Brandon Kenji Yamashita

You stand in Esteban Quiroga's kitchen in Toronto, and the last thing he does is run the tap until it goes cold. His hands are small and square, and the left one is steady and the right one wants to be doing something. You can feel how his feet stop short of the floor in the good chairs. For a month you have been a man whom people let finish his sentences. A minister's wife touched his sleeve at dinner and called him "Excellency" like a joke she was proud of. It was fine and it was a body that worked. But last night a clerk at the embassy needed a high shelf, and you stood looking up at the box of files while she reached past you, kindly, without a word. Nothing else happened. You rinse the glass and set it upside down. You are not going to say it out loud, not even here with the window black and the house asleep. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, slow, and you pay.

The show cuts to a bright frame.

You are sitting up straight. A remote sits on the couch arm, put there by a hand that is now yours. The leather is cold through the shirt and creaks as you shift. The dark room smells of old smoke, cold coffee, and the sour sweetness of a cushion that has been sat in for years. The light from the television moves over your wrists. On the screen a man falls off a ladder, and the laugh that should be in your chest is not there. Somewhere underneath, a pack a day has set a dry weight in your lungs. You breathe in, and it catches and lets go.

The sleeve first. You pull the cuff of the gray shirt down over your knuckles, and it comes: this morning, a different shirt, navy, the buttons done up wrong and done again, thumbs working on their own because the hands cannot stand still. Then the hard hat on its hook, the radio clipped to the belt, and the floor at shift change with the line still running, a roar like weather. The men were calling him by his first name, because he does not make them say anything else. Under your palm the denim of the knee is worn soft. A flash: a garage under a house, a steep driveway, cold white light through the bay window above, and his father's old truck that never ran. Nothing of the man's feeling is sad. It is only his, the way a room is. You press your thumb to your front teeth and find the gap, and his tongue knows it. Fourteen years old, a boy laughing with his hand over his mouth, learning to stop. Then he stopped bothering. You taste it now, the little whistle on an *s*.

The foot goes asleep under the crossed leg, and you feel the sock, the ankle, thirty-three years of stairs. Your shoulders are wide and tired. The calluses along the fingers catch on the seam of the remote and remember a wrench, a clipboard, a lighter. There is a pack in the drawer by the couch. You know it without looking. No one is waiting for him. The quiet in the house is the kind he made.

You lift both hands into the television light and turn them over. They are long, brown, sure. The right one is already tapping on your thigh.

You look up and say, to the dark room, "All right. Let's see what you were keeping."

Somewhere a wheel is already turning in you. How long, you wonder. Until the wanting comes back. Until tomorrow, or four minutes.