Thomas Brannigan

The professor's house is quiet in the way of a house with the furnace off. You are standing in his kitchen in Detroit, in his gray socks, with his reading glasses pushed up into his silver hair, and the laptop is open on the counter to a page with a wheel on it. You paid before you let yourself think about it.

You have been Lionel Whitaker for less than a minute. His knees ache on the tile. His beard itches under your thumb. The refrigerator hums a note he has stopped hearing in thirty years, and you hear it. He is a good body. He did nothing wrong.

But a little while ago, in this same minute, you opened the drawer by the stove looking for a pen and found a stack of student letters held with a rubber band, and his hand knew the rubber band. His hand wanted you to read them, and you did not want what was in them. You wanted something that did not already love anyone. So your finger goes down on the wheel, and the house goes out.

Cold. That is the first thing: cold air on one bare arm, hanging in the dark off the edge of a mattress, and the blood in it gone to pins. Your face is pressed into a pillow that smells of someone else's skin and fabric softener. A streetlight lays one thin white line through a gap in the curtains. Your breath, his breath, was ragged a second ago. You make it even.

You draw the arm up. The body rolls onto its back and your hands fold on your chest, and something in the muscles objects. This is not how he lies. The shoulders keep trying to turn back to the mattress, to curl around a lack. Nobody in the world has seen him sleep like this, and nobody will.

The sheets are cool cotton, blue, kicked into a heap. They give you a morning first: his hand smoothing a bed on the other side, a woman's side, and the feeling of being careful with it. Not tender. Careful, the way you handle something that has already broken once. Then the pillow gives you the wife's laugh in another room, and under it a smaller sound he keeps put away, an ex-wife's voice on a phone, saying his name the old way, and his stomach tightens and goes quiet because he prays about it.

The T-shirt is soft at the collar from a hundred washes. It hands you the Sunday before: standing at the front of the sanctuary with the pews emptying, his Bible tucked under one arm, the navy blazer on, the light-blue shirt buttoned wrong by one hole and him not noticing until a child pointed. The shame of that was small and warm, and he loved the child for it. Sleeve by sleeve you get the dressing, his left arm first because the right shoulder catches, then the wedding band turned once with his thumb, a habit like a rosary. You turn it now against your chest.

His scalp is cold. He shaves it every second morning with a plain razor, and the stubble on his jaw rasps your palm, three days of salt and pepper. Somewhere in the weave of the bed is the sea: the room smells of salt and cold wood, and with it comes the dooryard, lobster traps stacked silver, the shingled house, and a night when the money came, more of it than a pastor should have, and he told no one how he felt about being comfortable. That is the thing nobody knows. He is a little afraid that he has stopped needing God as hard as he used to.

His body is forty-six and carries it. The lower back is stiff. The knees are fine. His heart goes slow and big. His hands know how to be still.

You lift them into the streetlight. The ring, the thick knuckles, the pale band of skin under it. You turn them over. They are yours now.

You look up at the ceiling he has stared at praying, and your voice comes out of him low and rough from sleep. "Hello, Thomas."

The furnace ticks. Outside, the sea keeps its hours. You do not know how long this room is yours. You listen for the wanting, and for now it is quiet.