Daniel Kuroda

You are standing at a window in Pittsburgh, in Peter Lindqvist's skin, and the beard itches the way it has for the whole of the minute you've had it. The gray eyes in the dark glass are fine. The body is fine. It does everything you ask of it. It's only that he is tidy, and being him is like living in a drawer. You asked for something else, and you can't say what, even to yourself. Your thumb is already on the screen, the wheel already turning, and the ticking slows the way it always does.

Then you are standing bent over a cardboard box with both hands inside it.

The light is low, orange and gold from the open back door, and a blue neon word is bleeding across the floor from the alley. Fluorescent tubes hum overhead. There is a pallet at your knees. Your breath goes in and out of a chest that sits lower and wider than the last one, and your back takes the bend with a dull, complaining warmth just above the belt.

Your hands go to the box flap, and they are wrong, for half a second. The tape knife is not where they reached. So they stop, and do it again slowly, correctly, and then do it again to be sure, the way you check a thing that has never once needed checking.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Soft oxford cloth cuffed twice at the forearm, and the cuff under your thumb gives you a morning: a bedroom with the blinds half down, a woman's voice from the bathroom saying you're wearing that one again, and his answer, which is only a grunt that means yes, and the pleasure of a shirt gone gentle from washing. He rolled the left sleeve first. He always does. Then the keys at his hip knock your thigh, and a flash comes with them, a small kid's hand gripping the ring and shaking it like a rattle, and the love goes through you so hard you almost put a hand on the shelf.

The ring on your left hand is plain, warm and a little tight. It brings a kitchen, a number on a paper, and a long silence at a table. The number has a minus sign in front of it and is larger than he has said aloud to anyone. He folded it in four. Under that sits a cold, practical dread he carries like a second belt.

The concrete floor comes up through the soles of the brown shoes. Your knees ache, and your calves are tired, the tiredness of a man who has been standing since early. The back of your hand goes to your cheek without being told, over the smooth jaw he shaved this morning. A stub of old wanting lives under it: cigarettes behind a loading dock, years ago, gone now, but the hand still goes to the face to look for them.

Through the open door the neon hums and music is already starting somewhere down the alley. He loved this stretch of evening, before the doors open, when nothing is asked of him. You get that too, a quiet that belongs to him.

You straighten up slowly, and your spine ticks. You lift your hands in front of you and turn them over, the thick fingers, the band, the dust of cardboard on the creases.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Let's see how long you last."

The box waits. Somewhere a wheel is already turning in you, small and patient, asking whether this is the one that stays, or only the next one that goes.