Liam Doherty

You are Glen Thibodeaux, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you hate the chair.

It is a call center chair in a call center in New Orleans, mid-morning, and the headset is still warm from the last man's ears. Forty-five years of knees and a lower back press up through the seat. The belly sits on the belt like a hand resting there. The stubble itches along the jaw. Around you forty voices say the same sentence, "I understand your frustration," and you know it will be your sentence by lunch. You can feel it in his mouth already, the shape of it, worn smooth.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you cannot explain to anyone. He works, he breathes, he is warm. But you sat down in him and the first thing you wanted was out. Someone was on the line, a woman with a dead mother's insurance and a reference number, and she said, "Please, I've been on hold so long," and you realized you were the hold. You were the music. You were the thing that makes a person wait. You took off the headset, laid it on the desk, and opened the page with the wheel.

You pay. You spin.

Then the kitchen.

Your shoulder drops. A phone slides down it and your hand is under it before it falls, a quick hand, no thought in it. Tinny music loops back to its first bar, a synthesized flute. The pen has stopped on the second digit of a number on an envelope and the ink has pooled there, a small blue bead. You are standing, and the standing is the surprise: long. A long body, light, nothing pressing anywhere. Your weight sits on one hip against the counter. Cold comes up through the sneaker soles from the tile. Your breath is easy. You are nineteen, and nothing has happened to you yet.

Then the things start to talk.

The hoodie first. Your forearms are inside gray cotton gone soft at the cuffs, and the zipper teeth press against your ribs. A flash comes, his feeling and not yours: the hoodie off a hook by the door this morning, the left sleeve inside out, shaken right with one snap. Under it, the T-shirt, thin at the collar, a band he saw once in a basement and still loves with a defensive kind of love. He put it on because it was on top. Jeans next, dark and wide, hanging off the hip bones, and with them comes a heat in the face: a girl in September telling him they looked like a dad's. He wore them anyway. He wears them to be stubborn.

The pen is a cheap blue one, chewed at the end. Touch it and you get the lawn, the green one on campus, the laptop hot on his thighs, a paper on the Federalist Papers half written, and the sun on the screen so he can't see it. He squinted and kept typing. He was happy. It was a small, stupid, complete happiness, and it goes through you like a swallowed coin.

The envelope under your left hand is the bill. The number is a hospital's. Something with his mother, a fall on ice in February, and the dread under the paperwork is a low note he has been holding all spring. There is money put away, not a lot, enough to scare him with how much it is and how fast it would go. His thumb knows to smooth the corner of the paper flat. His thumb has done it forty times.

Your face is doing something. The mustache lifts, and under it deep dimples cut into both cheeks even though nothing is funny. Even at rest, you think. The mouth keeps its own small joke.

The hold music loops again.

You lift your hands off the counter and look. Long fingers, ink on the right thumb, nails bitten on one side. A boy's hands that hold the whole bill and haven't dropped it yet. You turn them over. Palms pink and unmarked. Then you look up, at the dark window over the sink, at a face you can't see yet, and you say, softly, in a voice higher and lighter than any you've owned, "Okay. Hi."

Behind you the music starts its first bar again. You wonder how long this one lasts. You wonder when the wanting comes back.