Raymond Eng

You were Elijah Runningwater for less than a minute, and what sent you back is the satchel. It sits by the door of a rented apartment in Queens, canvas, heavy with the day's route, and your shoulders have already learned its strap, the way they learn everything. His dimples show in the dark of the bathroom mirror. You pressed your thumb into one and felt nothing you wanted. He is thirty-four and strong and his knees do not complain, and none of that was the trouble. The trouble was the letters. Four hundred doors a day, and every one of them knows exactly who he is. Somebody's mother waved at you and said his name, and you waved back with his arm. You lay on his couch with the light off and thought: this one is already taken, by everyone but me. So you opened the page and the wheel was waiting, and you paid, and you let it turn.

The ground goes out from under you and comes back. Your right foot is in the air and has no business being there, a stumble that never lands, and then the other foot catches and you are running. Cold goes in through your nose and comes out white. Something small is in your ear. The path is gravel and it speaks under your shoes. Water lies to your left, flat and gray, breathing mist. Your arms hang lower than you would have carried them. Your head holds still. On your wrist a watch buzzes a split you have no record of holding.

Nothing has told you who he is yet. Then the jacket does. The nylon whispers at the elbow with every swing, and you are in his hands in a cold kitchen, zipping it to the chin because his wife says the mornings out here lie about how warm they will be. She is asleep upstairs. He is careful with the stairs. The left sleeve first, always, then the right, and the zipper that catches halfway and has to be coaxed. He has done it a thousand times and thinks nothing, only: *the coffee can wait.*

His chest is working. Fifty-nine years of it, a heavy rhythm, the belly riding a half-beat behind the rest. The left hip has a stiff place that loosens around mile two and tightens again by four. Your thighs burn in a plain, honest way. Under the burn he is almost content.

The shoes give you the next one. They are the gray ones, worn soft at the outer edges, and what comes up is a store, a young salesman kneeling, and his own voice saying *the old ones were fine, I just want the same ones again.* He has bought the same shoe four times. He does not like to be surprised by his feet.

The watch is his doctor. A number at a checkup. A man in a white coat saying *cholesterol* and *your age*, and the fear that was not loud but settled in him like a houseguest. He started running at the canal the week after. Software, twenty-six years of it, a standing desk bought out of the same fear, two screens, and the cold coffee he always forgets until noon. Your fingers move in the jacket pocket and find a lighter there, a cheap plastic one. They flip it over and over without being asked. He quit the drink, mostly, and the smoking went with it, except for those nights with the bottle in a friend's yard, and he keeps the lighter anyway. Your thumb knows the little wheel. It is the only part of him that is restless.

Then the ring. It turns against your knuckle as you run, and it brings a church, a Sunday, a wife's hand in his and a priest saying words he has not stopped believing. There are no children. They stopped saying the word years ago and he still counts the quiet. The bank holds a little, a careful little, enough for a roof and a bad year. He does not tell her how often he runs numbers in his head at night. The path bends. A heron lifts off the water.

You slow, and stop, and the gravel goes still. You lift your hands in the blue light. The ring. The watch. The knuckles are broad and tired and entirely mine, you think, and know it is a lie that will last as long as it lasts. You turn them over. Your breath hangs in front of you and then is gone.

"Well," you say, in his low, unhurried voice. "Hello, Raymond."

The heron settles. Your thumb finds the lighter. How long does this one hold, before the wanting comes back for you?