Daniel Wong

You are sixty-five, and your knees tell you so, standing in a kitchen in Ohio where the refrigerator hums and nobody else is awake. The linoleum is cold through your socks. You have been this accountant for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him: he is careful. His hands are careful, his cardigan is careful, and the whole house is a set of small sums that come out even. You wanted to be loud in something. You wanted a body that could be hurt and not mind. You open the laptop on the counter and the wheel is already turning, and your thumb, his thumb, spins it.

The kitchen goes. Cold goes. Then weight comes, and it is all in the chest, heavy and warm, face pressed into cotton that smells of someone else's detergent. Your breath is ragged and then it is not. The arm that was hanging off the mattress is cold to the elbow, and you draw it up, roll onto your back, and fold your hands on your chest like a man laid out. Streetlight cuts through the gap in the curtains and across the unmade sheets. Water glasses stand on the nightstand, two of them, sweating.

The shirt he sleeps in is soft, washed a thousand times, and it gives you the first flash: a woman's laugh, a hallway, a small child's weight on this very chest, and a feeling that is not yours at all. It is plain, enormous gratitude, the kind of tired that is a kind of wealth. The sheets are next, rough and a little damp, and they bring a night in a different apartment, years back. He is sitting on a bathroom floor with a cigarette he does not light, and he is deciding something. A glass, a drink, a door. The feeling is shame turning slowly into stubbornness. He has been sober a long time. The two glasses on the nightstand are only water, and you feel his pride in that, quiet and absolute.

Your tongue finds the ring in his lip, a cool bead, and with it comes a classroom after the last bell: chalk dust, a boy who would not talk, the long patience of getting him to. He broke his nose once, and your fingers go to the bridge and feel the crooked set. A basketball court, an elbow, bright pain, then laughing with blood in his mouth. The mattress under your shoulder blades is firm and old. The ache in your lower back is a teacher's ache, forty-six years of standing. Your legs feel strong, springy, built for stairs. This body could run. You can feel it wanting to.

He has three children or more, and the thought of them arrives as a weight in the throat. There is a woman asleep somewhere in this apartment whom he loves unreservedly. There is another woman, an old one, whom he still thinks about on certain mornings and does not mention. The pillow smells of the first, and the thought of the second is a small closed room in him that you do not open.

He has almost nothing. The memory of the ledger is there too, the rent and the carefulness. It is the same carefulness you just left, and you almost laugh.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are broader than the ones you had a minute ago, the knuckles smooth, the nails short from chalk and work. You look up at the dark ceiling and say, softly, "Well. Hello, Daniel."

Nothing answers, because nothing is left to. In the next room a child turns over in sleep. You lie there with his pulse in your ears and wonder how long this one holds, and when the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be here when the light comes up.