Anil Rajan Menon

You are standing in a cab on the Dan Ryan with Peter Sungmin Oh's hands on the wheel, and you are bored of the weight. Five-foot-five, thirty-five, a scar through the eyebrow that you keep touching at red lights. The trailer behind you is full of paper towels. You have been him for less than a minute. That's the trouble: you were already pulling over, already thumbing the page open, because a body that works is only a body that works. Last week it was a different cough. This morning it is the sameness of him, the long road straight as a ruled line, and the wanting that comes up under your ribs like a second pulse. You press the button. The wheel turns.

The hold music loops back to its first bar. His shoulder drops the phone into his hand, and you are there, mid-loop, with a blue pen stopped on the second digit of a reference number and no instruction to start it again.

A kitchen. Late light through a window with a grille. Granite under the heel of your left hand, cold and gritty with sugar. Your breath is long and even, a chest that is used to being asked for more. The phone is warm and slick against your palm. You are tall enough, after Peter, that the counter seems low.

Then the shirt, the navy cotton against your back, and it opens like a door. He put it on in the dark of the bedroom so as not to wake her: left sleeve, right sleeve, the collar tugged flat over a neck he had shaved raw an hour earlier. Hands that know the motion. The jaw is smooth now under your tongue, a faint sting. He thought of the flight line, the cargo plane, the ear defenders hanging by the door, and the thought came with a plain pride, the kind that never needs saying.

The pen. Its plastic is chewed at the cap, and under your thumb a flash: a church hall, folding chairs, his mother's hand on his knee, a talk about the hour of the day and the name of God, his own voice rehearsing a door he would knock on and was afraid of. He does not drink much. Once or twice a month he does, and then he sleeps on the floor of someone's apartment, laughing.

The watch on the left wrist, black, a plastic strap worn soft. It gives you an old ex, a girl in a green coat on a platform at Jamaica Station, a year he still tests like a tooth. And the envelope: a bill, a late one. He is scraping by, and the number he is circling is the one he has to fix before the end of the month, before she comes home and sees his face do the arithmetic. She is asleep or out; her mug stands in the sink. He loves her in a plain, unwatched way. It is in the muscles of your back.

Under your feet the old wood is smooth and bows slightly by the stove. Your calves are tight from standing, your knuckles rough, a long day coming and a longer one behind. The music starts the loop again.

You lift the hand off the counter and look at it. Brown, square, the nails clipped to the quick, the pen steady in the other like it has always been yours. You turn the hand over. The palm is hard at the base of each finger. You raise your eyes to the dark glass of the window, and a stranger's face looks back, patient, waiting on hold.

"Still here," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected, and not yours.

How long, you wonder. Until tonight. Until the music stops. Until the wanting comes back.