Michael Kubiak

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You have been waiting a long time in a place with no floor, and then there is a floor, and it is oak, and it is cold under his knees.

He does the work for you. That's the part nobody believes. He kneels in a first-floor apartment in Avondale with the radiator knocking and the 8:14 rattling the window glass in its frame, and he sets four candles at the compass points because a book he half-trusts told him to, and he crushes school chalk into a circle that isn't round — it bulges toward the bookcase where he ran out of arm. He pricks his thumb with a utility knife from his own bag. He is careful about it. He wipes the blade on his jeans first. Twenty-six years old and he still can't watch himself bleed without looking away, so he looks away, at the lamp, at the stacked paperbacks he bought from a man on Milwaukee who told him what to do with them.

He wants something. You don't know what, and you never will, because the wanting is the one thing that doesn't come across. Only the body comes across. His girlfriend Renata thinks he's out with the guys from the local. His ex — the one he still checks the profile of at 1 a.m. with the phone flat on his chest — she is somewhere in Portage Park not thinking about him at all. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the ceiling he was under all day, sixteen feet of unfinished drywall grid and EMT conduit he bent himself, and the thought that he will be under it Tuesday too, and the Tuesday after.

He presses the thumb to the chalk.

He says the last word with his lips only — no sound, just the shape of it, the way a man mouths a number he's counting — and every flame in the room leans toward him at once, four small tongues bowing inward like they've been pulled on a string.

Then they straighten.

So do you.

—

The first thing is the weight of a head. You had forgotten that a head is heavy, that it sits on a stack of bone and has to be balanced. You sit back on his heels. His hands are on his thighs. You lift one and turn it in the candlelight and it is a stranger's hand: broad palm, calluses ridged along the base of the fingers, a yellow smear of wire nut wax, the nail of the middle finger blackened from something dropped weeks ago. A bead of blood on the thumb, going tacky. You put the thumb in his mouth without deciding to. Iron and chalk dust.

You stand up. Five foot nine of untrained twenty-six-year-old — no strength in him worth speaking of, just a soft plain frame that has never been asked to do more than climb a ladder and hold a drill overhead, and it aches from that, a dull burn across both shoulders that you inherit mid-sentence like a debt.

There is a mirror over the dresser in the next room. You go to it because that is what you always do first.

The dimples are what get you. Even now, with his face doing nothing at all — mouth flat, eyes just looking — there are two deep creases cut into his cheeks like the face was made in a mold and set that way. You try a smile and they go canyon-deep and it is obscene, how likeable it makes him. You try a scowl. The dimples stay. He has been walking around his whole life with a face that argues on his behalf, that tells every foreman and every bartender and every woman on the Blue Line *this one's fine, this one's harmless,* and he never had to say a word.

You practice in the glass. You find where the eyebrows go. The brown eyes are unremarkable and that is a gift.

—

You blow out the candles. You scrub the chalk with a bath towel and put the towel in the hamper because you are not stupid.

His phone buzzes at 10:40. *you alive?* You look at the letters a long while, learning the shape of her name, then type *yeah just tired* and it goes through, and nothing in the world objects.

—

A month is a long time in a body that goes to work.

You learn the alarm at 5:20 and the mercy of hot water. You learn the walk to the Belmont platform in February, the cold coming up through his boots off the salt-white sidewalk, brick and rusted steel and the pale sun trying to get through the girders, and the way the whole trestle screams when a train comes over your head, and how nobody looks up because everybody has always lived here.

You learn the ceiling. Half-finished, a grid of black iron and drywall track, conduit running the length of it in long silver lines. The trade is in his arms and you just have to stay out of the way — the hands know where the benders are, the fingers know a quarter-turn on a lock ring by feel. Twice you overreach and a guy named Doheny says *the hell was that, Mike* and the dimples do the apologizing.

He tastes coffee differently than you would have guessed. He is allergic to nothing. His back hurts at the end of every day in a specific place, low and left, and by week three you can't remember what a back that doesn't hurt feels like.

Renata comes over on a Thursday and puts her cold hands under the collar of his shirt and says *you've been weird,* and you say *long month,* and she laughs into his throat and says *it's the third,* and you understand that you have said something true by accident. You are careful with her. Being careful is the whole discipline of the thing. You keep to the shape of the man: you drink what he drinks, you answer to *Mike*, you don't say the words he wouldn't. You take his body to bed and you take it to work and you take it out on the fire escape at midnight to look at the sodium light on the tracks and you feel the cold come into his fingers and you think: this. This is all it ever was. He had this.

Once, on a platform, someone in a green coat goes past and something in the chest goes off like a dropped tool — a lurch, a heat, a whole grammar of longing that is not yours and has nowhere to put itself. Her. It has to be her. You never see her face. You stand there hosting a grief with no story attached to it until the train comes.

You don't fix anything for him. That was never on offer. You just wear him well and eat his food and let his hands do the good work they know, and you don't tell his girlfriend the truth and you don't text the ex, and you leave the circle unredrawn under the rug.

—

On the last night you sit on the edge of his bed with his phone face-down and you say his name out loud, in his voice, just to hear it — *Michael Kubiak* — and the dimples cut in without being asked, the way they always do, for nobody, at rest.

Then the floor goes.

He comes to on the edge of the mattress with his boots still on and his thumb healed over and a month of Tuesdays behind him he can't account for. There is a smell of blown-out candle in the apartment that shouldn't still be there. He looks at his hands. Calluses, wax, a black nail growing out. His hands.

He goes to work. He's good at it. He'll do it again Tuesday.

And when Renata asks him, months later, what happened in February, he'll smile — the whole face folding into those two deep creases, the face that always did the talking for him — and he'll say he doesn't know. He'll mean it.