Dennis Hoang

You are Caleb Thibodeaux for less than a minute, and already you know what he is. He is the ache across the shoulders from other people's sofas, the hallway of a house in New Orleans where everyone is asleep, the screen's light on a wall. His hands are enormous and they are fine. They work. Nothing is wrong with him, and that is what sent you back: you stood in the dark kitchen with a glass of water and felt only that he was finished, a thing you had already read to the last page. You pay. The wheel turns.

Then the mattress is under your chest.

The breath is ragged in your mouth, and then it is even, in one pull. The arm hanging off the bed is heavy as wet rope. You draw it up. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold on your chest. Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket.

The first thing to come is the T-shirt, soft and washed thin at the collar. It is not this morning's shirt; it is a hundred nights of it. He bought a pack of three because the school wanted him in a tie and he wanted one thing in his life that asked nothing. The cotton is against your ribs and you are tired in his particular way. It is a teacher's tiredness, thirty-one years of other people's questions. Five-nine and dense, he carries weight in the thighs and the forearms. His left knee has a grudge. His back says he lifted something wrong in March.

The sheet under your palm gives you her. His wife turns toward him in this bed, years ago, and says his name into his shoulder. In his feeling it is simple and enormous, like a house he did not know he owned. Then the two children, small, on this same mattress on a Sunday, kicking. He had said, laughing, that he never slept, and they believed him.

The ring is cool when you press your thumb to it. It was loose on the wedding day, because he had lost weight from nerves. The silver hoop in his ear is a small cold nothing, and the memory behind it is a dare at twenty-two that he never took back. Your fingers find the buzzed scalp on the pillow. He shaves it every Sunday, and the jaw too, because the face in the mirror should look like it has nothing to hide. In a drawer somewhere there are cigars, one a month, on the back step, where nobody sees him enjoy anything.

The smell of the room is detergent, dust and a little cedar. The money worry sits under the mattress like a stone: the numbers, the truck payment, a small account that does not grow. He folds it away each night before sleep. It is the last thing that comes, and it is not yours.

You lift your hand into the streetlight and turn it over. The palm is broad and the fingers are blunt, the nails clean from chalk and soap. They are strangers' hands, and they are yours.

You look up at the dark ceiling, and the voice that comes out is low and not quite right.

"Okay. Hello, Dennis."

The house breathes around you. You do not know yet how long this one lasts, or when the wanting will come back.