Victor Armijo

You are standing in Neil Kowalczyk's kitchen in Detroit, and the coffee has gone cold in his hand. Forty-nine years old, five-eleven, skinny, the nose that was broken once and set slightly wrong. You have been him for less than a minute. A good body, nothing wrong with it. You had the browser open before you finished the thought. Something in the apartment is too quiet. There is a cabinet you haven't opened and a drawer you will not open, and the whole morning of him is lying around waiting to be lived. You set the mug down on the counter so it won't spill. Then you press the wheel.

The cold arrives first, then the breath. Your lungs are working in front of you, a white cloud with every exhale, and your feet are already moving. The ground comes up under the soles in a hard, even rhythm. The right foot is about to land and you let the left take it instead. The stumble never lands. You are running, arms low, head still, and at your left wrist a watch buzzes a split you have no record of.

Sagebrush on both sides. A canal, black and still, with the sky pale in it. Hills the color of a bruise going to peach.

Then he starts coming back, through what you touch.

The jacket first. Its fleece is worn smooth at the cuffs, and a zipper tab bumps your sternum. It gives you a closet door at four-thirty in the morning. His thumb catches the zipper pull, and a woman's voice says from the dark bedroom doorway, years ago, *you'll freeze, take the heavier one.* He took this one anyway. It was hers, bought for him, and he kept wearing it after she stopped being there to say anything.

The sweatshirt under it clings damp at your back. Then the pants, soft at the knee. Then the shoes, which know the path. They know where the gravel turns loose and where the canal bank crumbles, and your feet adjust before you can think to.

Your body is a good deal heavier than Neil's. Fifty-seven years sit in the knees and in the low belly that bounces a little with each stride. His breath is steady, though. Mile four, and he is not suffering. Dimples press into your cheeks when you grin without meaning to, and you can feel them like thumbprints.

The earbud in your ear plays something slow, a rosary podcast, a man's low voice murmuring the Hail Mary. Your tongue knows the words and starts to move with them. Sober eleven years, you learn, from nowhere: a gas station parking lot, a cold hand around a bottle, and him pouring it out onto asphalt. He still doesn't know why that day worked.

Then a kitchen, a small one, not his. Pill organizers lined up on a counter, Monday through Sunday, and a woman with thin white hair watching him fill the little doors with such care that it's almost an act of love. *You're early, Victor.* He is always early. He is good at this. He lifts people. He remembers who takes what and who hates the taste of it. Nobody ever thanks him enough, and he has stopped needing them to.

The ring finger. Your right hand swings up into view and the skin there is pale where the band used to sit. His thumb goes to it without being asked, rubbing the empty place. Two children, grown or nearly, one of whom doesn't call enough. A divorce nobody won. A cigar on the porch of the trailer on Sundays, one only, sagebrush to the step, the blue shadows hard as cut tin.

You slow down, and the slowing takes no effort.

You hold your hand out in the cold light and turn it over. Broad, brown, the knuckles thick. The tan line shows white against the skin. Your breath smokes. You look up at the water, and then out ahead, and you say, quietly and a little hoarse, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Whether that is to him or to yourself, you can't tell. The watch buzzes again on your wrist. Behind your breastbone something small has already started to ask about tomorrow.