Arjun Patel

You are standing in Philip Sandgren's kitchen with the light off, and the refrigerator is the only thing in San Francisco that is awake. The floor is cold under his feet. His beard is rough under his palm. You press your thumb along the scar through his eyebrow, the way you have been doing for an hour, and it tells you nothing. He was a good body. He sold things and slept well and his knees were fine. But it is the middle of the night, everyone is asleep, and you are tired of being a man who can wait until morning for anything. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the cold floor is gone.

Noise first, a roar you feel in your molars, and then the smell, hot plastic, machine oil, wet concrete. Your right hand is on a steel housing that vibrates up through the wrist. A clear sheet of film pours past your knuckles. Your left hand is swinging loose at your side. Your weight is heavy and low in the hips and settled on boots that have been worn to the shape of him. The motion you were in the middle of goes wrong. Your fingers slip a half inch from where they should be, and you correct, slowly, and it comes right.

The shirt is the first thing to speak. Cotton gone soft, the cuffs rolled twice, a fine grit in the weave. The sleeve drags at the forearm and you are in a dark room in a triple-decker, before the day, his mother's radio low in the kitchen. He buttons from the bottom up. He has always done it from the bottom up. He rolls the right cuff, then the left, and the left never sits as neat. There is a small brass lamp lit in the corner, and he touches two fingers to his forehead and thinks nothing, because it is only habit, and under the habit is something like thanks.

The glove hangs from his pocket, stiff, shaped to a grip. You take it. Ten thousand spools, the same quarter turn, the chill of the shift's first hour. A foreman once said *you don't even look anymore* and he took it as a compliment and then lay awake wondering if it was one. That is the feeling in the leather: pride, and under it a small tired fear of being a man who no longer looks.

So you look. You check the tension, the edge, the draw. Check, and check, ten times, on a job that has not needed it in years. The earplug cord rubs your neck. Your jaw is rough with two days of stubble. His face does something at the corners of the mouth that you did not ask it to. The dimples are there even now, at rest, in a face that has nothing to smile at. Through the open door a gray porch stands across the street, and a leaf comes down. Something in his chest knows that porch. Twenty-one years of weight, a stomach full of tea, a lower back that already aches, strong thick forearms that know the machine better than you ever will.

You lift your right hand off the housing and turn it over. Calloused, wide, not yours, yours.

You look up and you say, to no one, "Okay. Hi."

The film keeps pouring. You are warm, and new, and already listening for the quiet in your chest that comes back, the wanting, wondering how long before it does.