Jürgen Albrecht

Wade Pruett's knees hurt. That is where it starts: the right one, the one the couch on Fondren took out of him, a hot wire when I come down the stairs at the Houston place with the dark still outside. He had the body for less than a minute, and it was a good body. Thick through the shoulders, a beard I kept touching to be sure of it. The kind of man other men ask to help carry things.

I sat at his kitchen table with the phone propped on a sugar bowl and the page open, the wheel waiting. Nothing was wrong with him. I would say that to anyone. Something was wrong with me, and it had a shape I won't put a name to. I paid.

The wheel turns. His thumb is on the glass, and then the thumb is not there.

Cold porcelain under my left palm, the sink's rim curving away. My right hand is up against my jaw, and there is a razor in it, stopped. Foam on half my face, wet and cooling. Daylight comes flat through the tall window, gray, a winter noon. A radiator ticks. My feet are bare on tile, and the tile is freezing.

The razor wants to move. His hand knows it before I do.

I let it go up the jaw against the grain. Past the corner of the mouth, where some part of this body braces for a nick and then, because I do not brace, never gets one. The second half goes faster than the first. Nothing catches. The blade scrapes and clears and the skin comes up smooth behind it.

Then I touch the things he touches, and he comes back in pieces.

The sink first, the rim under my left palm. The ring clicks against the porcelain, a plain band, thin at the back from years of washing. A kitchen in the evening. A woman's hip against the counter, her laughing at him for something about the dishwasher. A tenderness so ordinary it has no edges. Two kids' voices in the next room, fighting over a charger. I feel his fatigue with it, a floor he stands on every day without looking down.

The razor handle, cold metal knurling. His father's? No: a gift, wrapped badly, from the older girl, who is seven and wrote on the tag. The corner of the mouth, the hesitation, from a bad cut at nineteen on a morning before an interview. He has been careful there ever since. I just erased a fourteen-year habit and he will never know it.

The shirt against my back, soft gray cotton, thin at the collar. He pulled it from the chair this morning in the dark so as not to wake anyone. His arms through the sleeves, left then right, the cuff catching the ring. The trousers dark and stiff at the knees from the school floors. The smell of floor wax rises from the fabric, and then the school itself: a corridor after the last bell, chairs upturned, his cart's one bad wheel clicking. Quiet he likes. Nobody talks to him there, and nobody needs him to be more.

Then the heavier thing. Numbers on a letter, the flat's loan, more owed than it is worth. He sits in the stairwell with the envelope so the house won't see his face. Under that, older: a girl from before, a river, a summer, a name he does not say. He still looks her up sometimes and then closes it. That is nobody's business now.

Jaw tight with gum, though there is none in my mouth. My jaw works anyway, a small chewing at nothing. This body is lean and a little tired. It is thirty-three. The back aches at the base, politely. Wade's knee is gone, and it is strange how much I miss it.

I set the razor on the sink. Foam still clings along the left side. I lift my right hand, the ring a pale band in the window light, and turn it over. Freckled at the wrist. Smaller than Wade's. A hand that wrings mops and holds a sleeping child's head.

I look up into the glass and don't know the face. Then I do.

"Morning," I say, in his voice, to the room. "Hello, Jürgen."

Somewhere a phone is lighting, a wheel is waiting, and I don't know how long before I want again.