Mahesh Rajan

Patrick Landry's thumbs are still sore from the phone. That is where you start: in a twenty-three-year-old's body, heavy through the middle, standing in a kitchen in New Orleans while the whole house sleeps. The refrigerator hums. You have been him for less than a minute and already you know the problem. He has a set, eight minutes long, about his mother and a parking ticket, and it lives in his mouth like a stone. You tried it quietly on the cabinets. The jokes arrive and nothing in you laughs. He could do it, and you can't want it. The goatee itches. The freckled forearms are somebody else's weather. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then you are lying down.

Your face is pressed into cotton that smells of someone else's sweat. Your breath was ragged and now it is even, in one pull. Your left arm hangs off the mattress and you draw it up, roll onto your back, and fold your hands at your chest. He never once slept like this. A line of streetlight comes through the curtains onto the ceiling. The weight of the body is a new thing: lean, dense, fifty-three years packed in tight.

The sheet under your palm is cool and worn thin, and it opens something. A night years ago, the baby screaming down the hall, and his wife already up. He lay there ashamed of how glad he was that she had gotten to the crib first. Then it is gone.

The shirt at your ribs is soft from washing. You pull at the hem. A morning, a different one: he put it on in the dark, left arm first because the right shoulder complains. His fingers fumbled the buttons of the work shirt over it until his wife did them up for him, not saying why. The tremor. It lives in his hands even now. You feel it as a fine hum in the knuckles, a wire that never quite stops carrying current.

Your right thumb finds the ring and turns it. A kitchen. A girl, decades ago, crying in a parked car, the ring not yet bought. His name for her in his head is still *the one I let go*. He has never said it to his wife. He is not sorry, exactly. He just keeps it, like a spare key.

Your upper arm lies against your side, and under the sleeve the skin has a memory of the needle: the unit, the heat, the boys who stood in line with him. Then a long afternoon on a ladder under a half-finished ceiling, conduit running over his face like ribs, a bead of sweat on the bridge of his nose. His hands knew the work and he trusted them even shaking. He quit drinking the way you let a friend drift off. There was no scene. There was a Sunday he simply didn't. Some quiet thing he calls God sits with him in the truck sometimes. He doesn't ask it for anything.

The mattress presses a dull ache into the small of your back. The scalp at your crown feels the air. The beard rasps under your jaw.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. They tremble, very slightly, and they are brown and capable and not yours. You turn them over. Then you look up, into the dark, and say, "Okay. Mahesh."

It is a stranger's name in your mouth. You wonder how long it will fit, and when the wanting comes back.