Darnell Whitlock

You leave Hernán Escobedo in the worst way: bored, and a little ashamed of being bored. Three minutes in him. You are sitting on a folding chair in a rented room that smells of old radiator and frying onions from downstairs, and your thumbs are scarred with other men's habits. His cauliflower ear throbs against the phone. His belly sits warm on his thighs. He has no job, no appointment, and nothing in his pockets but a transit card with four dollars on it. You could have lived in him for a year. The wheel is open in the browser. You press the button the way a man scratches something he has told himself he will leave alone.

Then the room is gone, and there is no between.

You are standing. Your hands are on a keyboard, mid-stroke, and the stroke is wrong. Something is off by half a beat. You correct it slowly, deliberately. Then ten more times, each one checked, on a motion that has not needed checking in years. The weight of you is in your heels. The standing desk is cold under your wrists. Tuesday afternoon pours through the tall window, gray and wet. Across the street, a brownstone stoop shines.

The hoodie comes first. The cuff rubs your wrist, and you are in a morning: his arms going into these sleeves, the fleece still cold from the chair, the blue shirt under it pulled down over a stomach he has stopped apologizing for. Two small kids' voices behind a door, a spoon against cereal, a woman's key in a lock that is no longer his to hear. The sweatpants drawstring, knotted by thumbs that have knotted it ten thousand times.

Your right hand drifts toward the desk and finds a pen. Click, click. It is a habit older than the job. A memory opens: a college lab, the same click, a professor's irritation. Then a different one: money arriving, a number in an account that made him sit down on the stairs and laugh until he coughed. The headphones around your neck are warm. Under them, a song you did not choose is still faintly leaking. Your ear tugs at the cartilage ring, and a boy at a mall, sixteen, wincing, proud.

The coffee beside you has gone cold. You lift it. The cup is cardboard, soft at the lid. He forgot it again. Under that is a smaller ache, flat and recent: a woman's name he does not type anymore. His thumb knows the shape of a phone he has not opened since Sunday. He smokes on the stoop below, and the memory tastes of mint and tar. His lungs remember it too, a faint tightness. His knees ache a little from standing. His shoulders are strong, thick, practiced at carrying small children.

You do not know what he was building on the monitors. The code is a language you can read only as shapes. But your fingers know where they live.

You lift your hands from the keys and turn them over. Freckles reach down to the knuckles. They are a stranger's hands, and they are yours.

You look up, and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."