Neil Guidry

You are standing in Rodrigo Valdivia's kitchen, in his socks, in the dark, with his thumb on the cold lip of the counter. Eastern Kentucky is asleep. The refrigerator hums. A man who has been him for less than a minute has already found out what you found out: he has a knee that complains on the stairs, a daughter's drawing on the door, and a quiet so complete you can hear the furnace thinking. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. You wanted to be somebody who was in the middle of something, and he is somebody who is asleep. You lean over the sink, you look at the black window, and you take out the phone with his thumb.

The page is already open. The wheel turns once, and the dark kitchen is gone.

You are sunk. That is the first thing: sunk in a couch, the cushion holding your whole back like a hand, your weight settled low and heavy, hips wedged between the arms. The room is dark except for the television, and the light moves over your face, cold and then warm. Your right hand holds a remote loosely against the arm. Your heart goes slow and big. The show has just cut to a bright frame and you sit up straight and set the remote down on the arm, and nobody laughs.

The hoodie is on your shoulders, and the zipper is open, and the teeth of it are cold against your wrist. Then the morning comes up through the cloth. It is not yours. He stood in a narrow hall with steam off the wet street coming through the screen, and he put the gray T-shirt on over his head and it caught on his beard. The sleeves of the hoodie came after, left arm first, because the left has the ring and the ring always snags. His wife was already gone, her coffee cup still warm on the sink. He felt something plain and good about that. He felt it every morning.

The sock under your heel is thin at the bottom. The carpet pushes up through it. A flash: bare feet, a small child asleep on this floor, his daughter at three, her whole weight on his shins as he lay here with a fever and she had a crayon. He felt a terror then, huge and happy, that nothing could be allowed to happen to her. It goes through your chest like a swallowed stone.

You breathe. The belly rises under the shirt, soft and warm, and it is not a thing you are ashamed of. It is just where the air goes. Forty-nine years sit in the low back and the right shoulder, a dull ache, from a desk, from a chair outside a corner office where he answered other men's phones for eleven years and was good at it. Under his fingers the couch fabric is nubbed and worn, and the memory comes with the nap of it: the evening his wife fell asleep here against his arm and he did not move for two hours, though his hand went dead, because he was a man who could be still for love. He also had a cigarette once, out back on the steps, years ago. He quit. You taste the wanting on the roof of his mouth and it is only a ghost.

You turn your left arm over. On the inner forearm, in black and gray, a face looks up. It is someone he lost, you can feel that much, a pressure behind his eyes that arrives without a name. The ring catches the screen light.

You look at the hand a long time, turning it, closing it, opening it. Then you look up, past the screen, at the dark window.

"Well," you say, in a voice with New Orleans worn into it. "Hello, Neil."

The show goes on without you laughing. Somewhere a clock in you is already running, and you do not know how long this one holds, or whether you will still be him when it gets light.