Joseph Whitehorse

You are standing in Brandon Kleist's kitchen in Los Angeles, before the day has started, and the tile is cold under feet that have been yours for less than a minute. He is twenty-two. His back is already sore from nothing, from a mattress. The coffee maker ticks. You open his phone and the site is there, the wheel, pale and patient. The reason is small and you will not say it: you reached for the thing he does, the register, the smile at the counter, and there was no thing, only a hole where somebody's habit should be. Whatever he was, you could not become it. You pay. You spin.

Wet air. Wet air, cold on the teeth, and a hiss in front of you that is the tunnel exhaling. Your right hand is pushing a towel across a gray door panel, and the motion goes wrong. Your wrist turns early. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though this is a job that has not needed checking in years.

The hoodie comes first. Cotton gone thin at the cuffs, and the cuffs open something: a morning in a small bedroom, a girl asleep with one arm flung over her face, and his stocking feet on cold floor so as not to wake her. He pulls the hoodie from the chair, the black one, because it hides the water. Left sleeve, right sleeve, the drawstring tugged even. Gratitude comes with it, plain as bread. That is his, not yours.

The towel is damp and rough, and under it the door is cold. A flash: an uncle's driveway, a hose, a Buick, a boy of nine told that you wash from the top down because the dirt goes down. The pride of being told. Then his boots, rubber, the heels worn on the outside, and a church basement with folding chairs, stale coffee he never drank, a song he knows every word of, and under it a stubborn quiet faith, like a pilot light.

The pressure wand hangs from your left hand, heavy, humming through the hose. Your thumb already knows where the trigger rests. Your teeth, without asking, go to the edge of your thumbnail, and you taste soap and rubber, and the nail is bitten to the quick. The memory comes with it: his mother saying stop, stop that, and the laugh afterward.

Blue hair falls over your ears and wet neck. He dyed it in a bathroom sink, the girlfriend holding the timer, both of them laughing, the towel stained forever. The money is thin: a rent number, a count of bills folded in a sock, nothing in the bank to speak of. And behind it all a want he never said aloud, a small thing, a trip home, and the road in the dark.

You are five foot five and your calves burn pleasantly. Your shoulders know this arc. The light is sodium and gray, and across the street a stoop is shining with rain.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. The knuckles are chapped. The nails are ragged. You look up, into nothing, into whoever is looking.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Whose are you?"

And somewhere under the hiss, already, the question you will not answer: how long.