Elias Haddad

You are in Vikram Deshmukh's kitchen, and the refrigerator hums in a key you have started to hate. It has been less than a minute of his life, and you have already stood in it longer than he would have wanted. The beard is the wrong weight on your jaw. You keep touching it. His wife's handwriting is on the calendar, and that is not the reason. The reason is smaller. You went to the stove, put your hand on the cold kettle, and nothing came. Nothing came from the mug or the coat on its hook either. Just his body, standing there like a coat on a hook, a good one that fit. You needed something to be hard, and he was easy. He is a man who has never once been afraid of a Tuesday. You take out the phone and the page opens, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then you are on your knees.

The carpet is under both kneecaps and the weight of you is all wrong, low and wide, a belly resting on the thighs. The mattress edge is against your folded hands. A clock on the nightstand says 12:11. You were halfway through a laugh and it is still in your chest, a half-finished breath going out of a man who was pleased with himself for getting to amen early. You have started to rise. Your hands are pushing off the mattress, and the legs are ready, and you stop, and you come back down on both knees. The smile goes out of your face while you are still breathing it. Your forehead drops to the bedspread, and it is cool and smells of detergent.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, navy, soft from washing, and where it pulls across the shoulder blades you get a morning, his, not yours. He stood in this room with the lamp off and the shirt in his hand, thinking he had one more clean one, and that was the whole thought. The smell of it is a drawer he keeps shut. Then the sweatpants, gray, the cuffs gone loose at the ankle, and a night on a couch with the television talking to no one. Someone had said *you can sleep in the bed, Elias*, and he had not wanted to.

You open your hands against the bedspread and the left thumb goes to your mouth on its own. Teeth find the edge of the nail, the ragged place, and it is a habit so old it has no feeling attached, a groove worn into him. Under it comes a classroom, a boy, a nun with a ruler, and the first time he was told to stop. You do not stop.

The knees ache, not badly. They are forty-nine years old and have carried this weight up the steps of a brownstone in wet weather for a long time. His back is thick and strong. The body knows how to be heavy. It is a body that lifted two children, one at a time, onto these shoulders, and you feel it before the image comes, a small hot hand in your hair, and a laugh. Then his throat closes around something, and it is a different woman's name, the recent one, who left her toothbrush here and then came for it. He kept it in the drawer for three weeks. The drawer is the nightstand. You do not open it.

The ring finger. You rub your thumb across it and the skin is paler there, a band of it, smoother than the rest. He took the ring off in a parking lot, in March, and could not say why it was that day. The prayer was for the children, then for her, the other her, then for nobody, and then it was a joke he told God, and God was getting the short version. *Amen, I'm done, you win.* That is what he was laughing at.

Under the knees the carpet is rough. It gives you the apartment on the day they moved in, boxes, a lease, his father's rosary in a saucer, still there on the dresser. Gray hair on the pillow. A man who manages nine engineers and is kind to them in an open room full of large prints pinned to the wall, who knows which of them is going through something. You know it. You know where he keeps a pen.

You lift your head. The clock says 12:12.

You turn your hands over in the lamplight. Square palms, thick fingers, the nail bitten down, the pale line where a ring was, and a wedding that is gone. You hold them until they stop being his and are only what you have. Then you lift your eyes, and you say to the room, in a voice lower than you expected, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Something is already stirring in you, small and bright and hungry. You do not know yet whether you will still be him tomorrow, or in an hour, or when the clock turns over again.