Rafael Correia

He is sitting up in a bed that isn't his, in a room that smells like antiseptic and the ghost of hospital coffee, and his hand is on the scar because that's what you do when a thing hurts and also when a thing is new — you touch it to make sure it's real.

I was not planning to be here. I want to say that first, if there's anyone keeping the record. I did not choose Rafael Correia the way you choose a house or a life. I was a heart, mostly, and then some wiring nobody names, and then I was in a cooler for four hours while a man I never met flew north with me packed in ice, and now I am sitting up in his skin looking at his own wrist like it's a menu I didn't order from.

His name comes to me the way the room does — all at once, no order to it. Rafael. Thirty-seven. Tattoo shop on Calle Ocho with a client's half-finished koi still under plastic wrap on a cooler shelf. A wife named Marisol who is in the hallway right now on the phone with his mother, translating good news into Spanish and back into English like it needs to be said twice to be believed. An ex, Priscilla, three years gone and somehow not gone at all, a name that surfaces in him unbidden the way mine must have surfaced in whoever's chest this used to belong to.

I feel his heartbeat change under my hand. It isn't rushing. It's finding a new time signature, like a song that's been transposed, and his lungs follow it half a breath behind, adjusting. I watch — from wherever I am now, which is everywhere in him — as his own eyes water without his say-so, and he doesn't know if it's relief or something else wearing relief's coat.

Nobody in that room can see it. That's the strange mercy of this. His face does what his face has always done: settles, a little grim, a little tired, Catholic in its patience, the face of a man who has sat still through six hours of another man's pain before and knows how to wait one out. But something underneath has rearranged the furniture. He picks at a thumbnail without deciding to. That, at least, is his — some habits survive anybody.

When Marisol comes back in, phone still warm in her hand, she says his name and he answers a half-second late, like a satellite delay, like the call is coming from farther away than the hallway. She doesn't notice. Why would she. He is still skinny, still black-haired, still has the tribal half sleeve and the wedding band and the tired blue eyes. He still bites his nails. He will still go back to the shop in three weeks and recline that chair for somebody's first tattoo and tell them breathe, it only bites for a second.

He doesn't know there's anyone else keeping time in there with him. I don't know how to tell him, or if I should, or if there's a rest of my life to spend telling him things at all, now, or if this — his hand on his own sternum, feeling two rhythms agree to become one — is the only conversation we ever get to have.

He presses down once more, like checking a door is locked.

It is.