Walter Francis Dombrowski

You are standing in a Berlin bathroom at the end of a Monday, looking at a cleft chin that has stopped being interesting. Jonas Wieczorek's hands are wet from the tap. They are good hands. They know pipe, flux, the give of a compression nut. Two days and four hours, and today a woman's sink in Neukölln defeated him, because the trouble was not in the pipe, it was in the wall, and he stood there wanting to be someone who did not have to know. You could feel the wanting come up in him like damp. So you dry his hands on his own towel and open the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You spin.

The hold music loops back to its first bar.

Your shoulder drops the phone into your hand. The pen stops on the second digit of a reference number and does not start again. A kitchen: yellow light through the window, a dish rack, a cold mug, envelopes fanned across the counter like a hand of cards nobody wants. You are heavy in the legs and the belly, six feet of settled weight, and your breath comes slow and wide, a big man's breath with a catch at the bottom.

The flannel is first. Its sleeves are rolled twice, and the cuff scratches your forearm. He put it on this morning in the dark, standing by the bed so as not to wake anyone, one arm and then the other, and he felt a flat, careful hope, the kind you keep quiet. There was an interview, a warehouse supervisor job, and it went nowhere. The email came Friday. He read it three times, standing in this kitchen.

The pen is warm in your fingers, a cheap bank pen. You circle the digits and the circling brings back a different counter, a different year: a man at a machine shop who handed him a final check and could not look at him. He drove home with the window down and did not cry until he parked.

Your free hand goes to your beard on its own. It tugs the salt-and-pepper wiry thing just under the lip, two inches of it, and the tugging is a habit older than the job loss. It is what he does when he is counting money, what he did at the hospital the night his younger kid had croup, what he did through every sermon as a boy in a Lutheran pew beside his father. The beard is warm. Under it the old scar through the eyebrow tugs when you frown, and with that comes a flash: a bicycle, a curb, a boy of nine, his mother's dish towel pressed to his face.

The envelope under the pen is from a lender. The paper feels hot with dread. You remember the last drink, though it is not your last, it is his: a Tuesday, a motel parking lot, his own voice on the phone saying never again to the woman who was then his wife. Sober since. The sober is in his hands like a held rope. He wants a cigarette now, in the roof of his mouth, years after quitting.

Your forearm shows script, a name and a date. You don't need to read it. The skin knows. Two kids, a girl born in the winter, a boy in the heat, and the ink was done the week after the second one, in a shop on Fulton, while the needle made him laugh. There is a woman now, too, a girlfriend who leaves her coat on the chair by the door. He loves her carefully. Another woman is still in his chest, the recent one, a lingering ache that has nowhere to be filed.

The sneakers are flat on the linoleum, and the floor is cold through them. His knees ache in the left one. His back says forty-one. The hold music climbs into its chorus.

You put the pen down. You turn your hand over and look: broad, ink-marked at the wrist, nicks across the knuckles, a stranger's life in the creases. Then you look up, at nobody.

"Okay," you say, in a voice with Brooklyn in the gravel. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."