Walter Hassan Brennan

You are leaving Dominic Szymanski because of the quiet.

It is the middle of the night in Pittsburgh and the whole house is asleep. You stand in his kitchen in his socks with his big trucker's hands flat on the counter, and the refrigerator hums, and nothing is wrong. His body is good. The shoulders are fine, the stubble is fine, the freckles on the backs of the wrists are fine. Two minutes in him and you already know the problem. He has a phone with a dozen names in it, and every one of them is a person who wants a Dominic. You cannot be wanted and also be nobody. The wheel never asks you to be anyone. So you open the page, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

And then the Pittsburgh kitchen is gone.

There is a couch under you, and a roar thin and far away in a speaker. Something cold and nearly empty is sweating in your right hand. Your mouth is dry and open. The second replay is running, and you are sitting forward before you decide to. Your thumb has found the volume on the remote without looking, quick and exact, and you are watching the ball and not the score. His body does that by itself. Nothing in you needs the beer. The can is not his; it is a prop, a habit, something to hold. Only now does the smell arrive, wool and dust and a lamp warming its own shade.

The flannel is the first thing to speak. It is soft at the cuffs and rough across the shoulders where it has been washed a hundred times, and your hand closes on the hem and a morning opens. It is not this morning. It is years ago, before the pre-dawn prayer, the tile cold under his feet in the hallway, his wife's slippers by the door. He pulls the flannel over the undershirt because the house is always cold at that hour. He feels no hurry, only the long habit of being up while everyone else sleeps.

You touch your own stomach to steady yourself. It is soft and heavy and warm, a belly that has carried three children's worth of dinners. The memory under it is a hospital hallway and a fist full of paper cups. Then comes a store, at dawn, the aisles smelling of cardboard and floor wax, a radio on his belt and keys that never stop talking. He has opened that building every morning for nineteen years. His knees know every pallet. His lower back knows it too, a low dull ache that wakes when you shift against the cushion.

You rub your hand over your scalp, and the thin hair lies down under your palm, and you did not decide to do it. Under the gesture is a shame and a tenderness he never said aloud. He was vain about the hair once, and then he was not. A cigarette arrives from nowhere, the taste of it, and then the long ugly year he quit, his daughter's voice through a bathroom door saying *Baba, please*. He has not touched one since. He has not touched a drink in forty years either, and he holds the cold can the way you hold a stranger's umbrella.

The ring turns under your thumb. A plain band, worn thin on the underside. It brings a kitchen, rain on the window, a woman laughing with her whole face at something he said badly. It is warm and enormous, and none of it is yours. You sit inside it like a man in a house he has not been invited to leave.

The carpet is rough through the socks. The couch gives under your weight and smells of him, and the bearded jaw feels strange when you swallow.

You lift your hand off your knee and look at it. The skin is loose over the knuckles, the hair on it gray, the band catching lamplight. You turn it over. Palm up, it is a stranger's palm, and it is yours.

You look up at the dark window, where a man's reflection looks back.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower and slower than any you have used, "hello."

Out there the rain goes on. Somewhere behind you a floorboard settles, and you wonder how long you get this one, and whether you are still him tomorrow.