Emilio Contreras

You are standing in Gordon Halvorsen's kitchen in Anchorage, and the window over the sink is still black. The coffee maker ticks. Fifty-five years in the knees, and you have had them five and a half hours. You have been a big man in a cold place, bald under your palm, beard rough as a doormat, and the whole time he could do one thing you wanted and couldn't. He couldn't stop. He stood at the counter cutting a grapefruit into eight even pieces, the same eight every morning, and his hands had done it so many thousands of times that they would not let you do it any other way. You tried to cut it crooked. The knife corrected you. You are tired of being carried by somebody's habits. You put the knife down and open the page with the wheel on it.

The kitchen goes out. Something has been taken from under your feet and a different floor is there.

You are standing. A strip of paper is running through your left hand, thin, warm, slippery as a ribbon. A fistful of small receipts is in your right. Your thumb is mid-motion, and it does the motion wrong. It slips off the tape. You do it again, slowly, and get it right. Then ten more, each one checked, though the hands insist the checking is a waste, because they have done this ten thousand times.

Your jaw is moving. Gum, mint gone to nothing, and you have been chewing it without having decided to. Light comes in from a window on your left, grey and flat, and under it the radiator knocks.

The shirt gives you the first one. Flannel, soft at the cuffs, a button hanging on by two threads. This morning, a bedroom the size of a closet. He fastens the cuffs first and then the collar, a thing he does wrong every day, and he is thinking about a number. Not the rent. The other number, the one that follows him from room to room, the loan with his name on it, so far under that he stopped looking at the bottom. He thinks: *at least the shirt is paid for.* His feeling, not yours, a dry little joke that doesn't reach his mouth.

The pen in the pocket over his heart. You touch it, and he is nineteen at a kitchen table and an old girlfriend is laughing at him for clicking it. *You do that when you lie.* The laugh has a gap in it where she used to say his name. It still hurts in him, small and precise, like a pressed bruise. He didn't call her. He nearly did on Sunday.

The paper tape, the box, the edge of the desk against your hip. He likes the adding machine and its heavy honest chunk. He likes that numbers either close or they don't. Out there nothing closes, and here a column does, and for four seconds of a day he is not in debt.

Your body: thin, all wrist and shoulder, a long back that wants to fold over the desk. Feet a little sore inside the worn sneakers, the left sole going thin. Calves loose, young, a stomach that has not eaten since early. Under the tongue, the ghost of a pinch of dip he wanted before. Your chin feels strange when you tuck it, a cleft you can find with the tip of your tongue's memory.

The chewing slows. You lift your right hand and turn it over, palm, knuckles, the pen-callus on the middle finger. Then you look up at the window, at the wet brick across the street and the stoop and the fire escape, and you say, quietly, to the glass, "Okay. Okay, you."

It is a stranger's voice, younger than you expected, and you do not know how long it will be yours.