Leonard Bascombe

You have been Farid Hosseini for two minutes, and already you know what he cannot do. He cannot stand it. The apartment in Los Angeles is quiet, the light through the blinds has gone the color of weak tea, and there is a rocket nozzle drawn on a whiteboard in the next room that you understand perfectly and care about not at all. His beauty mark itches when you think about it. His hands are small and quick and clever. Fifty-four times you have been given a man and fifty-four times you have wanted the next one, and today the wanting comes back before you have even sat down. You do not say why. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the bathroom. The brush is in your mouth and the foam is on your lip. The tap runs, and the sound of it is the first thing that is yours. The stroke stops mid-sweep, and you start it again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because they are the ones that ache.

You are heavy and tall, and the weight sits forward in the belly and low in the knees. The floor is cold tile under bare feet. Your left hand is on the faucet and is wet.

The faucet comes first. The cool metal handle gives you a hallway: a girlfriend's voice saying *you leave it running like we own the water*, and him, laughing, not turning it off. Then the shirt. It is a navy cotton tee worn soft, and it comes back sleeve by sleeve. This morning he pulled the blue work shirt over his head, buttoned it from the bottom, and clipped the green badge to the pocket. He is a man who clips the badge before he does anything else. The pen went in last, always the same pocket. Under it was the catwalk, the line rattling below, forty years of bottles and cans and the hum in his shins. Now the gray sweatpants have a drawstring gone slack, and his thumb finds the knot and remembers something: his father's church, a hard pew, a hand pressing down on his knee, *sit still, Leonard*. The knot is his, tied nightly, a small order he keeps.

Your right hand lifts to rinse. The thumbnail is bitten down to the quick, and it stings under the water. A flash comes with it: a recent ex, a kitchen, an argument about nothing, and him chewing his thumb in the car afterward while the streetlight turned. He misses her and is ashamed of how much. The girlfriend now is kind, and he is trying to deserve it. He quit smoking eleven years ago, and the want comes back every evening around now, a ghost in the back of the throat. A beer on Fridays. Never more.

You spit, rinse twice, and stand the brush bristles-up, out of the grey water it has always sat in. Rain ticks on the window. Your knees hurt, your back is wide and strong, and the breath in your chest is slow and deep and not yours yet.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. Thick fingers, calluses at the base, the ruined thumbnail. Then you look up into the mirror at a stranger with a gray-flecked beard.

"Hello, Leonard," you say, low and a little amazed, in his voice.

How long, you wonder. Years, or the time it takes this water to run out.