Daniel Nishioka

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You died on a Tuesday in the apartment you shared with him, and nobody noticed for eleven hours, which tells you something about the two of you.

Not the dying — he wasn't home. He was at the shop, laying bead after bead on a run of handrail for a hotel in Culver City, and you were on the couch with the fan going and the game on mute, and something in your chest that had been quietly failing for two years finally quit. You remember the ceiling. You remember the sound of the palms out in the courtyard, that dry papery scrape they make when the evening wind comes up off the boulevard, and you remember thinking *Dan's going to come home and find me and he's not going to handle it well.*

He didn't. You watched. That's the part nobody warns you about — that you don't go anywhere, you just get thinner, and you stay exactly where your wanting is.

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Here's what you know about Daniel Nishioka that nobody else on earth knows, not his mother in Torrance, not the guys at the shop, not the girl he saw twice in April and then stopped texting for no reason he could name.

You know his leg. Right leg, always, heel up on the ball of his foot, bouncing — at the table, on the couch, in the car at a red light, in the plastic chair at the clinic waiting for his refill. You used to reach over and put a hand on his knee to stop it and he'd say *sorry* like you'd caught him doing something rude, and thirty seconds later it would start again. It's not a nerve. It's a motor that never gets to idle.

You know he smokes exactly ten in a day and calls it a pack because a pack is what he buys, and he smokes the last one standing in the courtyard under the palms with the last of the sun coming orange off the stucco, and he holds it wrong, pinched between thumb and finger like a dart, and he never once in three years finished a sentence about his father out there.

You know he drinks the way a man drinks who thinks the amount is the problem and not the reaching. Tall boys in the fridge door, always four, always four again the next day, like the shelf has to look a certain way or something bad happens.

You know he takes the pills and he takes them right, every morning, dry, standing at the sink, which is the single most disciplined thing you ever saw a person do, and the reason you'd be ashamed to tell him you think that is that he'd shrug it off. He never gave himself credit for anything. He gave you credit for everything. *Nah, that was your idea.* It wasn't. It was his.

You know the freckles. That's the thing you'd tell a stranger first. Twenty-two years old with a welder's calluses and forearms like bridge cable and a spray of freckles across the nose and cheeks that make him look about fifteen when he laughs, which is the reason he doesn't laugh in front of people he doesn't like. You told him once they were the best thing about his face. He got so uncomfortable he left the room.

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The restaurant on Fourth is the one you used to go to. Vinyl booths, hanging lamp low over the two-top by the window, the good garlic chicken, a bill that came with two cookies in a little dish whether you asked for them or not. He kept going after. Every couple weeks. Same table, same order, and he'd sit facing the door and eat and pay and take both cookies and crack one and leave the other one on the plate. Untouched. Whole.

For eight months he did that. For eight months you sat in the chair he was looking at and there was nothing between you but the width of a piece of wood.

Tonight he cracks the first one and it comes apart in his fingers and he reads the slip and his leg is going under the table, going and going, and the second cookie is already broken on the little white dish where he broke it before he ate — he did both tonight, he broke both, that's new — and he's looking at the empty chair the way you have watched him look at it for eight months.

And he says it out loud, quiet, not to anybody: *I just don't want to do this by myself.*

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You have wanted a great many things in the time since the ceiling. You wanted to tell him it wasn't his fault for being at work. You wanted to tell him the four beers in the door were four beers too many and that you knew, because you'd counted, because you'd been counting for a year and never said. You wanted to tell him about the freckles again, properly, so it landed.

But mostly, and you are not proud of it, you wanted the room. The couch. The fan. The scrape of the palms. Weight. Hands. A cigarette held wrong under a dying sun.

Wanting is a door if you push on it long enough from the right side.

He asked for company. You were company. You were the only company that ever fit.

---

The lamp swings a fraction on its cord.

You go into him the way water goes into a boot — all at once, all the way down, no part of him left dry. His head goes back and there's light where his eyes were, white and pouring, and out of his open mouth too, a second of it, maybe less, and the freckles are lit from inside like a road sign in headlights. Then it stops. He slumps. The chair takes his weight. The lamp keeps swinging.

And then the leg stops bouncing.

That's the first thing you notice, from inside. It stops. Not because you stopped it. Because there's nothing left in here that needs to run.

You come up slow. Twenty-two years old. Everything works. Everything *hurts* a little, in the good way, shoulders and hands, the specific ache of eight hours of holding a torch steady, and you had forgotten — you had genuinely forgotten — that a body is a thing you feel from the inside and not just a shape a person makes in a doorway.

You lift the hands off the table. Turn them over. Calluses across the pads, a burn healed years ago into nothing, dirt in the creases that a shower won't take out. Not your hands. Not by a mile. His hands, and you know them better than you knew your own — you passed him the salt over these hands, you took beers out of them, you shoved them off the remote.

You put them down. You pick up the slip of paper.

It says: *YOU WILL NOT BE ALONE.*

You read it once. You look at the empty chair across the table, and it's the chair you were sitting in eleven seconds ago, and it is going to be empty from now on, and you know exactly and precisely what that cost. There is no way back. There's no term on this. His mother is going to call on Sunday and you are going to answer.

You read it again.

Then you set it down on the wood, square, careful, with the small satisfied care of a man who wrote it himself.

You take the second cookie off the dish — the broken one, the one that was always yours — and you eat it, and it's stale, and it's fine. Outside the window the boulevard is going, and out past that there's a courtyard with dry palms and a fan on a floor and a shelf that's going to have to look different starting tomorrow.

*Sorry, Dan,* you think, in his voice, with his mouth, and the mouth doesn't move.

You get up. You leave too much money on the table. You go home.