Isaiah Okafor-Bell

Peter Lindqvist's knees ache in a way I did not ask for. One day and three hours in him, and I have learned that a man of thirty-eight in a good chair at a good desk can still feel the whole week in his lower back. I sit on the edge of his bed in Los Angeles with his laptop open to a tab I keep closing. The silver in his reflection in the black window looks like a stranger's idea of wisdom. He is five-six. Everything I reach for is a little too high, and I have spent a day being looked over by taller men. His green eyes are tired. His code is clean and I do not care about it. The screen says vessel.cards, and the wheel sits there, patient, with its colors. I pay with his card. It is a Monday, and the night has gone quiet enough that I can hear the refrigerator thinking. I don't tell myself why. I spin.

The thumb is already moving.

It is mid-scroll, and the glow is six inches from my face. I am on my side in the dark, and the sheet is cool along one hip. The blue light is on my cheek, and the thumb carries on, faster and steadier than whatever had been driving it. Past a video, past a face, past something he'd stopped on and meant to come back to. I don't blink when he would have. The window is full of a city lit like a fever, red and gold, and behind me the room smells of laundered cotton and a day's sweat.

Then the shirt. The old cotton tee, soft from a hundred washes, twists against my ribs where I lie, and it opens something. It is a morning, his morning. He pulls the navy jacket off a hanger, the one he bought on a sale rack and had taken in at the sleeves because his arms are longer than any off-the-rack. He threads the lanyard over his head and stops at the mirror because the badge says Name where his name should go, a blank card he never filled in. He clicks a pen. He always clicks a pen. He practices the pitch to his own face, and his dimples show even when he isn't smiling, and clients trust them before they trust him. He is twenty, and he is proud of it, and he is frightened by the number he does not look at, the debt, deeper than a man his age should be able to dig. It is a figure with a lot of zeros that he carries like a stone in a shoe.

My hand shifts on the phone. The case is slick and a little worn at the corner, and the edge of it is a church parking lot. His mother is in a hat, a Sunday in a hot city, hymn-sweat on everyone's collar, and a deacon is pressing his shoulder, saying, "You carry yourself, young man." The pride of that sits warm under the debt.

The mattress is firm under my hip. Hotel-firm, or close, a rental he keeps to himself. The sheet under my palm remembers a Friday, a big night, the one or two a month he allows himself, laughter, a ceiling that rotated, a promise to himself at dawn. His stomach is soft over the waistband, the skinny-fat of a man who sits in lobbies and eats in cars. His legs are long and unmuscled and restless. His beard is neat, shaped by a barber's hand he can barely afford. My jaw feels the care of it.

Nobody is left in here to mind. I feel the place where he was, like a warm seat.

I stop the thumb. I lift the hand out of the blue light and turn it over: the pen-callus on the finger, the tendons, the long brown palm. His. Mine. I look up, past the phone, into the dark of the room, and the dimples come without my asking, deep, at rest, like they are waiting for a client.

"Okay," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected, warm and a little hoarse. "Okay. Let's see what you were scared of."

The thumb twitches, wanting to click a pen that isn't there. I wonder how long this one holds. Whether tomorrow I still have this jaw, or whether the wanting comes back tonight, in the quiet, the way it always does.