Kenneth Akira Sato

I am Julian Arroyo for less than a minute more, and the first thing I do is stand in his shop and hate the quiet of it. The bell over the door has not rung. The harbor outside is gray and settling, and the lazy eye keeps drifting off the thing I want to look at, so that everything I try to hold steadily slides a little to the left. He is big, soft in the middle, six-two, and his knees tell me about the stairs. I have worn him for less than a minute and I already know the whole of him. Nothing here is mine, and nothing in him pushes back. That is what sends me. A body that works and has nothing in it to refuse me is a coat on a hook.

I open the page. The wheel is already turning before I have decided anything, and I am the one who pays.

Then there is a bar of light across my face, and it is hot.

I am on my side. The mattress is soft and sunk under my hip. I did not turn toward this light, but now I have turned back into it, and my eyes are open on the glare and will not shut. It is a long way past dawn here. Nothing about the room fits the hour I left. I am asleep in daylight, foil on the window, and a corner of it has let go.

The first thing to arrive is the cloth. The work trousers are stiff at the knee and soft at the seat, and the cotton under my thigh is gritty with a day of diesel. Something in the weave gives me a flash that is not mine: a hand pulling these up in the dark, cold floor, the belt left off because the waist is loose, and a thought that is his, plain as a stone, that the day is being turned over backwards again. He puts the boots on last, and last night he took them off last. Right now they stand at the foot of the bed with their tongues out.

The sleeve is a thermal, gone thin. When I drag my arm up, the cuff drags a memory with it. A woman's voice in a kitchen, unhurried, saying his name the short way. She cuts the tag out of this shirt with the kitchen scissors because he complains about tags. She does it without being asked. I feel what he feels, which is no gratitude and no speech, only a settling in the chest like a barge taking the lock.

The pillow smells of him. Under it, the pillowcase has a seam that his cheek knows. I get the push of the tug under the floor of a different room: the wheelhouse, the deck humming through the soles of his feet, the barge ahead like a field that has to be steered across. Rivers do not forgive. A line of coal moving at three miles an hour, and him with two fingers on the stick as if it were a sleeping child's back. There is a stillness he keeps there that I will never have earned. The body keeps it for me anyway, a slow set of the shoulders, a breath held low.

My hand finds the ring on the left hand and turns it with the thumb, and the metal is warm and worn smooth. A girl comes up through it, before the wife, years before: a lake, a borrowed car, somebody laughing so hard she is crying, and the feeling of her going, which has no edges left, only a quiet ache he has never mentioned. He keeps her the way you keep a lit window across a field. I do not know her name. I only know he never stopped being kind about her.

The scar through the eyebrow pulls when I frown. A cleat, a winter, a rope that came back at him. He did not say a word. He sat on the deck with a rag against his face and watched the water, and thought that it was a small price and an accurate one. He is not a man who bargains.

My body hurts in the places sixty-two years do: the low back, a shoulder that has pulled on lines, the knuckles. And it is strong. When I flex my fingers they close like a clamp, clean and certain. These hands know knots. They know them without me.

I lift my hand into the bar of light and turn it over, palm, back, the ring, the pale seams of old work. Then I look up, and I say, rough with his sleep, "All right. Let's see how long you let me."