Rafael Contreras

You are standing in a conference room on the nineteenth floor, in a good gray suit that fits Brendan Quigley like an apology, and you have been him for eleven minutes. The blue eyes work. The dimples work. His partner is talking about a deposition, and you are watching a pen in your borrowed fingers click, click, and you know with perfect clarity that you are bored of the way this man's problems are all made of paper. Nothing is wrong with him. He is simply finished. The afternoon light lies on the table like something poured, and you thumb the phone under the edge of it, and the wheel is already turning in your head, the way it does.

Then there is no room.

There is a steel deck under your boots, and cold on the back of your neck, and a wrench in your right hand with its jaw closed on a brass valve. Your left hand is flat on the fitting. Something has gone wrong in the motion, a half-second hitch, a turn made wrong, and so you back it off and do it again, slowly. It seats. The air smells of jet fuel, salt and paint. Past the great open mouth of the hangar the harbor lights glitter, and a vending machine glows blue against the wall, humming to no one. Everyone is asleep. Aircraft sit chained down around you like animals.

Your body is heavier than Brendan's, softer through the middle, solid in the thighs. Your knees ache in a low, honest way. Your scalp is cool where the hair has pulled back from your temples. There is a small round lump of pouch under your upper lip, tingling, and you did not put it there.

The coverall comes first. The cotton cuff scrapes your wrist, and the morning opens: a narrow apartment, a lane of dark houses, the vending machine outside buzzing. He sits on the edge of the bed pulling the left leg on, then the right, the zipper climbing under his thumb with a sound he has heard ten thousand times. He tucks the flashlight into the chest pocket, where it always rides. He is thinking of his daughter's recital, and that he will miss it again.

You tighten the wrench and cannot stop yourself checking the fitting. Then again. Ten times, each one deliberate, and the old job answers, nothing wrong, nothing wrong. Your thumb finds the pale groove on your ring finger, where a band sat for eleven years. The wrench handle is worn smooth, and it gives you her laughing in a kitchen, and then her not laughing, a suitcase by a door, his voice catching on the first syllable of a word he could not get out. His hands had shaken then too. He stutters when pressure builds, and the hands do it with him.

Under your boots the deck hums. The cap's brim presses his forehead. A small cross hangs at his collarbone, and a Sunday opens for you, incense and a child's patent shoes, the one hour in the week he is entirely still.

You lift your hand into the light, turn it over. Thick fingers. A tan line. They are not yours, and they are warm.

"Okay," you say, and he has a low, careful voice. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."