Raúl Whitcomb

Liam Gorecki's back hurts, and that is part of why you are leaving. You stand in his kitchen in the dark with the refrigerator humming. His forearms are black to the elbow with grease that the soap never gets out. The beauty mark by his eye is a thing you caught in the bathroom mirror an hour ago and liked for about a minute. You have worn him less than a minute in the sense that matters, and already you know the whole shape of him. He is a good body and it is finished. The wheel is a lit page on his phone, and your thumb is already on it. Nothing he can do is a thing you have not done. You could not say what you want. It is only that wanting has come back, and he is not it.

You spin.

The wet street takes you in mid-step. A shoe scuffs and you stumble off the kerb. Your palm slaps the cold roof of a parked car, and the scuff stops. There is rain-smell and tar and the sour sweetness of whiskey coming up from a stomach that is not yours. The street is empty. Every shop is shuttered and dark.

The jacket comes first. Canvas, stiff at the cuffs, heavy on the shoulders. Pressing your arm against the car brings the lining against your wrist, and with it a morning: the same jacket off a hook by a back door, a woman's voice from upstairs saying *take the long way, it's nice out*, and his feeling, a dull warm guilt, because he had already decided to stop at the bar. The flannel under it is soft from washing. At the buttons your fingers come up with a kitchen memory. A Friday rush, tickets running down the rail, and him at the flat-top, so quick and so empty-headed that it felt like praying. His fingers are drumming on the car roof. You did not tell them to.

Your feet find the pavement, and the left shoe is the bad one. Through the sole comes a bar stool's brass rail, then a church floor on a cold Sunday, a kneeler under his knees and a child's hand in his. His daughter, small then. The tenderness is so large and so unearned that you nearly stop breathing. The ring is warm on your left hand. You turn it with your thumb and get a kitchen table, a wife laughing at something he said, and under the laughter a quiet that he has never put a name to. He has not told her how many nights he walks the long way.

He is fifty-five. His knees ache and his lower back is a hot wire. His body is thin, tall, and strong along the forearms and wrists, with the strength of ten thousand pans lifted. The whiskey sits in him like warm sand. It does not blur you, and you find you can stand straight.

You go forty steps and they land even and quiet. At the corner your feet turn left. It is the wrong way for him, and you do not know why you chose it.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Gray hairs on the knuckles, burn scars you cannot find in the facts but can feel, the ring. You turn them over. They drum once and go still.

You look up and say, to the empty street, "Well. Hello."

Somewhere under you the wheel is already lit, patient as a pilot light. You do not know whether this man lasts the night or the year, or whether the wanting is already stirring.