Gabriel Ocampo

I am standing at a stranger's bathroom mirror in San Francisco, early, the light still gray, and Mateo Arriaga's lazy eye is looking at a point just left of my own reflection. He has been mine for less than a minute. I could say the muscle in his shoulders is wonderful, and it is. I could say the apartment smells of someone else's coffee. What I will not say is that when I reached for the razor my hand knew where it was, and I did not like how much I liked that. I want to arrive in a place I have to learn. So I open the page with the wheel on it and pay, and it turns, and Mateo goes out of me like a held breath.

The rhythm breaks. My thumb comes down wrong on the caliper, a half second off, and I do it again slowly and correctly, and then ten more times, each one checked, on a housing that has not needed checking in years.

I am standing at a bench in a long open shed, fluorescent tubes ticking overhead, and the window in front of me is full of green. A cable footbridge hangs over a brown creek out there, the light coming through the leaves in pieces. The air smells of cutting oil and wet leaves. My left hand holds a steel caliper. My right rests on a gearbox, half-assembled, its gears bare. Safety glasses sit pushed up on my head.

The shirt gives me the first of him. A small checked cotton, soft from washing, and the cuffs are buttoned. Somebody buttoned them this morning in a dark kitchen, one-handed, while the other hand held a phone with two small faces on it, and the feeling in it is pride so tired it is almost grief. The vest is fleece, zipped to the sternum, and in the pocket my fingertip finds a little round tin. Nicotine pouches. A flash: his tongue, the sting against his lip, a promise to quit those too the way he quit drinking, which he did, eleven months of lime seltzer at his sister's wedding while everyone toasted. He is a Catholic who goes to the early Mass and stands at the back.

The caliper is cold and exact in his fingers. His hands know it. They know the gearbox too, the tooth of every gear, the burr he filed down yesterday. He is twenty-six and the knees are good, but there is a low ache above the belt, the ache of leaning over benches. Under my boots the concrete is chilled and gritty. My scalp is cool where the hair has thinned at the crown, and my moustache moves when I breathe out. Even slack, my face is pulling into dimples. I can feel them, deep, like thumbprints in dough.

Then the floor gives me a memory. Two kids on this concrete, a Saturday, hard hats too big, the girl banging a mallet on a scrap of plate while he laughed. And the ex, the recent one, in the doorway of this same shed, saying nothing, holding the car keys. The feeling arrives before the picture: he still sets a place for her in his head. He is the one who stays up fixing things so he does not have to be in the quiet. Something in me, something that spun today because a perfect body bored me and a perfect life felt like a loan, goes still at that.

I turn my hand over. The palm is callused at the base of the fingers, a faint grease line in the creases. It is not mine, and it is warm.

I look up through the window at the bridge, and then at nothing, and say, softly, "Well. Hello, Gabriel."

The gearbox waits. Somewhere in my pocket a tin rattles. I wonder how long this one holds, and when the wanting comes back.