Daniel Seo

Vikram's thumbs are rough from forty years of other people's lumber, and I am standing in his kitchen with the laptop open. The coffee beside it has gone cold. I have been him for less than a minute, which is the problem. A carpenter's body is a good one. It is strong and it knows where its own edges are. But the first thing it did was reach for a tape measure that wasn't on his belt, and I stood there with his hand closed on nothing, and understood that I was going to spend the whole morning being handed his habits. The wheel was still open in the other tab, turning slowly. I did not need a better body. I wanted to be surprised by one. I clicked.

Then it is warm, close air and a bed in front of my knees. My hand is flat on my chest and under it the ribs go up and down, narrower than the carpenter's, quicker. The shirt is black and thin and the buttons are one off all the way up. My fingers know before I do. They undo the row and set it right, and the tie hangs loose and my fingers knot it in a way I would never have chosen.

The cotton against my back is damp already. Blinds, a gray light, a clock radio on the sill. It is late morning, which makes no sense for a man dressing for work, and then the shirt tells me why.

He works the night-into-day shift at a café that opens late for the hospital crowd, and he sleeps in pieces. The collar under my fingers gives me a morning, not this one: his daughter at the kitchen table of a house that was once his, and a boy beside her, both of them watching him knot a tie for a recital. *Like this, see, over, under, through.* He knotted it for them slowly, each time, so they would learn. Pride, then the ache behind it.

The tie in my fingers is slick and cool. It gives me his ex-wife in a church parking lot, the heat coming off the asphalt, her saying his name as if it were something she'd decided to put down. He said nothing. He prayed about it afterward on the drive home, and the praying did not do what he asked.

My left thumb finds the ring finger and the skin there, pale and smooth where the band was. His thumb does this on its own, a dozen times a day. The mattress edge presses the backs of my knees, and the floorboards through the socks are cool. He owes more on a car and a loan than the house would fetch, and the number sits low in his stomach like a swallowed stone. He doesn't drink. He never has. He steams milk for strangers at six in the morning, and his wrist knows the exact moment the pitcher is too hot to hold.

My shoulders are tired already, and my knees too. A forty-six-year-old back, a man with a good deal still to carry.

I lift my hands and turn them over. They are slender and steady, a pale band on one finger. I look up into whatever is looking back at me and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Daniel."

Nothing answers. The blinds tick against the window. And I wonder how long this one will hold, and whether the wanting will come back by noon or by the year's end, or before I've finished the knot.