Gordon Takeda

Marcus Odom's knees are the first thing I decide against. Fifty-one, six feet, a teacher's long stride, and a left knee that tells me about the weather in Western Kansas before the window does. I am standing at the back of his classroom with the chairs up on the desks and the wind pushing dust against the glass, and I have a stack of ungraded quizzes under one palm. Some kid's handwriting leans hard to the right. It is kind of him to have kept them so neat. I could be him for years.

But I looked at the clock over the door and watched it not move, and I knew that the whole afternoon would be exactly this. Chalk, the heater ticking, a man who says "folks." He was good at being tired. I had been him for less than a minute when I felt it, and I could not stop feeling it. So I put the quizzes down, squared them to the desk edge as he would have, and opened the page with the wheel on it.

It turns. It always turns the same way, and I always lean toward it.

Then there is a rack door at my left shoulder and a cable in both hands.

The cool comes first, dry air with a metal taste, fans going in a long steady roar. My thumbs are mid-motion on a black patch lead. Something in the rhythm is wrong. I have pushed it in crooked, and the body is already correcting. It pulls the lead out, seats it slowly, and I feel the click through the pads of two fingers. Then the next one. I check it. And the next. Ten of them, each one tugged and eyed, and I can feel that this is not like him. These are hands that haven't doubted themselves in years.

They are shaking a little. Not from fear. It is simply what they do, a fine tremor at the fingertips that stops when they are busy and returns when they are not.

The sweater is heavy, soft wool-cotton gone smooth at the cuffs, and when the cuff drags across my wrist I get a morning. A bedroom with the blinds half open. Sleeves pulled on, left arm first because of a shoulder that clicks. A woman's voice from the kitchen asking if he wants the good coffee, and his answer, which is yes, which is always yes. The zipper at the throat is cold under my chin. He zips it only halfway, always, because the full collar makes him feel strangled. Jeans next, the belt let out one notch last spring and not spoken about. His feet go into the brown boots without untying them, a habit his wife has given up on.

The yellow cable draped on my shoulder is warm from my neck. When I touch it I get nineteen years at this company, the pride of a clean run, and underneath it a long, dull ache about a promotion he never asked for. I let it pass.

The ring is a plain band, loose with the heat. My thumb turns it, and the feeling that comes up has no picture, only a sound: a screen door, a long summer evening, cicadas so loud they thicken the air, two people on a porch not needing to say anything. A cul-de-sac. The smell of cut grass in thick wet heat. He loved her in a slow, unspoken way.

His belly sits comfortably against the belt, his shoulders are thick and strong, his lower back has a low grumble. There is the memory of cigarettes in my mouth that tastes like nothing now, twenty years quit, and the hand still reaches sometimes for a pocket that has nothing in it. His hair is too long and brushes my neck. He kept meaning to get it cut.

I let go of the cable and hold my hands out in front of me. They tremble in the cold light. The ring catches it. I turn them over, palms up, and look at the creases, the thick pads, the small nick across one knuckle I won't ever know the story of.

Then I look up, into the dark mesh of the rack door, where a stranger looks back.

"Well," I say, in a voice lower than the last one. "Hello, Gordon."

The fans keep roaring. Somewhere a window is bright with leaves. I do not know how long he lasts me. I only know that my fingers have already started wanting something to do.