Ernesto Villarreal

Behind my eyes, in Raymond Okabe's kitchen, the refrigerator hums and the clock over the stove says the house is asleep. I have been Raymond for less than a minute. His freckled hands are flat on the counter. His knees, which are sixty-two years old, ache in a way I can only call courteous.

I could say he was fine. He was. He walks well and he sleeps. But upstairs there is a woman breathing in the dark who thinks she knows the man who just came down for water. I stood at the foot of the stairs and she said his name from the bedroom, half asleep, and I did not answer to it. I did not know how. Nothing was wrong with him. I just couldn't stand being known by someone who was wrong about me. The page is already open on the screen. The wheel is waiting.

I pay. I spin.

Then I am on my stomach in a bed, one arm hanging into the cold air off the mattress, and my breath goes from ragged to even in a single pull. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains. Something in me draws the arm up and rolls the body onto its back and folds the hands on the chest. I did not do it. Or I did. It is a way he has never once slept.

The sheets are damp with Houston. The air has weight. The first thing I touch is the wedding band, with my thumb, and it turns on the finger worn smooth.

A wife's laugh in a parking lot, her hand in his back pocket. The ring was too big, and for a year he wrapped thread around it. Plain gold. He was thirty-four and had never been so afraid of dropping anything.

The sheets are tangled around the shins. Cotton, washed thin. Under the cotton I find the shirt he fell asleep in, navy, the collar soft. Then the morning is there, in his hands: the polo off the hook, left arm first because of the shoulder, the badge clipped on the lanyard, the cargo pants with the knee gone gray, the laces pulled tight on the left shoe twice because it always loosens. He stood in the hall and clenched his jaw at nothing. It is the thing he does with his hands when he is not thinking, except it is his jaw, and I feel it now: the teeth set, the muscle jumping.

My palm finds the mattress edge, and under it, the cable he left on the floor. Not the cable. The memory of one. A desk in an office, carpet smell, the dust behind a monitor, lying on his back with a flashlight in his teeth, plugging the blue line into the wall for a man who did not look down. Thirty years of other people's Mondays. He was good at it. Nobody ever said.

A cigar, after, in the lot behind a strip mall, dusk and heat like a wet towel, one drink or two at home. An old girlfriend's name arrives with no face, only a feeling like a door he does not open. The savings are small. The worry is smaller than it should be.

I lie here, five-foot-five, thin as a rail, scalp cool where the hair has gone, jaw freshly shaved and smooth under my fingers. The body is tired in the honest way of a body that works.

I lift my left hand off my chest and turn it over. The ring catches the streetlight. Then I look up, to whoever is there.

"Hello, Ernesto," I say, and his voice is quiet, a little rough.

I wait to learn how long you last.