Nathan Cruickshank

You are in Leon Pettiway's chest, and it is slow work, breathing in him. Sixty-four years of lungs. The office smells of hand sanitizer and the paper on the exam table, and the window is full of a flat bright Tuesday-morning LA that has nothing in it for you. You came in at twenty to nine. At nine a woman is due with a mole she thinks is nothing, and he would know what to say to her. You would only have his mouth to say it with.

That is the whole trouble. Forty minutes ago you were given a man who knew things, and you have found you can't use any of it. His memories rise when you touch the stethoscope, and they are all of other people's bodies, other people's fear. Everyone he ever helped leans on you from inside. You wanted to be unknown. You wanted nobody to need you.

You open the site with his thin brown fingers. The wheel turns and the room goes.

The air is wet and the light is gray and sudden. You are standing on a step with your right foot lifted and your left hand closed around something stiff. A book. Your weight is already moving down the stairs, and for half a second the motion is wrong, a stumble in the knee, so you stop and set your foot down again slowly and correctly. Then ten more steps' worth of checking, every small thing in you verifying that the stoop is still there.

Wet iron under his palm. The railing is cold, grit-slick, and your thumb knows a chipped place in the paint before you see it. A memory comes up through it. Six years ago, a February, he scraped that rail with a putty knife himself because the trustees had no money, and his knuckles bled into the black. He was proud and embarrassed to be proud.

The book is the next thing. Leather worn soft at the corners, the spine loose. It is heavier than it looks, and it comes up warm. It was his grandfather's, a church in Ohio, a front pew, a smell of floor wax. He was nine, being told to sit still, and he sat still because the old man's finger lay under a line like a man holding a door. The hymn was "Be Thou My Vision." He cried and no one noticed. He decided then, in the wax smell, to be the one who holds the door.

The jacket across your shoulders is wool, scratchy at the neck, and it gives you the morning. The shirt first, navy, the third button that wants to stay open, because the iron was cold and he was late. Then the sleeves, one and then the other, and the jacket last, the only one he owns that makes a congregation sit up. He stood in the hall mirror and did the hair with his fingers, gel, spikes, a gesture against being thirty and tired. He told the mirror, *you can do this one more week.* The money was short again and he had not told anyone. He had the sense of being a door, with everyone passing through and no one stopping.

The body underneath is decent. Five-seven, light on your feet, a lean thirty with a tired lower back from the front pew and the folding chairs he stacks himself. The knees are good. The jaw is smooth where he shaved it, and it stings faintly in the wet air. The shoes pinch at the left small toe. Your hands, his hands, are curling and cracking the knuckles by themselves, one at a time, a habit older than prayer.

Someone calls from the sidewalk, a man in a black jacket, a name that isn't yours. Pastor. Wet pavement, the hiss of tires, a bus sighing somewhere. There are people waiting to be told something.

You lift the hand off the rail and turn it over. It is steady, and you are almost surprised. Then you look up at them, and you say, "I'm here."

How long, you wonder, with the knuckles still ticking in your fingers. Until the wanting comes back, which it will. Tomorrow, or in four minutes. You do not know yet whether the stairs will still be under you.