Rudy Almonte

Start with Wayne Sockabasin's knees, because they are the reason. Fifty years old, five foot seven, and the left one has begun to announce every stair. Before dawn I stand in his kitchen in Coastal Maine with the kettle ticking and the window still black. His beard is damp from the tap. His brown eyes look back at me from the dark glass, and I know I am sick of him. Nothing is wrong with him. He is a man who can lift forty pounds of anything and say nothing for nine hours, and for a minute and a half I have been him. I don't want quiet. I want to be somebody who has to be forgiven for something. I put the phone on the counter, and the wheel is already turning under my thumb.

It stops.

Weight. Heat. My face is pressed into cotton and there is a taste in my mouth like old pennies. One arm hangs off the edge of the mattress, and the blood has gone out of it and is coming back as needles. Light comes through a gap in the curtains, thin and orange from the street. My breath was ragged and then it is even, because I am the one breathing it. The arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back, short and thick and heavy through the middle. My hands fold at my chest, and some part of him would have hated that.

Now the things on him start to talk.

The T-shirt first. Cotton worn soft as skin, the collar stretched. He pulled it from the drawer yesterday in the dark so as not to wake anyone, and I feel it as his tiredness, a particular tiredness: the fourth week of listings, the résumé that says *eleven years* and then a gap. The jeans are still on him, so he fell asleep dressed, and the denim has a grit of pocket in it. My right hand goes there without asking and finds a lighter. Brass, dented. My thumb flips the lid, shut, open, shut, and a whole room opens behind it. A fire escape. He is twenty-two. A girl with her hair tied up in a bandana laughs at him for how he cups the flame, as if the wind could take it. He quit six years ago, on the morning his daughter asked why his coat smelled like a burnt match. He kept the lighter. It's how his hands cope with not holding anything.

The ring is cool against my own chest. Under the thumb it turns easily, because he's thinner there than he was on the day of the wedding. I get the day: a registry office, rain, his wife's shoes in her hand because the heels had failed her on the steps. He laughed so hard he couldn't say *I do* until the second try. Under that a quieter thing, the old girlfriend, a name he doesn't say, a letter he never answered. It doesn't hurt anymore. It sits in him like a stone in a pocket, familiar and warm.

The tattoo itches. I rub it against the sheet. An anchor, a swallow, bold black lines gone soft and the red faded to brick. He got it at nineteen on a dare, in a shop on a street that's now a pharmacy, and a man named Sal told him it would hurt less than it would, and was right.

The mattress pushes back, a little sprung on the left, where his wife sleeps when she's not on the early shift. Through the wall comes the clank of a radiator and a child coughing once, then nothing. Two children. I know the sound of both of them without having heard them. I am in a brownstone, in Brooklyn, in the hour before anyone has to be anywhere, and a man who works nights would be waking up now. This one doesn't work at all, and has been awake in his sleep for a month.

I lift my hands and the left one trembles slightly. Heavy fingers, thick at the knuckle. The ring. The faded swallow. I turn them over. Then I look up at the ceiling, at the amber stripe from the street, and say it to the room, in a voice lower than I expected:

"Okay, Rudy. Let's see what you've got."

Nothing answers. His heart goes on in my chest, steady and borrowed. I wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back, and whether tomorrow I'll still be lying here, new, with his lighter in my fist.