Patrick Doyle

You are standing in a break room in Miami with Glenn Sorensen's thumb pressed to a vending machine button, and you have been him for less than a minute. Already the freckles on his forearms annoy you. The stubble itches. His knees are forty-four years old and say so. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. A man who runs a press all afternoon, who wants a cold can of something and a Tuesday that ends, and you can feel the whole shape of that life like a sleeve that fits fine and goes nowhere. So you take out the phone and open the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb knows what it is doing before you do. You have done this one thousand three hundred and thirty-one times. Glenn will not be missed by anyone you can feel.

The wheel turns. It clicks and slows.

Paper. You are holding paper, a thick sheaf of it, the edges lifting under the fingers of both hands, and the hands are doing the thing hands do ten thousand times: thumb under the corner, flip, square, flip. Your left hand has gone wrong. One page folded under. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then the next, and the next, each one checked, as though this job could still surprise anyone.

Air-conditioned air, toner, a plant's wet soil. Glass at your left, desks beyond it, a woman's voice on a phone. Through the open front door a brownstone stoop across the street, gray and damp.

The polo comes first. Cotton, washed soft, the collar a little stiff where it dried on a hanger. It gives you this morning: a bedroom too small for the two of them, the girlfriend's back turned, a child's sneaker on the floor that he nudged aside with his foot. He found the navy shirt because it was the one that did not need ironing. He pulled it over a head that already felt tired. The khakis give you the belt, the dark leather punched with an extra hole he made himself with a nail, because he has lost weight and not told anyone. The shoes hurt at the left heel.

Your fingers go to your mouth. Your teeth find a thumbnail, and the nail is already bitten to the quick. The taste comes with a flash: a car, a night, a number on a statement, sixty thousand and something below zero, and him sitting very quietly in the driveway with the engine off so he would not have to go in yet. Two drinks most evenings, he tells himself, it is two. A rosary in a coat pocket from his mother. He does not pray with it. He holds it.

The ID card swings against your thigh. Its plastic is warm. Under it, an old name, a girl from before, Maureen, who still texts him on his birthday, and he reads it in the stairwell every year and never answers. The ink on your right forearm tingles when the air hits it. A face in black and gray, a man's face, shaded so carefully it looks breathing. You do not know who it is. His chest hurts when you look at it, a dull, specific ache, and no name comes.

His body is thin, wiry, a little hollow under the ribs. His feet burn. His lower back has a knot from standing. His scalp feels the cold at both temples. His hands are quick and know this paper better than you do.

You let go of the stack. You turn your right hand over and look at the palm, the bitten fingers, the ink climbing the wrist. Then you lift your eyes to the glass, to the room, to the lens of the morning.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."