Calvin Eugene Merriweather

You are standing in Anil Mehta's boots in the apparatus bay, and the afternoon is flat and bright on the chrome. Somebody is wiping down the rig. Somebody laughs at the far end. He has been yours for two days and six hours, and the body is a good one. It is quick and green-eyed and it never tires. It cannot do the one thing you wanted today. Upstairs a man was crying behind a door, and the body that you wear walked up to the door and stood there. You knew the words and none came. Your throat knew only the drill of the job. You came back down and opened the page with the wheel on it. You are not unhappy. You are only done with being a man who cannot say it.

You pay. The wheel turns. The bay goes out like a hand over a lamp.

The floor changes first, because it is wood, old and give-y under the soles of your shoes. You are standing. Your hands are lifted over a keyboard, fingers curled, mid-sentence in some language of brackets. The air smells of brick dust and burnt coffee gone cold. It is a Tuesday in Nashville, and light is coming through the tall window with neon sitting in it, red letters backward on the glass. Your knees are old. Your lower back has a low, patient ache, the ache of standing since morning.

Your right hand twitches and does one keystroke wrong. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though this is a job that has not needed checking in years.

Then the memories come, through what you touch.

The hoodie first. The cuffs are soft and thinned out, and the left one is stretched where he pulls it over his palm. The cotton on your shoulders brings that morning back, his morning. He sits on the edge of the bed in the gray before the alarm. He pulls the zipper up over the T-shirt, sleeve by sleeve, one arm and then the other, grunting a little at the left shoulder. He thinks of nothing but the coffee. He feels something like gladness that no one needs him anywhere by nine. The sweatpants are loose on a skinny frame, and the drawstring is knotted twice because the elastic died years ago. The black sneakers are creased across the toes and carry a church-shoe loyalty. He bought them for a funeral and kept wearing them.

Your hand finds the headphones at your neck. The foam is warm from his skin. Through them comes a year: a Sunday, a choir loft, his mother's alto climbing over everyone, and him at nine years old holding the hymnal upside down and not caring. Then a long stretch of nights in this same room fixing a bank's ledger code, proud and lonely in equal measure. Nobody to tell. Nobody waiting. The quiet is not sad to him. It is just his, as the pen is, a plain ballpoint you find in your fingers. It clicks, click and click, a habit older than the code. Click, and the calm of a man who has finished most of what he meant to.

The mug is under your other palm, thick and chipped at the rim. Cold coffee. The beard is rough against your knuckle when you scratch it. The freckles feel like nothing, and somehow you can tell they are there.

You look at your hands. Brown, long-fingered, thin at the wrist. You turn them over. They are steady.

You lift your eyes to the window, to the red neon letters, and say, quietly, "Well. Let's see what you were about to say."

Somewhere under the ribs the question is already waiting: how long, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.