Daniel Kenji Watanabe

You are in Kareem's chest, at Kareem's kitchen counter, and you have been for under a minute. The tile is cold through his bare feet. The refrigerator hums. His nose, the broken one, whistles faintly on each breath, and you have already stopped finding it interesting. He is strong and he is thick through the shoulders, and none of it is a surprise to you anymore. That is the trouble. You wanted a body that could do something you could not. This one does what a body does. Down the hall his wife is asleep, and you know nothing about her but the shape of her under the sheet. You did not come for her. The phone is lit in his hand, the wheel turning on it, and you are tired of being handed things that fit.

You press the button.

The cold tile is gone. There is carpet under your knees, and a mattress edge against your forearms. Your mouth is stretched mid-laugh, and the smile slides off your face with the breath still in it. You were halfway to standing and your legs have folded you back down. Your forehead meets the bedspread. It smells of detergent and dust and warm cotton. A red clock on the nightstand says 3:14 and the window beyond it is black.

Your knees ache first, a flat old ache from the floor. Your back is stiff at the base. The t-shirt is thin and soft and washed nearly to nothing, and when you breathe it shifts across your shoulder blades. There is something clear and hard on your face, plastic pads on the bridge of your nose. Safety glasses, in bed, at night. You do not know why. Your fingers know how to tuck them up the nose.

The bedspread is under your palms, and it gives you a woman's voice from the doorway, years ago, saying *you don't have to do it on your knees, Dan, He can hear you lying down*. Him laughing. Doing it on his knees anyway, not because he believes, but because it makes him mean the words more. He is spiritual, not religious. He talks to something, not very seriously, and he does not ask it for much. Tonight it was for the satellite. The cleanroom, the stand, the white light, a torque value he cannot stop checking in his head. He wore the glasses home by accident, and then to bed on purpose, a joke on himself that he never told anyone.

The shirt gives you the morning, sleeve by sleeve. That was not this shirt. That was the white smock, snapped to the throat, the lanyard cold on his collarbone. The black trousers, the boots with the soft soles, the badge tapped to a reader. This shirt came after, from a drawer, in the dark, quietly, so as not to wake her.

Your jaw moves. Something is missing from your teeth. A toothpick, long gone, because his mouth still goes looking for one. The skin along your jaw is smooth and tight, and the face of a man shaves at night when he cannot sleep. His dimples pull in your cheeks even now, with nothing to smile at. You can feel them like thumbprints.

In the next room, a child turns over. You hear the mattress. A feeling rises through his chest, huge and plain and embarrassing, and it is not yours. You let it go through you. You do not claim it. There is a woman in a photograph on the nightstand, but also another woman, older and fainter, from a summer before any of this, a name that surfaces and sinks. He never told anyone he still thinks of her sometimes, and was never unfaithful, and is not sorry. Pittsburgh has stairs between its backyards, and he walked them at dusk the day his daughter was born, wet leaves slick underfoot, the whole city leaning on its hills.

You lift your head. Your hands are on the bedspread. The left one wears a plain gold band, a little loose in the cold. You turn them over. Square palms, short nails, a callus on the right middle finger from pens. They are careful hands. They are very good at small things.

You look up at the dark window. Your reflection is in it, a stranger in glasses.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, soft. "Okay, Daniel."

The voice is lower than you expected. You wonder how long it will keep answering to you, and whether the wanting will come back before the morning.