Daniel Cheung

You are leaving the arborist because of the saw. It is early, Maine dark going gray, and you are standing in Imran Qureshi's kitchen with his coffee going cold in his scarred hand. Thirteen minutes. You spent them looking at the climbing rope coiled by the door and feeling nothing, no hunger in his forearms, no pull toward the spruce he has to take down at nine. He is strong and he is dull, and the wanting has already gone out of him. You thumb the scar through his eyebrow, and you pay, and you spin.

Then the wheel stops, and you are standing at the foot of a bed with your hand reaching for a button.

Carpet under bare feet, scratchy, a hotel's. Lamp on. A window going pale blue over a city that is not yours. You stop. Your hand lies flat on your chest, and under it are ribs, narrow and quick, a heart running fast for a man who is standing still. The shirt is wrong by one button, the collar crooked on one side. A tie hangs loose around your neck. Your right leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. You press the heel down, and it starts again.

The cuff touches your wrist, and the memory comes up warm and not yours. Two years ago, a flight to Phoenix, a client who called him "kid." He ironed this shirt in a hotel bathroom with the steam running, because the iron was broken, and he was proud of it, a small clever thing nobody saw. The cotton is soft now with washing, thinned at the collar.

The tie is silk, slick. Under your thumb it gives you his father in a doorway in Denver, adjusting this same blue knot at the throat of a boy of sixteen and saying, *Shoulders. Nobody listens to a man who apologizes with his posture.* The boy hated it. The man at the foot of this bed has kept the tie anyway.

The slacks are wool, wrinkled behind the knees. They give you the airport, the lounge, the ledge where the laptop sits open, forty emails, a bagel he could not afford at that price. They give you the loan statement folded in a bag by the chair, the number he checks like a pulse. Scraping by, in a good suit. They give you a Friday last month, a night with whiskey, the one or two a month he allows himself, and the cigarette he did not smoke afterward. Four years quit. His fingers remember the shape of the pack anyway.

You are short. The mirror will show you a heavy line of brow, and he has spent his whole life being looked at there first. His jaw is smooth and stung from the razor. Your feet ache in advance of shoes.

You undo the button. The buttons come apart and go back up in order, right, each one. Your fingers know the work. The tie goes around, over, through, and the knot you make is one this closet has never seen, something you learned in a body of mine long gone.

You look at your hands. Small, clean, quick, a little cold. Yours until you spin.

You lift your eyes to the glass and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Daniel."

How long, you wonder. The wanting is already there, faint, like a tooth, waiting to ache.