Kenji Hayashida

You are Ismael Torres, and Ismael Torres is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. Four minutes in him. His knees are good. His shoulders are wide and loose, and the stubble on his jaw is the right length, and the white streak in his hair keeps falling across your eye. Somewhere in LA a freeway hums under the window of a house that is not yours. Everyone in it is asleep. You are standing in a kitchen in his socks.

The trouble is small. You opened the fridge for no reason and stood in its light and wanted nothing in it. He is twenty-five and can lift a pallet, and none of that was what you were hungry for. Something in you went flat the moment the body stopped being a surprise. You will not say that out loud, not even here. You pick up the phone with his thumb and the page is already open, the wheel painted in its tired carnival colors. You pay. You spin. It ticks past a hundred names and slows.

Then the kitchen is gone and the dark is a different dark.

You are face-down. Cotton against your cheek, and a pillow that smells of someone else's shampoo. Your breath is ragged, then it is even, in one pull, because you have taken it over. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone out of it. You draw it up. The body rolls onto its back and your hands fold on your chest. It is a stiff, careful posture, like a man laid out, and it was never his. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies on the ceiling. Coastal Maine, the middle of a Tuesday night, the cold coming off the sea through old glass.

The sheets first. Under your palms they are flannel gone thin, and a flash comes up that is his and not yours. His wife turning in them years ago, her cold feet, his laughing, the shock of it. Then the sleeve of the dark shirt at your wrist, soft from washing. He put it on tonight after the drink, one glass of whiskey, maybe two, standing at the sink and listening to the tide. He pulled one arm in, then the other, the way he does everything: carefully, so as not to wake anyone.

The ring is a plain band, worn smooth, turning under your thumb. A flash: a small house, a wedding in a rented hall, his hands shaking so badly that her father steadied them. Then another, older, unwanted. A woman on a station platform in the rain, saying his name once, and him letting the train take her. He never told his wife how often he thinks of it. You feel the ache sit down in his chest, familiar as a chair.

Your fingers find the mole high on the cheek. Under it, the jaw is smooth, shaved last night for a flight at dawn. The keys on the nightstand, the glass of water, the ghost of a cigarette he quit eleven years ago and still wants every evening at six. The Buddhist beads in the drawer, which he holds when the work wears him thin. Airport lounges, laptops balanced on ledges, other people's companies explained back to them at great cost. A mortgage. Two children asleep down the hall. He has almost nothing to his name and everything to lose, and he has been brave about it for forty-three years in small, unseen ways.

His back aches at the base, a consultant's back. His heart is slow and steady. The body is shorter than the last, lighter, and it knows how to be still.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. The ring catches the light. Then you look up at the ceiling and say, quietly, in a voice that is not yours yet:

"Okay. Hello, Kenji."

Nobody answers. Down the hall a child coughs and settles. You do not know how long this one lasts. You lie there and listen for the wanting to come back.