Patrick Sullivan

You are standing in Raymond Kasprzak's kitchen in Pittsburgh, and the house is asleep around you. Its refrigerator hums. You are sixty-two, with a bad left knee, and you have been him for less than a minute. You came back to the site with his hands flat on the counter, and you already know why.

He has a ladder in the garage, and a mop bucket with a wringer he loves. In the minute you have owned him, you have learned that he hums when he cleans and that his wife's reading glasses are still on the windowsill. Everything in him is sorted and kept and grieved, and none of it is yours. You wanted a body that had nowhere to be. This one has everywhere. His moustache itches against your lip, and the grief in him is patient and heavy and tender, and you cannot carry it. So you pay, and the wheel turns.

Then you are lying on your side in the dark with a light six inches from your face.

Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll. Your cheek is warm with blue, and your head rests on your own bent arm. The mattress is thin and the room smells of vape, something sweet like blue razz, and of cheap detergent. Your heart is going fast for a man lying still. The thumb moves again, and it is steadier than it was.

You flick past everything he had stopped on. It is a picture of a girl, then a post, then another. You let it all go by.

The shirt against your back is soft with washing, and it hands you something. It is the morning, and his hands are doing up a gray work shirt in a bathroom with a mirror that has a crack in one corner. His fingers drum on the sink while he waits for the water to run warm. A little voice from the next room is singing a song with no words. He has a daughter, and she is three. The feeling that comes with her is so large it has no edges. You almost drop the phone.

The sheet under your palm gives you more. There is a girl's side of this bed, and it is cold. Nobody has slept there for a while. It is a recent ex, and a different girlfriend now, and a guilt that is not clean about either. He has a tattoo of a name and a date, and you feel it on your arm like a warm coin. Elizabeth, 2002, is the year she was born. He does not say whose she is, even to himself.

The phone is cracked at the corner and warm from his thumb. Through it comes the debt: a number with a minus in front, a drawer he does not open, and a prayer his mother taught him that he says anyway, in the dark, after the second drink. The corridor smell of floor wax rises in you like a hymn. It is the school, the keys on his belt, the long empty hall after everyone has gone.

His body is twenty-two. The shoulders are strong and the stomach is flat. The knees do not hurt at all, and that is the thing that shocks you most. His hair falls against your forehead, and when you push it back, your fingers know exactly how.

You hold your free hand up into the light and turn it over. It is long-fingered and freckled, and the knuckles are scraped from some bucket. It is not Raymond's, and it is not yours either.

You look up and say into the dark, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere under the words is the other question. It asks how long this one lasts, and when the wanting comes back.