Manuel Arredondo

You are standing in Dustin Kramer's boots on a plywood subfloor, and the thing that sent you back is the drywall dust. It has been in your nose for a minute and a half, a dry chalk that tastes like a dentist's office. You are holding a screw gun that someone else, a man named Pete, has been shouting at you to hurry up with. The body is a good one. It is skinny and strong and doesn't tire, and the beard itches in the heat. But you carried the same sheet of board up the same stairs twice, and on the second trip you realized you were already bored. You are thirty-two in this man and have been him for less than a minute, and you already know every sentence the day holds. You set the gun down on a sawhorse. The wheel is a page in your pocket. You press the button the way you press an elevator button, and the dust goes.

Then the cold, and the hum.

You are standing in an aisle of black cabinets with your arms up. One hand holds a thin gray network cable and the other holds the end of it. A rack door stands open at your shoulder with a hundred cables fanned out and stacked, white and blue and yellow. A coil of yellow cable hangs across your shoulder. The air smells of warm dust and ozone. Through a window at the end of the aisle, a red neon sign glows in daylight, the bleed of a back alley, and beneath it, faintly, a guitar is being tuned somewhere.

Your hands do one thing wrong. The plug goes toward the port at a bad angle, half a second off, and you pull it back and seat it again slowly. It clicks. You check it. You check the next one too, and the next, ten of them, each looked at, on a job these hands could do asleep.

Then the body arrives under you. You are short, and the floor is closer than you are used to. The weight sits low and wide in the belly and the thighs, and the breath comes shallow. The fleece against your back is soft and a little damp. When you hold the cable tighter, the knuckles of your right hand ache to be cracked, and you let them. The pop is loud in the aisle. A memory comes with it: a wooden pew, his mother's hand slapping his wrist, and the shame of it. It is his shame and not yours, and it passes through you.

The fleece is the next thing. The zipper at the throat is cold against your chin. You feel the morning in his hands: the closet, the gray pullover he reached for because his daughter once said it was soft. She is six and she presses her cheek to his stomach when he wears it. He pulled the sleeves up to the forearm because the server room runs hot. In the bathroom he shaved slowly, with the good razor, because it was a Sunday-school Tuesday in his head, a day he wanted to look careful. His hand combed the hair to its hard side part with water and a plastic comb he has owned for ten years.

The wedding band is warm on your finger. You turn it with your thumb, and it opens a kitchen. A woman is at a table with a stack of envelopes and a calculator, and her pen is tapping. He says something gentle and she doesn't look up. The numbers are underwater, past a hundred thousand: a house, a loan, a hospital bill from the boy's first winter. He stands behind her chair and puts his hands on her shoulders, and the feeling is not love exactly. It is a vow he keeps renewing, and it is enormously tiring and he would not trade it.

The tattoo sits under the sleeve, and you press your thumb to it. Praying hands. He got it at nineteen, after his father's funeral, in a shop with a buzzing neon sign. The needle burned, and he cried quietly and did not stop it. He goes to church on Sundays in a stiff collar, sings baritone, and does not drink much. Twice a year, maybe, one beer at a cookout.

The cable in your hand has a small ridge on its clip. His thumb knows it. Ten thousand times he has done this: patch, label, test. He is good at it, and no one thanks him. Nobody has mentioned the promotion in two years. The server room is the one place the world makes sense to him, and it is the only room where he is entirely unafraid.

You look at your hands. They are broad and brown and soft across the back, with short nails and the ring. You turn them over, and they are yours, and not yours.

You lift your eyes to the dark window of the rack door and the face in it. "Okay," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Okay, Manuel."

Under the hum you are already wondering how long this one will fit.