Brian Stoltzfus

You are sixty and you are standing in a kitchen in Pittsburgh with the light not yet on. The coffee has gone wrong in the pot, burnt at the edges. You have been this man for less than a minute and already you know the thing: his knees complain on the stairs, the cleft chin catches when you rub it, the hazel eyes in the dark window look tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. He is an engineer. He knows how a wing holds. He cannot tell you why nothing in the house is warm.

You do not say why you are going back. Maybe it is the quiet in this kitchen. Maybe it is a phone on the counter that does not ring and a name in it you will not press. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you pay without reading the price.

The server room is cold and loud. A rack door stands open, a gray cable is looping from your left hand into the shelves, and a coil of colored patch cords hangs across your shoulder. Your thumb finds the clip of a connector and presses it wrong. It slips. You do it again, slowly, and it seats with a click.

The breath is his: thin, even, a little high in the chest. He is light. Your shoulders are narrow, your wrists are bony, and the fabric of the pullover rides loose on a body with nothing extra to fill it. Your hair lies on your neck like something you forgot to deal with.

The sleeve at your wrist is soft, pilled gray fleece, and it opens something. A closet in the dark, a hand reaching without turning on the light, because he does not like to wake the house, and the house is only him. Left sleeve first, always. He rolls both to the elbow because the cuffs ride into the work. The zipper at the throat is cold on his chin. The jeans are the soft black pair, worn thin at the knee. He pulled them on sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg at a time, and he thought, without sadness, that he should call his mother Sunday.

The cable in your hand is cool and slightly tacky. The memory under it is plain and good: the first time he got a whole building to talk to itself, a Friday, nobody to tell, and he drove home with the windows down. Then the connector clicks and the memory is gone.

You reach up and run your palm over your scalp, and the hair drags softly through your fingers. Something comes with it. A woman's laugh in a car, years back, her hand taking his wrist off his head: *stop doing that.* She is not here. He still does it anyway.

His shoes are flat against the tile. His back aches a little where it has bent over racks. His sleeve slides up and the ink shows, bold lines and faded color, and you understand he got it young and never regretted it. He does not drink. He does not smoke. He has a little money put away and an ordinary, steady life, which is hard to hold in a hand.

You look at the hands. They are long, dry-knuckled, quick. You turn them over, and the fingers curl as if they knew you were watching.

You lift your eyes. "Well," you say, in his voice, light and a little rough. "Hello."

The cable hangs from your fingers. Down the aisle the fans keep pulling air, and you wait to feel how long this one will hold you.