Darnell Okafor-Reed

You are leaving the man in Houston because of the headset. For three weeks you have worn Curtis Haldane's ears down flat under it, saying the sentence they wrote for you, and this morning a woman asked you to say it again slower and you heard yourself do it, same pitch, same smile. You had paid to be someone, and you were a voice in a cubicle. His belly sits over the belt like a held breath. His knees are fine. It's not his fault. You close the laptop, the wheel is already turning, and Curtis's thumb comes down.

Then you are lying on your back, and the first thing is the light.

A corner of the foil has peeled off the window and laid a bar of white across your face. You turned from it once, you know that without knowing how, and now you turn back into it and open your eyes. They don't blink. The glare goes in like a nail. Your mouth is dry. Your chest rises under cotton that is warm from you.

The sheet is under your hand, and the first thing comes up through it. It is not yours. It is the sound of a mattress being dragged up three flights of stairs, and the pride of it, and the cheapness. A man laughing on the landing about a bargain.

The trousers are still on you. They are heavy at the thigh, creased behind the knee, and they smell of cardboard and diesel. Through the cloth you remember the morning. His thumb on the button at four, in the dark of the porch, the storm door's spring complaining. He sat on the step to get his boots laced and lit a cigarette, then the second. You feel the pack in your chest like a second, smaller lung, the wanting in it, a pack a day, a dry rasp down in the bronchi. You have never wanted one this way. It is his wanting, and your tongue goes looking for it.

Your arm is on the blanket. A cross is inked on the forearm and praying hands on the other, and a flash comes through the skin. A church basement. A woman's hand on the back of his neck. Folding chairs, a hymn he can't carry, and a grandmother's perfume. Under it a long thin shame about something he never told anyone. The shame tells you he stopped asking for things a long time ago. You don't know what the thing was. It stays a shape.

The studs in the earlobes are cold against the pillow. The beard is a thicket under your jaw. Your fingers go to the cheek and find the mole, and you remember a child pressing it with a finger and saying *does it come off.*

Then the legs. Nine hours of a van is in them, the calves stiff as rope, and the lower back has a hot coin pressed into it. The shoulders are strong, loaded daily with other people's furniture. The hands know weight. They know the handle of the van's back door and the exact height of a porch step, and the way a dog's face changes when you come up a walk in brown. You feel the rolling door in your palm before you've touched it. He is good at this, and nobody has ever said so.

Outside a truck brakes. A lamp burns beside the bed though it is morning, because he sleeps by it, and the foil hisses faintly in the draft. Somewhere under all of it is the other man, the bouncer in Miami with the gap in his teeth, whom you were and left two minutes ago. What you did in him, you did. The world doesn't know that this one is the same you.

You lift your hand into the bar of light and turn it over. The palm is darker than the back, lined and nicked, a thumbnail ridged from a hundred boxes. It is steady. It is completely yours and has never been.

You look up and say, to the room, in a voice lower and slower than any you have owned:

"All right. Let's see how long you last."

Not him. You aren't sure which of you you mean, or when the wanting comes back.