Stanley Brodzinski

You are standing in a kitchen in Pittsburgh, in the dark, in Gregory Hanlon's feet, and the thing that sent you back is a jar.

It is a pickle jar, the lid set on tight, and it will not open. You have been at it for a minute and a half, the glass sweating in your left hand, the lid biting the heel of your right. Gregory's forearms are thick and a landscaper's hands should do this. They don't. Something in the right wrist, an old grudge, flares white every time you torque it. The nose he broke years ago whistles when you breathe through your teeth. Somewhere upstairs a woman who is not yours is asleep. You run the lid under hot water. You hit it with the heel of a knife. You are fifty-six, five foot seven, and defeated by a pickle.

It is not the jar. You know that. It is that you wanted something, and the body would not give it to you, and you stood in the refrigerator light understanding that every body does this eventually. So you set the jar down, take out the phone, and the page is already open, the wheel patient on the screen. You press it with a thumb that smells of brine.

Gone.

The thumb is moving. That is the first thing: it flicks upward across glass, fast and even, past a photograph of a boat, a man's opinion, a recipe, a grandchild who is not his. Blue light lies on one cheek. You are on your side, and the weight of you has gone to the hip, a soft heavy slope of belly resting on the mattress. The pillow is cool under the ear. The room is dark except for what the phone makes of it, and the breath you take comes slow and deep and a little wet at the bottom.

Then the hand. It trembles. The phone shivers in it, a fine constant buzz in the fingertips, as if the hand were always listening to something far away. You hold it in front of your face and the tremor does not stop for you.

The sheets come first. Flannel under the forearm, worn thin, and with it a Sunday: he washes them himself, standing at a basement machine, folding the corners the way his mother did, because the woman at church who offered to do his laundry offered once and he could not bear it. The shirt on his chest is soft, black, a hundred washes old, and your skin remembers the day he bought three of them at once, in a store with bright lights, and felt briefly like a man with a plan. The socks hold his feet warm. The phone is cold and slick, and a feeling comes up through it, long and low: the hours he gives it. He scrolls to hear voices. The house under the tracks shakes when the train goes by, and he has stopped hearing it, but at night he counts the cars.

You turn the wrist and the beard rasps the pillowcase. A grey short beard, trimmed on Saturdays over the sink with a steady care, because the tremor is worst when he hurries. Through the beard comes a pew, a hard oak one, his name said aloud in prayer by people who meant it. He believes. It is not a thing he performs. It sits in the chest like a warm stone, and it did not move out when you moved in. You can feel it there, a room you cannot enter.

Your knee aches. The back is stiff in the lower third, a hinge that wants oil. The body is strong in odd places: the grip, which learned thirty years of something, and the thighs. Outside the window a train goes over, steel on steel, and the glass hums in its frame.

You lift the hand into the light and look at it. Brown spots, knuckles wide, the tremor like a pulse. You turn it over. Palm, creases, the soft pad of the thumb. Yours now. You look up into the dark and say, quietly, in a voice that is deeper than the last one, "Let's see how long you last." The thumb starts again, and you do not know whether that is the phone or the wheel.