Harold Benally Yazzie

You are standing at a kitchen sink in Chicago, in the dark, in a man five foot four who has been yours for under a minute. The tap is running and you are not drinking from it. He is athletic and short and his beard is wet where you bent to the water, and the apartment is so quiet that the refrigerator sounds like a conversation. Everyone is asleep, and so is the whole street.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He works, he runs, his knees do what they are told. You carried him to the sink and stood there and understood that you had already finished him, the way you finish a meal you only ordered because it was on the table. The phone is on the counter, and the page is open on it. You do not decide. Your thumb has already paid.

Then you are lying down, and it is a different dark.

Face in a pillow. Mouth open against cotton, breath ragged, torn in the middle like something being dragged. Streetlight lies through a gap in the curtains. One arm hangs off the mattress, the fingers brushing carpet, and the weight of you is larger than the last body, longer, settled in the hips and the shoulders. Fifty-seven years sit in the lower back like a hand pressing. You breathe once, and the ragged breath goes even. The arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and fold your hands at your chest, the way no one ever has slept in this bed, and the ceiling is a stranger's ceiling.

Your hair is across your neck, long and shapeless, and it is the first thing of his that you touch. A summer, then. A boy's summer on a dry hillside, his mother cutting it with kitchen scissors, saying hold still, and the smell of dust and sage and the shame of being looked at. He has not had it cut since. He keeps meaning to. The memory is gone before you can keep it.

The sheet is under your fingers, worn thin, and it gives you a woman's laugh in this same room. A girlfriend, the one who sleeps beside him, her feet cold against his calf, and the warm ordinary gratitude of it, which is his and not yours. You turn your head. The other half of the bed is slept in, and the pillow still holds the dent of her.

The cuffs of his shirt are soft and gray. You know without knowing that he put these on in the dark, to let her sleep, that his hands knew the buttons, and that he stood a moment at the door of another room listening to children breathe. Three of them, or more. Grown, some of them. A phone number he has memorized that he never calls.

Your palms are rough. The calluses lie across the base of the fingers, where the van's back door has pulled down ten thousand times, the strap, the cold lip of the metal. His shoulders remember boxes. His knees remember the step up. A scanner rides his hip in his sleep, and your hand finds the place where it would be and closes on nothing, and a whole afternoon opens. Late sun in a stucco courtyard, dry palms rattling, a woman at a door signing with the wrong hand and laughing at herself, his own tired pleasure at being thanked. No drink in him now. He gave it up, and his mouth still knows the shape of the wanting, and you taste only dryness.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and look at them. Broad, brown, scarred only by work. You turn them over. Then you look up at the dark and say, quietly, in a voice lower than any you have had, "Well. Hello, Harold."

The curtains breathe. Somewhere a bus passes. You wonder how long this one holds, and whether you will wake as him.