Devonte Marchand

Warren Yellowhorse has been standing at this window for four minutes, and the coffee in his hand has gone lukewarm, and his knees ache the way they always ache mid-morning, a soldier's knees, fifty-six years of them, and none of that is the problem. The problem is that nothing in this room is interesting. Barracks light through a government blind. A photo on the dresser of people he does not yet know and does not care to. Four minutes was enough to learn that Warren's life is small and orderly and that his hip does something unpleasant when he turns too fast, and there is a whole wheel waiting, and the wanting comes back faster every time now, like a hunger that resets before the last meal is even down. You do not examine that. You go to the site on the borrowed laptop with his gray-haired reflection ghosted in the black corner of the screen, and you pay, and you spin, already leaving before it decides where you land.

The vise is under your palm before you know it is a vise. The sun is enormous and white and comes off a chain-link fence like struck metal, and your hand — his hand — is turning a small brass thumbscrew on an old adjusting instrument, precise, unhurried, and then it is not: the screw turns half a rotation the wrong way, the motion of a man who has never once in years gotten this wrong. You feel the correction happen before you will it, his body catching itself, backing the screw out, resetting, doing it again slow and right. Then again. Ten more, checked each time, careful as a man defusing something, though it is only a jeweler's loupe stand he is calibrating on a rooftop workbench above El Paso, mid-shift, midday sun flattening the yard below into white glare and turquoise wall.

The linen against your back arrives first, and with it a morning: him standing in front of a mirror in a rented loft downtown, sliding one arm and then the other into this jacket, cream-colored, bought because his stylist said cream photographs warm against his skin and he had laughed at the word "photographs" like it belonged to somebody else's life. Devonte Marchand. Twenty years old. Three years ago a patent he half-understood turned into more money than any forecast had prepared him for, and the money never stopped arriving, the way weather doesn't stop arriving, and somewhere in there he'd kept doing this — this workbench, this loupe, this precision — because his grandfather had taught him to true a jeweler's stand before he'd taught him anything else, and it was the one motion that still felt like his and not the algorithm's.

The ring on his finger — thin, unremarkable, his grandfather's — gives you the old man's hands over his, guiding, patient, the smell of flux and hot solder in a shop three blocks from here that doesn't exist anymore. The mole on his cheek you cannot see but you know it is there the way you know your own weight, and touching it — his hand goes to his scalp instead, out of nowhere, an old unconscious habit, palm smoothing over the tight rows of his own cornrows — brings back a psychiatrist's office, sixteen floors up somewhere, a small orange bottle, a voice saying anxiety is not weakness, it is chemistry, and him believing it eventually, mostly, on the good days. The drink sweating on the table by the other chair, untouched since ten this morning: he doesn't really want it, he never really wants it, he just likes having permission to.

His body is twenty and easy in a way Warren's was not — no ache anywhere, shoulders loose, a runner's economy in how he leans against the table, weight on one hip. His hands know this instrument without his eyes; his hands know money without his heart being in it; his hands, unbidden, go to his scalp again, a tic worn smooth by years, and under it, faint, the memory of nobody's hands but his own ever really being on him — no woman who mattered enough to leave a mark, no one who calls and means something by it. Single. Straight. Nothing waiting for him tonight but this terrace, this glass, this heat.

You look down at the hand on the vise, twenty years old, a mole cooling in shadow somewhere above it you cannot see but can feel like weather on your cheek, and you turn the hand over, palm up, into the white desert light.

"Whose grip is this," you say, out loud, to no one, and it isn't really a question.