Walter Dean Kessinger

You were Isaac for less than a minute, and the first thing you learned about him was that he sleeps badly. Somewhere in El Paso the house is dark, a fan turns, and you stand in his kitchen with his dimples in the black window glass. His body works. It is twenty-seven and thin and quick, and none of that is why you are back at the page with the wheel on it. Daniel is why. Two minutes ago you were Daniel in Pittsburgh, in his study, and you found a drawer with a letter to his best friend in it. It was unsent, three drafts, and the friend's name was at the top of each. You read it with Daniel's eyes. You wanted to be the man it was written to, only to see what kind of man earns a letter like that. You spin. Isaac's thumb is steady on the trackpad and you do not look at it.

Light. A white disc of it overhead, and the noise reaches you before your own name for it does: one long flat tone, and a click, click, click of something counting. Your shirt is open. Cold air sits directly on your ribs, and there are sticky discs on your skin. The trace on the monitor stops being a line and becomes a heartbeat, one, and one, and one, with no stagger. Your chest fills. It fills further than lungs in a man this age have a right to, all the way to the bottom, and the breath is gold and tastes of plastic.

Nobody has put a hand on you. Your eyes are open, searching for no one.

The jacket under your shoulders is stiff canvas, cut open and splayed. It smells of diesel, cold dust and old cigarettes, and with the smell comes the first thing of his. It is a pre-dawn highway shoulder, amber lights turning across the sagebrush, and a man's relief at a bumper finally hooking. It is his relief, not yours. Then the cuff against your wrist pulls a morning out of him. He put this flannel on in the dark trailer, standing on cold linoleum. He did the buttons wrong, one off, and fixed them with thick fingers. The undershirt came next, then the jacket, with its zipper that catches halfway. Every item was put on by feel because the light switch has been broken since March. Then the toothpick. His mouth knows it before you do: the splintered end between the back teeth, the small mint sting. He quit drinking and took up the pack a day instead, and his tongue goes looking for the taste of both.

The scar through your eyebrow tugs when you frown. It came from a chain, and a boy of nine held a washcloth to it. That boy has a name you can feel but not hear. There are three of them, and the bright voices come in flashes. A woman's laugh follows, wearing a different last name now, and a ring that was taken off so long ago the skin has forgotten it. You find the pale band on the finger and press it with your thumb. The grief in it is old and has gone smooth, like a stone in a creek.

His back aches, low and right, from fifty-six years of leaning into other people's disasters. His knees hurt too. The heart in him, which stopped, is now running hard and even, and you can feel it knocking against the sticky pads like a fist on a door.

You lift your hand into the light and look at it. Wide, scarred across the knuckles, the fingertips yellow. It turns over, and you let it. It is a hand that has pulled strangers out of ditches in the dark.

You lift your eyes, and say, hoarse, "Well. Hello."

You think of Daniel's letter, and of how long this one will last. A day, or four minutes, and the wanting is already warming somewhere under the breastbone.