Elias Khoury

You are Mateo Archuleta, and you are standing in the vestibule of a train with the doors sighing open on a gray Seattle morning, and you have been him for less than a minute. The conductor's cap sits right on his head. His shoulders are young and loose. His knees take the step down without a thought. Everything in him works, and that is the trouble. You stand at the platform edge with a radio on his hip and the horn of the next train in his chest, and you feel nothing arrive. No wanting. A body that is only a body, and you have already been in twelve hundred of those. You open the page again with his thumb. The wheel is there, patient, a bright dumb circle. You do not say why. You pay. You spin.

The wheel clicks down, and the platform is gone.

Heat first, thick and wet, laid over the skin like a cloth. Then a window full of green. You are standing, leaning forward on straight arms, and under your right palm there is a smooth cool slope of glass that hums faintly. Your left hand is moving across it, a motion made ten thousand times, and it goes wrong. The hand stops half a beat short. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more times, each one checked, though this job has not needed checking in years.

Your back is tight, but in a good way, the way of a body that is used. You are short, solid, dense through the chest. Your breath comes slow. A white pen is tucked behind your ear and you feel its cool plastic against the rim of it.

The shirt gives you the first thing. Black cotton, soft from washing, clinging across the shoulders. It brings the morning: a dark bedroom, a drawer that sticks, his thumbs working the hem down over his stomach because he is vain about the stomach and does not admit it. He stood at the mirror and combed the silver over to the hard side, wetting the comb, because his father did it that way, in a country he left at twenty. The goatee he trims on Sundays, after church, with the small scissors and the radio low.

The pen is next. Your fingers find it without asking and click it, click, click, and the flash is a kitchen table, a child's math worksheet, two heads bent close, his daughter's hair smelling of coconut. Her mother in the doorway, arms folded, saying something kind in a tired voice, and the kindness is the worst part. His ring finger aches where the band is not. A pale stripe, still unbrowned after two years. You rub it with your thumb and a whole winter opens in him: the lawyer's office, the signature, the careful way he held the pen, as if it might spill.

Your feet are in leather shoes worn soft at the heel. Under them, carpet, and beneath that the house settles. Money is thin. The memory is a number on a screen, and the small private arithmetic he does at night, with his lips moving. He has not had a drink in six years. He remembers the last one the way you remember a fall, in the stomach first. There is an icon on the shelf at the edge of your sight, a gold saint with a dark patient face, and something in his chest bows to it before you have decided anything.

Freckles across the nose, sun-made. His mother used to press them with one finger, one at a time, counting.

Somewhere a car passes in the cul-de-sac. The air conditioner shudders on.

You lift your left hand off the glass. It is broad, brown, dusted with gray hair, the knuckles thick. You turn it over. The stripe on the ring finger is pale as a healed thing. His hand, and yours now, and you hold it up to the light until it stops feeling borrowed and starts feeling only new.

You look up and say, to nobody, in a voice lower than yours has ever been, "Well. Hello, Elias."

The pen is still behind your ear. Your thumb is already reaching for it. How long, you wonder. A year. An hour. Until the wanting comes back, and it always comes back.