Amir Hakimi

You are standing in Daniel Seo's kitchen in Los Angeles, and the coffee has gone cold in his big freckled hand. You have had him for under a minute. Twenty years old, six-three, a beard you keep touching. The body works. Every joint is oiled. It is the middle of a bright morning and he has a lecture you will never attend, and you stand there with the strange wanting rising in your chest like a second pulse. It isn't boredom, and it isn't that he failed at anything. It is that he is young and the whole of his life is ahead of him, and you cannot stand to be handed what everyone is handed. You want a man with a long road behind him. You want to know what it costs to be old. You put down the mug and open the page.

The wheel turns. You are not told where you land.

Cold porcelain under your left palm. A razor stopped against your jaw. The air is steamy and smells of menthol foam, and the light at the frosted window is gray and thin. In the mirror a stranger looks back at you with half a white beard. Your right hand is already moving, up the jaw against the grain, past the corner of the mouth without hesitating, and it is faster than you would have thought. Hands that know the work. The second half is finished before you've decided anything.

Then the shirt. The flannel is soft at the cuffs, and when the sleeve brushes your wrist, it comes: a dark morning, his thumb working the buttons from the bottom, because the top one always sticks. His wife's voice from the other room, saying something about the heat in 4C. Beneath the flannel a thin undershirt, and with it a long night, the radiator ticking, Anchorage snow ticking at the glass. He is up in the middle of the morning because he works the dark hours, the building quiet, the ladder open under a ceiling panel in a hallway that smells of carpet glue. You feel his knees, the stiff left one, the small ache at the base of his spine that arrives each time he straightens.

You lift the hand to the sink edge and the ring on it is warm. The plain band. Memory pours through the metal: a courtyard, a different country, a woman laughing with her hand over her mouth, and then years later another woman at a kitchen table, the paperwork between them, both of them gentle and both of them tired. The ex-wife. He still sends her a card at the new year. There are two children, grown, a daughter's voice on a phone saying Baba, are you eating? His chest does something you didn't order.

Your tongue finds the gap between his front teeth. Habit: he presses it there when he is thinking. Under it, a bitter ghost of tobacco, a tin in the jacket by the door, wintergreen, the only vice. He has never touched a drink. He keeps a little money put away, and he counts it in his head at night the way other men pray. He does not pray, quite. He talks to the dark sometimes, or to something in it.

Your free thumb rises to your mouth and the nail is already between the teeth, ragged, bitten down to the quick. You take it away.

You turn the razor over. You turn your hand over. It is brown and square, scarred by no one's story, older than any hand you have worn. The skin is smooth and your jaw is smooth under it, bare and cold.

You look up into the mirror, into his brown eyes, and you say aloud, in a voice lower than you expected, "So this is sixty-three." The foam is still drying on the faucet. Somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep, and you wonder how long it will stay that way.