Anil Raghunathan

You are at the screen, and the evening is nothing. Work is done, the scrolling is done, and the dull hour after is left. The tab has been open a while. You have wanted this since before you could say what it was: the films where someone wakes in another man's coat, the threads at two in the morning, the long private habit of wondering what a stranger's hands feel like from inside. Now there is a wheel, and you have paid, and you don't believe it. You press the button anyway.

Then you are on a ladder.

One boot is on a rung, the other knee is braced against the step, and your head is tipped back toward a square of dark ceiling. A flat fluorescent hum is in your teeth. In your right hand is a small screwdriver and in your left a stripped wire, held with the ease of something done ten thousand times. For half a second your hand does the motion wrong, and then it does it again, slowly and correctly. You check each motion after that. It feels like a courtesy to a job that has not needed one in years.

The shirt is the first thing that answers. Cotton, navy, softened by washing, the cuffs rolled twice. Your thumb brushes the placket, and it is dark, before the light, a kitchen. His fingers go down the buttons from the bottom because the top ones are stiff. A radio talks low. Three voices argue over cereal in the next room, and they are not his anymore, they are only his to miss. He rolls the sleeves because his forearms run hot. He has done it that way since a boy, in a house where the heat was always on.

The key ring on your hip knocks the ladder. Brass and steel, heavy as a fist. Unit 4, the boiler closet, the roof door that sticks. His whole body knows the roof door. A winter, a tenant locked out, and himself on his knees at midnight, patient and not angry. He is never angry at a lock.

Your left hand sits strangely. The ring finger is bare, with a pale band where the skin has never learned the sun. Touching it opens a woman's laugh across a table, then a long hallway of the same laugh turned quiet, then a signed paper and a drive home with the radio off. It is not grief exactly. It is a room kept swept.

The body is sixty-one, and it tells you so. A tightness in the lower back, a click in the right knee under load, shoulders that hold well. The legs are short and steady. The scalp is cool in the draft from the panel, and the beard is dense and bristly against your collar when you swallow. Breath comes easy and deep. The hands are thick-knuckled and sure, and they know where the pliers sit in the pouch without you asking.

You are in him, in the same second. Nobody is left to notice.

You lower the wire. You turn your hand over in the buzzing light and look at the tan line, the callus, the small scar of a thousand jobs, and then you look up, down the hallway, at nothing, at someone.

"Huh," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "It works."

The wheel is still there behind your eyes, patient. How long you have this one, you can't say. Maybe years. Maybe until the ladder is folded.