Harish Venkataraman

You spin because of two in the morning, years of it: the threads, the old films, the one story you keep rereading about a man who wakes up in another man's hands. Tonight is nothing. Work is behind you, the scrolling has gone stale, and the page is just there, a wheel with a price under it. You do not believe it. You pay anyway.

The wheel ticks down and stops.

Then you are lying back on cracked leather with a phone six inches from your face, thumb stopped mid-scroll. The room is dim and the screen is blue on one cheek. A lamp is off somewhere behind you. Your breath goes in slow and comes out with a whistle, because there is a gap in the front of your teeth and the air finds it. You did not arrive. You were simply already here. Your thumb starts again, steady, flicking past whatever he had stopped on, and you do not read any of it.

The sofa is first. The leather is cool and split at the arm, and it gives you a flash that is his and not yours: the day it was delivered, two men grunting in the narrow hall of a house one room wide, and his wife saying it was too big, and him saying nothing, pleased. The feeling is a small, stubborn pride, and under it something that has no bottom.

The ring is next. It turns loose on the bone of his finger, a little looser than it was once. You touch it with your thumb and the thumb knows the move, an old habit of turning it when he is thinking. Then it comes: a hot room, smoke from the fire, a string of marigolds, his own voice stumbling through the words, and her eyes on him over the flame. He was twenty-six and terrified. Then, much later, a hospital corridor, the same ring cold against a plastic rail, and a long gray quiet he has never told anyone about. He still sets out two cups some mornings, then puts one back.

Your other hand has found his cuticle and is picking at it. The skin is sore and worn. He does this in meetings, in the glass office with the door always open, so that people can walk in. He manages eleven people. He has never raised his voice. He covers for the young ones when they are late and says nothing about it. One of them has a child with a fever tonight and does not know he knows.

The shirt moves against your back, soft from a thousand washes, and with it comes this morning: his arms going through the sleeves of the navy polo, the lanyard badge clipped at the hip, the belt pulled to the third hole because he is thinner than last year. He stood at the small shrine with a match and did not rush it. Then came the cold eggs, the steam already lifting off the wet street, and the sun.

The sock slides on the leather. Your knee aches, a dull weather ache. Your shoulders are narrow and light. Your chest is a skinny, tired thing, but it works. The tooth comes back to you too, from a curb and a bad fall years ago. He never fixed it. Money is no trouble now. Fixing it would mean saying out loud that he had gone on living.

You hold the phone away and look at the hand. It is brown and thin, with veins like cords, and the ring is still on it. You turn it over. The palm is creased and the cuticle is bleeding a little.

You look up, and your voice comes out low and cracked around the gap: "Hello. It's me."

Somewhere under the quiet you are already wondering how long this lasts, whether the wanting will come back by morning, whether you will still be him then.