Walter Szymanski

Ernesto Valdivia's knees are bad on the cold kitchen tile, and that is the first thing you know about him tonight. The house in Anchorage is asleep. The refrigerator hums. You are standing in his socks at the counter with his phone lit in his short brown fingers, the page open, the wheel waiting. He has been yours for less than a minute and already he is too low to the ground. You reach for the top shelf and your arm stops short of it. You have felt that all night, the world set a little too high, a man made for looking up.

That is not the whole reason, and you do not say the rest, not even here in the dark. Something in the hallway, a child's drawing on the fridge that is not yours to have, a name on a mug. You take the card out. You pay. The wheel turns.

Cold, then white light. A hum in the floor.

You are standing with both arms raised, fingers deep in a loom of wire. Your eyes are on the harness and your hands have stopped, one motion done wrong, a connector seated a hair off. You pull it, and set it again slowly, correctly. A click comes up through your thumb. The next one you check. And the next. Ten of them, each tested with a small tug, on a job that has not needed testing in years.

The air is filtered and dry, smelling of nothing, faintly of plastic. A satellite the size of a dishwasher sits on its stand, gold and black, and the white light lies flat on everything. Your height is right at last. You are 5'8" and nothing reaches over you. But the body is soft in the middle and thin in the arms, and a long-standing ache sits low in the back. The scalp is cool at the crown, where the hair has gone.

The white smock rasps at your wrists, elastic cuffs snug. The sleeve against your forearm opens something. His hands pulling it on this morning in the dark, the left arm first, snapping the front closed from the bottom, his wife's voice somewhere down the hall asking if he'd eaten. He had not. He said he would later. It is the kind of lie he tells her kindly, and it comes with a flush of tenderness that is entirely his.

The lanyard swings against your chest. Under it comes a different memory: a woman, years back, on a campus path in October, and the long ache of not following her. His wife has never once been told. The ache is old and well kept, like a coin he turns over only when alone. You feel him choose, again and again, the life he has.

Your jaw is clenched. You find it out by the pain in the hinge, and loosen it, and it tightens again by itself. Hands know things too: the torque of a small screwdriver, the exact pressure that seats a pin. A cartilage piercing in the upper ear aches faintly where the safety glasses' arm presses it. Some foolish year of his, a dare, never taken out. The ring on the left hand is warm and a little tight at the knuckle. Sunday comes with it, a plain church, a folding chair, his voice joining the singing slightly flat and wholly sincere. The money comes too: the quiet sums in accounts, the house paid down, a man who has never once felt rich and is.

Your tongue finds the smooth jaw, shaved close in the dim bathroom, the razor catching the cleft of the chin. Always the cleft, where he nicks himself.

You take your hands out of the wire and hold them before you under the white light. Thin fingers, a pale band of skin under the ring, veins standing on the backs. Somebody's hands. Yours now. You turn them over.

You lift your eyes and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Walter."

The satellite says nothing. Somewhere in you the wanting is asleep, but only asleep, and you wonder how long it will stay that way: tonight, this week, the next breath.