Arjan Singh

Brandon's jaw is still in my teeth, that small gap he tongued without noticing. He is thirty-three, and for an hour and two minutes his foreman's knees have been easy under me. I stand in a San Francisco stairwell with a clipboard I don't remember picking up. The shift whistle goes. A man below me laughs at something I didn't hear. The body is good. I have nothing against it. But a boy on the floor above dropped a crate of fasteners and Brandon's shoulders flinched with a hundred small mistakes that weren't mine, and I understood I was only a guest in someone's well-kept house. I wanted a man who had already finished being built. The wheel is a page. I press it.

The ladder takes me first, a rung under each boot, then the ceiling, then the pliers. My right hand is closing on a wire and the motion goes wrong by half a beat. The jaws bite too shallow. I do it again, slowly, and the copper comes clean. Then ten more times I check what needs no checking. The light through the courtyard is orange and low, and the dry palms rattle against stucco.

The shirt comes first. It is cotton gone soft at the collar, and it is against my back where the sweat has dried. A morning rises up out of it: Arjan, fifty-three, sitting on the edge of a bed in the dark, buttoning from the bottom because his wife once teased him for it. Sleeve, sleeve, the cuffs rolled once. The little name patch is stitched crooked, and he never fixed it because she sewed it. Then the pliers, the rubber grip worn to the shape of his palm. My fingers want to crack their knuckles and do, a small pop, and under it comes a garage in Artesia, his father's, a bare bulb, a boy of fourteen taught to twist wire clockwise. Hold it like you're shaking its hand.

The belt carries weight. The screwdrivers knock against my hip and give me the debt: a number he carries in his chest like a swallowed stone, the second loan on the business that failed, the kitchen table with the envelopes squared into a stack. He doesn't drink anymore. The memory has no taste, only the dry mouth of the nights he stopped, and the cigarettes he quit, which still arrive as a hunger behind the teeth at the end of a long day. His knees ache from the ladder, a dull hinge ache. His back is strong. The shoulders know how to hold an arm overhead for minutes without complaint.

The ring is a plain band, warm, a little loose from work. Through it comes a woman who isn't his wife, years ago, laughing on a staircase, someone he did not marry and did not stop wondering about. Then the wife, tired and kind, setting a plate down for him at nine, saying nothing about the envelopes. He prays in the van at midday on a folded towel. That arrives as a quiet I could almost hold. The scar through his eyebrow tugs when I frown: a cabinet corner, age nine, his brother crying louder than he did.

I lower the pliers and turn my hand over. It is broad, dark-knuckled, scarred across the pads, and it is mine for now. I look at the courtyard, then past it, at nothing.

"Well," I say, in a voice rough from years of other people's rooms. "Hello, Arjan."

The wire hangs live-looking and dead. Somewhere a gate clicks. I do not know whether I will wake in him tomorrow, or want something else by the time this light is gone.