drinking more, and he does not say so, and the drinking has learned to be quiet.

Then his daughter, five or six, asleep against his shoulder in the truck. The weight of her is the one entirely clean thing he owns. It goes through you so hard that you have to put the lanyard down.

Your leg is still bouncing. You let it.

You raise your hand into the streetlight and turn it over. Dagger, swallow, faded red. The knuckles are scarred a little. They are broad hands on a small man, and you know them now from inside. Then you look up at the dark and speak, because someone should say it to the room, in a voice that comes out lower and rougher than yours.

"Okay, Mateo. Okay."

Down the hall a child coughs once and settles. Your leg keeps going. You do not know whether it will still be your leg in the morning, or in an hour. The wanting is quiet in you tonight. You wait to see how long that lasts.