Emilio Santana

The first thing I know about Karim Nassar's body is that the knees have opinions. They have had them all night, standing in his kitchen over a sink that is not draining, a wrench I did not need hanging from a hand I did not choose. His wife is asleep down the hall. His wife of thirty years, whose name came to me this afternoon off a coffee mug, and who coughs in her sleep in a way he has stopped hearing.

I have worn him for less than a minute, by his clock. Long enough to learn the work: the water in the pipe, the weight of the wrench, the pleasure of a thing that is wrong and then is right. And I stood there with the pleasure in my chest and found it was only his. It did not reach me. Nothing in him reaches me. That is what the wheel never says. You get the man and you do not get to be glad in him.

So I put the wrench down. I let the tap run. I open the page on his phone, its light making the birthmark on his cheek glow in the black window, and I pay, and I spin.

The show cuts to a bright frame.

I am sitting up straight. The couch has a hole in the arm and my thumb is already in it. The remote is loose in my right hand, and I set it down on the arm like something that might go off. The room is dark and the television moves across my face. There is a streetlamp in the window, orange, smeared by old rain on the glass. My chest is full of smoke. A whole pack of it, a day at a time, lives in the bottom of these lungs, and when I breathe in, something rattles politely.

Twenty-six. I can feel it. The back is loose, the shoulders are heavy and strong, the legs are a kind of ready I had forgotten. Nothing here hurts. After Karim's knees, nothing here hurts.

I have not laughed where he laughed. On the screen a man falls into a pool and the room's old laughter would have come out of me, and it does not.

Now the things come. The sweater first, against my neck, wool gone soft, and with it a morning: a hook by a door, and a hand that is mine and not mine pulling it down, thinking *he likes this one*. A husband asleep upstairs, warm-backed, one arm flung out. I pull the sweater on over my head quietly so as not to wake him. The feeling is a small, stupid happiness, the kind that is only possible in a house you share.

The denim, stiff at the knee. A job site, plaster dust, a vest that smells like orange plastic and sun. Sawdust sweet in the throat. A foreman saying a number, and the number is too low, and the jaw clenching, the old shame of it, *five thousand in the bank and two kids*. Two. A girl missing a front tooth, a boy asleep on this very chest, his breath hot through the wool. That one comes so hard I almost put him down.

My left thumb turns the ring. Plain band. A wedding on a cold church step, or not a church, a courthouse, wet marble, and another man's hand, rough, crying openly, laughing at himself for it.

My right hand rises to my mouth. The nails are bitten to nothing. He does it without thinking, and I stop him, and he was in the middle of it, and the habit sits there under the skin waiting for me to forget.

The left ear is a knot of gristle under my fingers. Mats. A gym floor and a smell of bleach, a bell, a heel in the face, and the pride of it, the ugly proud.

Outside, a car passes. Somewhere in this house, upstairs, someone turns over in bed and the floor tells me.

I lift my hand to the light. Dark ink runs up the forearm in black bands, the knuckles scraped, the ring catching the television's white. I turn it over. Palm, calluses, the bitten ends of the fingers. Then I lift my eyes to the dark window, to the face in the glass, and I say it quietly, in a voice that is not mine yet either:

"Hello, Emilio."

The streetlamp hums. I don't know how long you last. I only know the wanting is not back yet, and I am listening for it.