Russell Denham

The apartment in Chicago has gone quiet the way it always does after 2 a.m., and you are sitting on the edge of somebody else's mattress — Native, six foot, that soft doughy weight around the middle that never got fixed no matter how many times he told himself Monday — and the phone in his hand is open to vessel.cards, wheel already spun, already gone flat and gray on a name you don't know yet. You have been him fewer than sixty seconds. You already know you're leaving. It's not the body — the body is fine, better than some. It's that in the last minute of being him you remembered, unbidden, the way his memories don't ever come to you, that this man has a 6 a.m. stand-up and a schematic due Friday and a life that is, underneath the softness, working. And you have never once in nine hundred and forty-five spins wanted to be somewhere that was working. You want the gap. The unfinished thing. You close your eyes on his life still humming along without you and you go.

You land face-down.

The pillow is against your mouth before you know you have a mouth again, and the arm — his arm, hanging off the mattress into cooler air — draws itself up on its own, folds against a chest that is narrower than the one you just left, harder, a chest with a heartbeat already slow and even where a second ago, a whole state away, it had been ragged going into sleep. Streetlight comes through a gap in curtains that don't quite meet. You are on your back before you decide to be. Nobody taught this body that.

The goatee is the first thing you feel, oddly, before you feel anything else — a stiffness at the chin, gray hairs wired in among the brown, and touching your own jaw with a stranger's hand it comes: a barbershop on Westheimer, a Tuesday, the barber saying *leave it, it looks good on you now* and him — Russell — not sure if that was a compliment about her craft or a comment on getting older, and laughing anyway because he'd liked her.

The wedding band is next. It's on the hand that's still crossed over the chest, cool metal against a cool sternum, and it opens like a struck match — not one memory but the shape of a marriage, ten years of it, a woman named Denise who used to fall asleep with her foot hooked over his ankle no matter how hot the room got, who died on a Tuesday in March eighteen months ago, an aneurysm, no warning, the kind of thing that happens between one sentence and the next. He kept the ring. Nobody asked him to. There's a daughter, eleven, at her aunt's this weekend, and the ring is for her more than it ever was for Denise now, so she has something to point at and say *he still does that.*

The leg starts bouncing before you've told it to — heel drumming lightly against the sheet, an old motor that runs whether or not anyone's home. It slows, then stops, because lying down there's nowhere for it to go, and something in that stopping feels like relief that isn't yours.

The shirt is on the floor, not on him — he sleeps in a black t-shirt, and reaching for it in memory rather than fact gives you the morning before instead: him buttoning a pale blue shirt over a white undershirt, sleeve by sleeve, in a bathroom mirror with a comb-over of steam still on the glass, checking the goatee, checking the ring out of habit though nobody at a showing has ever once asked about it. A gray blazer off a hanger that still smelled like the dry cleaner's plastic. A flyer for a four-bedroom on Braeswood folded into his jacket pocket, already creased from being handled at three showings that afternoon, a lockbox code memorized and half-forgotten by dinner. Forty-eight years old and the knees complain going down stairs now, and the shoulders are still good, still the shoulders of a man who used to play rec-league softball on Sundays before Denise died and he stopped going, and started again this spring, alone, because a friend told him to.

Underneath all of it, plain and physical: the goatee's rasp under your fingers, the ring's small cold weight, the mattress too soft in the middle where one person has been sleeping the width of a bed built for two, the bounce trying to start up again in the leg the second the mind goes quiet. Comfortable. Widowed. A man who does not pray and does not smoke and does not, particularly, believe anything is owed to him — who just keeps showing houses, keeps folding flyers into pockets, keeps not throwing out a ring.

You lift the hand off your chest and look at it in the gap-light from the curtain — the band, the knuckles, a life's worth of paperwork and open houses in that hand and none of it yours yet.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, to nobody, to him. "Okay."

Nine hundred and forty-six. Somewhere behind you, Chicago is still humming along without you, unfinished, and here the leg under the sheet has already started to bounce again, waiting to find out how long you'll let it.