Ruben Ocasio

The man I am has been awake since four, because the body I'm in has never learned to sleep past it. Lloyd's knees ache on the lanai tiles. The coffee has gone cold in his hand. The light over Honolulu is still gray and the roosters are at it, and I am sitting in a man I've worn for under a minute, and already I know what he can't do. He cannot want the right things. He wants a job back that he will not get. He wants a phone call. I have been in him for sixty seconds and it is like wearing a coat with someone else's grief in the pockets. Nothing he did was wrong. I just don't want to be the one who waits.

So I open the page and the wheel turns, and I let it.

Cold tile gives way to a warm, close room. Steam is still on the mirror. My right hand is at my jaw with a razor stopped against it, and my left is flat on the edge of a sink, and half my face is foam. It is mid-morning, and the light through the frosted window is white and flat. I am tall, and I am leaning over a sink built for someone shorter, so my lower back is already complaining. My breath comes slow and minty. There is gum in my mouth. I didn't put it there, and my jaw is working it anyway.

The razor moves. Up the jaw, against the grain, and my hand doesn't hesitate at the corner of the mouth, though something in the hand seems to expect to.

Then the flannel on my back. It is soft from a hundred washes, and the sleeve is rolled twice, and I know the rolling the way you know a stair in the dark. Hands doing it, fast, at the kitchen table, a woman's voice saying *you'll ruin it, Rubén, give it here*, and his laugh, and the warm weight of a mug. Her name is Delia. The ring on my left hand is hers, and it is loose now, because he has lost weight since the funeral and has not told anyone.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. A school hallway comes up under me, long and waxed, the floor humming with the buffer, and the pleasant ache of nine hours. Keys on my belt loop, a heavy ring of them, and in the memory I know which one opens the boiler room, which one a kid once stole as a joke and brought back crying. Thirty-one years of other people's mess. He liked the quiet after the last bell better than the noise.

The porch. The bungalow is mine in this feeling: peeling rail, mountains over the rooflines, a lawn chair, a glass with two fingers of something, a cigarette going, and the pastor's voice at Sunday's door saying *the Lord does not give us more*. He'd said it back, gently, and gone home and drunk anyway. Three kids' pictures sit on the fridge, grown, scattered, one in Pueblo who calls on Sundays. The soap smells like her, and I realize it is still her brand, still bought.

My forearm, wet at the edge of the sink, shows an old skull with roses, the ink faded to soft green. He got it at nineteen, in a shop with a flickering sign, and was ashamed of it in church and proud of it everywhere else.

I lift the razor away and look. The hand is broad, scarred at the knuckle by nothing I'm told, steady. I turn it over. Foam slides down the wrist.

I look up into the mirror, at a smooth bald stranger with one cheek still white, and I say, low, "Ruben." It's the first thing I try, and it fits like a borrowed shoe.

Somewhere there is a wheel that doesn't care how long this lasts. A year, an afternoon, the time it takes to rinse the blade. I wait to feel the wanting come back.