Cody Lee Harmon

You are standing in a kitchen in Los Angeles with a glass of water you don't want. Martin Albrecht's bare scalp is cool under your palm, and the moustache has gone damp from drinking. He has been yours for five minutes. He is forty-five, a lawyer, a big man with a soft middle and a Sunday-night quiet in his house. Every light is off but the one over the stove. You open the laptop on his counter and the wheel is there, as it always is.

Nothing is wrong with him. He is fine, he has a good chair, and you look at his hands on the counter and think: they are only ever going to sign things. That is all. You press the key.

Then you are at the foot of a bed with your hand at your chest, and the button you reached for is already in your fingers.

Your ribs are under your palm, a washboard with a pad of softness over it. Socks on carpet. A lamp throws yellow on the wall. Your own breath comes out of a mouth that tastes of old cigarette and a Coke gone flat, and the shirt is buttoned wrong by one. You undo it and do it again. Your fingers don't fumble, because they have done this a thousand times in the dark. The tie hangs loose at your neck. You pull it into a knot he has never tied, and your hands tie it anyway.

The shirt cuff is the first thing to open. It is cotton gone soft from washing, and as it slides on your wrist you are in a thrift store on a Saturday, twenty-two, holding it up against yourself in a mirror and feeling clever. Four dollars. You wanted to look like a man who has somewhere to be. The feeling is pride, small and stubborn, and it isn't yours.

The slacks come next, loose at the waist and belted tight, and they bring a funeral. It's a church with a bad heater and a priest who mispronounces a name. You are wearing these because they're the only dark pair you own. A woman's hand grips your sleeve, and then the grief lands in your throat like a swallowed stone. Your thumb finds the tattoo on the back of your hand without being told. The script is a name and a date. You don't read it. The body already knows it, and you let it keep that.

You turn the hand over and the lighter is there in your fingers, though you never picked it up. Your thumb rolls the wheel, flip and catch, flip and catch. It is the hand's own habit. A porch comes with it, the night, a beer sweating on the rail and the dry sage smell off the desert. He has a cigarette going, and for twenty minutes he is almost happy, with nobody asking him for anything.

The carpet is rough under your socks. Your back aches low from the pallets, cases of canned tomatoes and dog food, a rhythm of lift and turn that your shoulders remember better than he ever did. The ache is honest. At three in the morning there is a long aisle and a cold floor and a radio somewhere, and he likes it more than he'd say. There is a little money put away, and a rosary in a drawer he doesn't use but won't throw out.

The room settles around you, and the lamp hums.

You hold your hands up. The blue eye and the brown eye in the dark window are both looking at you. You close the hand, open it, and flip the lighter once more.

"Hello, Cody," you say, and his voice is lighter than Martin's, a little rough. You wait to feel how long this will hold.