Calvin Nakagawa

You are standing in a kitchen in Atlanta with a wrench-callused hand around a glass of water, and it is the middle of the night, everyone asleep. Wesley Hartigan's knees ache on the cold tile. Three minutes of him and you already know what he is for: a bad left knee, a beard that itches when he swallows, freckles on forearms that have been under sinks for twenty years. His wife's reading glasses sit folded by the toaster. You did not want any of it. The house ticks. A pipe somewhere knocks, and your whole new body knows which pipe, and what is wrong with it, and that it is not yours to fix. That is the thing. He is competent at a thousand small things and none of them are yours. You set the glass down. You open the page.

The wheel turns. You do not feel yourself leave.

Now you are standing, and your hand is already moving across paper. Evening. A lamp is on at your left, throwing orange on a scarred wooden counter, and fluorescent light hums overhead. Your weight sits forward on the balls of your feet. You are mid-motion, a sheet pinched between two fingers, and for half a second the motion is wrong, a fumble, a hand that does not know whose it is. Then you do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because you are checking, because you are new.

The body is dense and warm. Shoulders thick, heavy through the chest, short in the leg. Your pulse is steady and young. The room smells of burnt coffee, carpet glue, and cold glass.

The shirt first. The collar scratches the back of your neck and something opens: a morning, a small kitchen, a window with mountains in it. His hands working buttons from the bottom up, because he started at the bottom once and never changed. A pressed black sleeve folded and creased with a thumbnail. The patch on the shoulder, which he straightened in a mirror and thought, not for the first time, that it looked like a costume. Then the belt: its weight, the flashlight against your hip, the old habit of touching it to make sure it is there. Under that, a flash of his father's voice saying a guard is just a man who stays awake, said not unkindly, and the long shame and stubborn pride that came with hearing it.

The paper under your fingers. Visitor logs, a sign-in sheet, ink smudged by someone's sleeve. Your fingers are drumming against the counter, a quick rolling pattern you did not start. The rhythm brings a porch with it. A bungalow step, cold beer, an ex-smoker's phantom ache for a cigarette at the exact moment the sun drops behind the rooflines, the Front Range going purple and then black. He has quit eleven months. He still reaches for his pocket every dusk. Your hand goes there now, and finds nothing, and the wanting is his and yours both.

Your left eye drifts. You feel it, a slight outward lean when you stop concentrating, and with it a schoolyard, a kid's voice asking which of us he is looking at. He learned to hold the gaze anyway, to make people meet it. Under the shame there is a stubbornness you almost admire.

Metal in your ears, a small cold weight in your nose. A night he did it, sixteen, grinning, scared, proud. Money, too: the number in his account is small and he knows it to the dollar, rent first, then the truck, then nothing. He is scraping by and has made a quiet peace with it. He sits sometimes, not praying, just sitting, believing in something he cannot name. Nobody knows that about him.

You lift your hands from the counter and hold them in the lamplight. Square palms, short strong fingers, a callus along the side of the index. You turn them over. They are warm. They belong to nobody now.

You look up at the black glass, at the lights of a city you have never seen, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last." The lamp hums. Somewhere under your ribs the wanting is already asleep, and you cannot tell for how long.