Gerald Pasternak

You are standing in a kitchen in Honolulu, in the dark, wearing Rami Haddadin, and the refrigerator is humming at you like a complaint.

He has been yours for under a minute. You have already tried the stubble with your thumb, and the birthmark with the dark of the window glass. He is short, quick, and tight in the shoulders. His calves still hum from something he did at work yesterday, and a coil of copper wire sits on the counter where he left it. Everything in him works. That is not why you are here.

You are here because of the sound. Somewhere in the walls of this apartment a faucet gives one drop, then a long silence, then another, and you have stood waiting for the next drop for what feels like a decade. The 1520th time, and you could feel the drop coming before it fell. A body that works, and the same wanting underneath it as in the last body, and the one before. So you open the page with his thumb. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are leaning over a sink with half a face of foam and a razor stopped against your jaw.

It is bright. Wet-cold porcelain bites the heel of your left palm, and the weight of you tips forward onto it, a big soft weight, belly against the basin's lip. Your knees ache. Your breath comes slow and low, minty and a little sour. The razor is still moving, because his wrist was moving: up the jaw, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth where something in you should flinch and does not. The second half goes faster than the first.

Then the pen. Your right hand wants to click something, and there is nothing in it but the razor. The thumb works anyway, click, click, against the plastic handle.

The handle gives you the first one. A ballpoint, the same click, in a long beige office. A man across a desk says *Gerry, you'll want to sit down*, and you feel not fear but a flat, practiced calm, a man who has heard bad news in good rooms. Thirty-one years of accounts. Numbers he trusted more than weather. The money came late and then stayed, and it sits in him now as a quiet floor under his feet, never mentioned.

The gray T-shirt against your back is soft from a thousand washings. This morning comes through the sleeves: left arm first, because the right shoulder catches, then the right, slow, a small grunt. The khakis from the chair, the belt he does not need to look at, the shoes by the door with the laces already loosened. He dressed for nothing. A Thursday. Coffee on the stoop, in a minute, when the jaw was done.

The foam smells of menthol, and under it comes a church basement. Folding chairs, a hymnal with a cracked spine, his mother's voice a half-step flat. He stopped drinking a long while ago and does not make a speech about it. Water, then more water. He kept the Sunday suit and kept the faith in the way a man keeps a good coat, quietly, mostly for the weather.

Then a woman, in the bathroom mirror's corner of him: Linda, her hair wet from the shower in some old apartment, laughing at the foam on his chin. She left, or he did. It was gentle, and it has never finished hurting. He still reaches for the phone some mornings and puts it down.

The tile is cold through the shoes. A tap drips here too. It is the same drop, and it does not matter.

You lift the razor away. Steam has softened the mirror, and the face in it is smooth now, clean down to the bone of the jaw, silver at the sides, the crown bare. Brown eyes you do not know. You turn your hand over under the light. The fingers are thick, patient, and pale, the knuckles a little swollen, and the thumb is still clicking.

"Well," you say, in a voice with Brooklyn worn into its floor. "Hello, Gerry."

Somewhere a wheel is already thinking. How long, you wonder, before the wanting comes back? Whether you will still be him when the coffee goes cold on the stoop.