Daniel Joseph Wozniak

Idris Oyelaran's hands are steady on the bench, and I hate how steady they are. He is good at this. The pipette sits in his fingers like a pen, the beauty mark under his eye catches the lab light, and his beard has the neat edge he gave it this morning. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He has been mine for less than a minute and I already know every door in him, and none of them leads anywhere I want to go.

I set the pipette down. Somewhere past the glass a centrifuge winds down, and a woman laughs about lunch. A Tuesday afternoon in Nashville, and I am standing in it with a heavy man's pulse in my ears, wanting.

The wanting has no name. I open the page. The wheel is already turning, and I press.

The box is in my hands. Cardboard edge, the weight of it dragging at the forearm, my left foot planted wide on cold concrete. I have started the motion wrong, the lift ahead of the grip, and the box lurches. I stop. I set it back and do it again slowly. Then I check the label, the bin, the count on the scanner, one by one, ten times, as though something might have changed.

Air that smells of dust, tape glue and cold iron. A forklift beeps somewhere out of sight, patient and regular. Light slants through the high brick windows, winter-thin and gold at the edges.

The vest comes first. Its nylon is stiff and scratchy against my forearms, and the reflective strip has gone soft with washing. Then the memory comes, and it is his, not mine. Hanging it on the hook by the time clock, the hook bent from years of other men's vests. Three of his children, grown now, once told him the colour made him look like a traffic cone, and he laughed for a day.

The scanner is strapped to my wrist, and its rubber band is warm from his pulse. Under it a tiredness arrives that is neither mine nor Idris's. Knees that argue on the stairs. A lower back with a bright, particular ache. Fifty-seven years of standing up.

My right hand has gone to my left, and the thumb is working at the ring finger, turning something that is not there. The skin is bare and a little paler. A memory comes up through the thumb: a kitchen, a woman with her coat already on, and the ring going into a saucer by the toaster with a small flat click. He did not argue. He has gone over that click every day since. She was the one who got away, and he knows it was his own two hands that opened the door.

The polo is navy cotton, thin at the collar, and it carries the morning. He stood at a bathroom mirror and ran the razor up the underside of his jaw, slowly, because shaving is the one thing he still does carefully. He touched the crooked nose from habit. A fist in a schoolyard, a doctor's thumb, the set slightly wrong. He pulled the polo over his bare head, and the trousers, grey and soft at the knees, came up over the hips. The boots he laced last, tight, double-knotted.

There is more underneath. A small rug and a morning in a spare room, forehead to the floor, quiet. That was his, and it was the one place he never counted anything.

I lift my hand into the light. It is broad, scarred by nothing, the knuckles thick, the ring finger pale at its root. I turn it over. A stranger's palm, creased and warm and mine.

I look up and say, to nobody, in a voice rough as gravel, "All right then. Let's see you."

How long, I wonder. Until the wanting comes back. Until tomorrow, or in four minutes, with the forklift still beeping.