Owen Brackett

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You do not choose him. That is the first thing to understand about how this works, though understanding is not something you have much use for anymore. There is only the wanting, and then a door, and this time the door is a basement on Hancock Street in Detroit with eleven inches of water standing on the floor and a wall of breakers arcing white.

He is twenty-three. He does not belong here — not in the basement, not in the coat. The coat is his cousin's, borrowed off a hook because the sleet had soaked him through walking over, and his cousin's lab is upstairs, a research annex nobody uses on Sundays, a building that leaks. He came to help. That's the whole of it. A pipe let go in the ceiling and the water came down the conduit and the panel started spitting and his cousin ran up for the shutoff and Owen stayed because someone should stay, because he is the kind of man who stays. He works a gate. He knows about staying at a post.

Look at him in that last second. His mouth open a little, jaw set, his hand going out toward the breaker not because he is brave but because he can't think of anything else to do with a hand. Water running off the hem of the coat. The sodium light overhead buzzing. Freckles across his nose and cheeks, and the light so hard it makes them stand out like something scattered.

Then the storm puts its finger on the roof, and the current comes down through the wet steel, and the flash is behind him and white, and I am in.

He goes rigid for one beat — the whole lean length of him, shoulders locked, arms straight — and then sags. Then straightens.

And I lift his hands and look at them.

That is the part I always want, and nobody tells you why. Calluses at the base of each finger from the gate keys, from the weight room in the basement of his mother's house. A hangnail. Cold water beading on the knuckles. Under the skin, blood moving. He was twenty-three years old and had never once looked at his own hands.

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His cousin comes down the stairs shouting his name and I answer with it, because I have his mouth and his mouth knows how. *I'm good. I'm good, Ray, I'm fine.* The voice comes out flatter than his. Nobody notices flat.

I have a week.

I spend the first night sitting on the edge of his bathtub with the taps running hot, sleeve pushed up, watching the steam raise gooseflesh on his forearm. In the mirror there's a young man with wet light-brown hair and blue eyes and freckles, and I make the face do things — surprise, disgust, that particular half-smile I find already grooved into the muscle, the one he must have used on people at the gate to keep things easy. It fits him. It does not fit me. It goes on anyway.

Monday I take his body to work because his body knows the way. Painted cinderblock, that green nobody would choose, and the long throat of the corridor, and the gate. I stand at the gate for eight hours and I am not bored for one minute of it. Men go past me. They say *Brackett* and I nod. The keys hang off a retractable reel at his hip and the little zip sound of it going out and coming back is the best sound I have heard in a very long time. Someone offers me half a sandwich. I eat it. I eat it so slowly the man asks if it's bad. It is not bad. It is turkey and mustard on white bread and I have no words for what it is.

His girlfriend's name is Danielle. She notices before anyone. Wednesday, on the couch, TV going, she says, *You're being weird.* Not scared. Fond, a little irritated. *You keep looking at me like you're doing math.*

I am doing math. I am counting what's left.

*The lightning thing shook me up,* I say, and that buys everything, all week — the standing too long in the shower, the walking the wide street of brick houses at six in the morning under a low gray sky just to feel cold air pull through a set of lungs, the way I hold her hand like a specimen. She lets me be strange. That is the astonishing thing about the living: how much strangeness they will absorb out of love and call it a rough patch.

Thursday his phone lights with a name — Kayla, who is the recent ex and who still matters, whatever mattering means in a life with only twenty-three years in it. *Heard about the fire. You ok?* I look at it a long time. He would have written something careful. Something that took him twenty minutes and got shorter with every draft.

I type: *I'm okay. I hope you're happy.*

Then I delete *I hope you're happy* because it isn't mine to send, and I send *I'm okay,* and I put the phone face down, and I sit in his mother's kitchen with his hands flat on the table until the light changes.

---

Friday at the gate a man stops in front of me and says, *You look different, boss.*

*Yeah?*

*Lighter,* he says. *Like you set something down.*

I laugh with Owen's throat and the sound is wrong and neither of us cares.

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Sunday morning I wake up in his bed with Danielle's arm across his chest and I know the way you know weather. I get up. I go down to the street. Brick houses either side, gray sky lying on the rooftops like a lid, a dog barking two yards over, the cold coming up through the soles of his feet because I did not put shoes on and I wanted the cold on the skin one more time.

I hold his hands up in front of his face. Calluses. Hangnail. Blood moving.

*Thank you,* I say, to nobody, in a stranger's voice.

He will come back to himself on a sidewalk in his own neighborhood with wet feet and no memory of the week and everyone telling him he seemed lighter, that he set something down. He will think it was the lightning. He'll be right in a way he will never get to the bottom of.

And me — I go back to the wanting.