Desmond Achebe

The dorm room smells like instant coffee and somebody else's laundry detergent, and none of it is yours, because none of it has ever been yours. You are sitting at Efrain Solano's desk in Efrain Solano's body, gray-haired and thirty-five and dimpled when he — when you — used to smile, and you have been him for nine minutes and it is already the longest nine minutes of your life, because nothing in it is happening. A textbook. A window with the blinds half down against the El Paso glare. Somewhere down the hall a door slams and this body's pulse doesn't even change, like it's used to being ignored, like it has spent thirty-five years politely waiting for something to occur. You flex the hand. Nice hand. Not yours. You paid for a wheel and it gave you a man reading about supply curves, and the shame of that — not sadness, shame — is what gets you back to the laptop, card already saved, thumb already knowing where the button is before the rest of you has agreed to anything.

You spin.

—

The wall is close and pale and unpainted-white the way a room is before anyone's decided what it's for, and there's a box against your hip, heavier than you expected, corner biting into muscle that did not used to be there and now is, and your hand — his hand — is dropping it to the floor with a controlled little grunt that comes out of a chest wider than any chest you've stood in twice. Keys are still in the door behind you, swinging a half inch, catching a cold white light off the driveway. You didn't do that. You're only now arriving to find it already done, his weight settling forward onto the balls of his feet, his knuckles already lifting toward the wall like this is a thing he does, like the room needs to be introduced to him and him to it before either of you can call it home.

The knuckles touch plaster and something answers.

*Cold.* Fingers against drywall, and under it — a cutting table, a bolt of gray flannel unrolled the length of an arm, chalk dust, the particular ache across the shoulders that comes from bending over pins for six hours and being fine with it because it's yours, the shop, the light coming sideways through the window at four o'clock the way it always does. Desmond Achebe. The name comes up out of the wall like it was waiting in the plaster the whole time. Forty-nine years on this coast, twenty-two of them with a needle between his teeth more often than his mouth wants people to know.

You walk the room's edge, trailing knuckles, and every few feet something else opens.

The vest — you're not wearing it now, just the black tee and the jeans, but your body still remembers the weight of it, the tape measure looped through, the drag of the leather straps across your shoulders at seven this morning when you buttoned it in the mirror of the old apartment for the last time, sleeve by sleeve, checking the give at the elbow because a jacket that doesn't move with a man isn't worth calling finished. That's the thing you know how to do without being told: cut cloth so it moves like it isn't there. Twenty-two years of it. A trade that came from an uncle in Oakland who never once said he was proud, just handed you shears and walked away, and you built a whole life out of that silence being enough.

The wedding band on your left hand is warm from your own skin already, and it brings the wife — Carol, seven years married, the smell of her hair on a pillow that's in a box somewhere in this apartment right now, unopened. Before her: Renee, the ex, and a daughter, sixteen and furious in the particular way sixteen-year-olds are furious at fathers who moved out and then, worse, moved on. You carry that the way you carry most things — quietly, in the shoulders, in a jaw that's already tight before you've decided to be upset about anything.

Your knuckles crack on their own, one hand then the other, an old unconscious tic, and you feel the whole day underneath it: waking at five because the movers were coming at six, a last cigarette on the old back steps watching the fog not lift, the drive over here with everything he owns fitting into a rented van because thirty years of tailoring pays the rent and not much further than that. Scraping by. He knows the number in his bank account the way he knows the inseam of every regular customer's left leg — off by heart, and never mentioned.

The room is empty and his and cold, and somewhere down the hall of your own memory — Efrain's dorm, nine minutes, a textbook open to a chapter you'll never finish — is already faint, already someone else's problem.

You stop walking. You look down.

The hand at the end of your arm is thick-veined, forty-nine years old, a plain gold band catching the white light from the driveway, and you turn it over like it's a tool you've been handed and told to learn.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice that isn't yours yet and is already starting to be. "Okay. Let's see what you're worth."