Darnell Pickett

You have been Isaiah Whitfield for under a minute, and already you know his refrigerator hums in B-flat.

You are standing in his kitchen in Chicago with a glass of water you poured and haven't drunk. His beard is thick under your palm. His belly sits against the counter edge like a second, patient person. The house is asleep: furnace ticking, a child's night-light down the hall. You came here to want nothing, and the wanting came anyway. He has a body that works. He has a job that pays. The thing you wanted, you found within a minute, was not in him. You set the glass down. The laptop is already open on the island, and the wheel is already turning.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is a mattress under your whole front, a pillow wet at the corner where his mouth was open. Your breath comes ragged, then even in one pull, and your arm, hanging off the bed, wakes with pins in it. Streetlight stands in the gap of the curtains like a blade of milk. You draw the arm up. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at the chest, on their own, in a way he has never once slept.

Light body. Sixty years in it. The left leg ends below the knee in a sleeve of ache, and the carbon is propped against the bed, cold when your heel finds it. Your right knee bounces under the sheet, already, without you.

The sheet first. Cotton, worn soft, and it gives you a Sunday: his wife's feet against his shins, her saying *you're doing it again* about the knee, and him stilling it, and it starting up the second she's asleep. Forty years of that. The warmth of it is not yours and it goes through you like a hymn through a wall.

Your ring finger finds the band. Plain gold, thin on the underside. A courtroom hallway, a Friday, his thumb turning it round and round while a jury deliberated over a boy who could not afford him. He won. He went to the bathroom and sat in a stall shaking. Nobody knows that. Now you do.

Under the bed, the sneakers; your foot has found a lace. Then a stretch of red clay, a hospital light, his mother's voice singing "I Need Thee Every Hour," and the leg, the leg, the day he understood it was not coming back, and how he made himself learn the stairs before he let anyone see him cry. His shoulders know that stubbornness. Your jaw sets with it.

The shirt on you is gray and old, the cuffs frayed. It gives you last Easter: his daughter fixing his tie, his son pretending not to watch, rolling the left trouser leg for him because he likes the carbon to show. *Let them look,* he said. Let them look, and then hear me.

You lie in the dark in a skinny, hard body that has outworked everyone and never once been surprised by comfort. A millionaire, and the knee still bounces.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. His. Brown, long-fingered, the band catching blue. You turn them over, and the palms are lined like a ledger.

"Well," you say, in his low, dry voice, quietly, so as not to wake the house. "Hello, Counselor."

Somewhere under the bed a shoe shifts. You do not know how long he will hold. The knee starts up again, and you let it.