Kevin Tsai

You are nineteen, and you have been Mateo for six minutes, and already you know what's wrong with him. It is the same thing wrong with all of them. He is a headset and a cold cup of Mountain Dew and a mother asleep down the hall. His voice cracks when he says the script. The pale patches on his hands keep catching your eye, and you keep looking at them as though they were somebody else's. Which they are. In the Pittsburgh dark before anything opens, you sit at his desk with the site up and the wheel standing still, and you tell yourself you are only looking. The goatee itches. You have worn a thousand and ninety men, and this one has made you want nothing at all, and that is the thing you cannot stand. You pay. You spin.

The wheel clicks down through its pegs, and the click is the last sound.

You are bent over a sink with your weight on your left hand. Cold porcelain edge under the heel of the palm. Foam on half your face, wet and cool, the other half bare and stinging. A razor is stopped against your jaw, your own right hand holding it, a fine tremor running through the handle into your wrist. A bare bulb burns beside the mirror. The window is blue, the blue before the sun. Your belly presses the sink. Your knees are tired already.

The razor moves. Up the jaw, against the grain, and at the corner of the mouth it does not slow. The hand knows where the corner is and does not flinch. It is done faster than the first half. Your cheek is smooth and cold.

Then the sink under your hand gives you the first one. Cold, chipped enamel: a house on a street with one stoplight, a diner shut for good with its chairs up on the tables. A wife saying his name through the bathroom door, Kev, and the sound is warm and tired and his. Three kids' toothbrushes in the cup, and a small hot pang because one is always wet, always left out.

The towel on the sink's lip is rough and smells of detergent. Under it comes a Sunday, a church with a low ceiling, his knees on the kneeler, a rosary of his mother's wound around the tremor in his fingers so it would hold still. He has not touched a drink in six years. The shaking never left. Under the wet foam you can feel the old shame of a bottle he poured out in a gravel lot, and how clean the morning was after.

The plaid shirt is on a hook behind you, you know without looking. The tee clings to your back, soft and washed thin. His hands put it on in the dark: left sleeve, the band catching on the knuckle, the same ring for eleven years. You get the old ex then, uninvited. A girl in a car with the window down, a summer, a goodbye he never regretted and never quite stopped turning over. He doesn't tell his wife. It is not a secret so much as a small room he keeps.

And the rig. The wheel's long cold leather under his palms at first light, a truck stop, coffee from a paper cup, three children's drawings taped over the dash. His back aches in a place that has a name. His gut is heavy and warm and his thighs are strong. He is thirty-two and tired in a way that feels like love.

You lift the razor out of the foam and look at your hand. Broad, steady now that you are in it. The band gleams. You turn it over. The palm is creased and callused, and a faint shiver runs through it.

You look up into the mirror. The gap between the front teeth shows when you speak.

"Okay. Kevin."

Outside, the blue is thinning. You do not know whether this is an hour or a year. The wanting is asleep, but it breathes.