Tyler Burkhart

You are standing at a window in Detroit, in a body that is sixty-two years old, and the knee is the reason. Alan Pierzchala's left knee has announced every stair since you got him, and the stairs here are many. The coffee in his hand has gone cold at the same pace as your interest. You were him for less than a minute before you knew he was a mistake: five foot four, a man built for chairs, a screen, a pension. You wanted shoulders. You wanted to be tired in a way that means something. So you set the mug on the sill, open the page with the wheel on it, and pay with his thumb.

The wheel turns. Nothing travels.

The board clicks to 48 and your knee stops bouncing on the same click. Your knee. The cup of water is in your hand, warm, a paper thing gone soft at the rim, and you set it down square on the floor between boots that are suddenly enormous. You fold your hands. Strip light, loud as a wasp. A name is called somewhere and you do not look up, because you have not yet learned that it is his.

Then the body starts giving you things, because you are touching it.

The hoodie first, its cuffs against your wrists. Cotton gone thin at the elbows, and with it a morning: Tyler Burkhart in a dark kitchen before daylight, pulling it off a chair back, one arm and then the other, the zipper catching at the hem the way it always does. He swears at it softly so he won't wake her. The girlfriend sleeps with one foot out of the blanket. He looks at the foot for a second longer than he needs to. Then the vest, which is not on him now, but the ghost of its weight is, and the boots, laced double because a pallet once rolled across his toes.

Your palms rest on your thighs. Denim stiff with dust. Under it the thighs are huge and soft over muscle, a fat man's strength, the kind that lifts a hundred pounds forty times an hour and never looks like it. The belly presses the waistband. His lungs are wide and slow. Nothing hurts. After the knee, that is nearly obscene.

The metal seat is cold through the jeans, and it gives you the other thing, the reason he is here at all. A folding table, a form, a woman not looking at him: the hours cut, the shifts at the dock gone to someone's nephew. Not fired. Thinned. He has been counting rent on his fingers for a week. And under that, the ex, recent, a text he has typed and deleted four times, not because he wants her back but because she was the only one who ever said he was funny. He is ashamed of how much that still weighs.

Your thumb finds the scar through the eyebrow, and it gives you a box corner, a trailer door, nine years old and bright red, his mother's voice from the driver's seat. The studs in his ears: a dare, then a habit. Church on Sundays, Methodist, the hymnal's smooth spine, his grandmother's hand on his neck. He quit drinking in the spring and nobody threw a party.

The name is called again, and this time you stand, and the floor takes your whole weight without complaint.

You lift your hands. Thick fingers, split knuckles, a callus along each palm like a ridge of rope. You turn them over slowly. They know things you do not. They would be a pallet jack's handle in the dark.

You look up and say, in a voice low and unhurried, "Well. Look at that."

The board hums its number. Somewhere your wanting is already asleep, and you wonder how long before it wakes, whether this is a day or a year, whether you will still be him when the light changes.