Marcus Teague

Calvin Thibodeaux's beard is still wet from the sink when I decide, and I can feel how short a time I have been him. Less than a minute. The mirror in the laborer's cramped bathroom gave me hazel eyes and a beauty mark I keep touching. The shirt smells of drywall dust that is not mine. Outside a truck backs up, beeping, and the morning is already thick as a wet towel. He is a perfectly good body: sound knees, a back that has lifted things. Nothing is wrong with him. But I lean on the sink and what I feel is the flat quiet of a room after the music stops. I have had him for a minute, and I already know the whole of him, the way you know a menu. The wanting comes back the way it always does, a hunger with no particular food. I open the page. The wheel is already turning, and I let Calvin go with his mouth half open, mid-breath.

Cold. A different cold, clean and salted. I am standing. My hands are on a keyboard, and they are moving, a pattern so old it needs nobody. Then one finger lands wrong, and the rhythm cracks like a dropped plate. I do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because I am here and I do not trust anything yet.

The floor is under me, and my knees tell me about it: thirty-nine years, a little too much weight carried a little too long, a dull ache low in the back from standing. The standing desk hums. A paper cup sits by my right hand, and a gray light comes through the window, the sea somewhere behind brown grass. A lobster trap leans in the dooryard like a cage left open.

The hoodie is what opens first. The cuffs are worn soft, and when my wrist brushes the zipper I have the morning: him pulling it up halfway in the dark, because the house is never warm, the baseboard heat ticking, his breath showing. He put on the black sweats because nobody sees him. He likes that. He likes that nobody sees him.

The headphones around my neck are warm from his skin. I touch the band and music comes, not sound but the memory of it: a gospel choir, his grandmother's church, folding chairs, the hot-comb smell, a hymn he does not believe and cannot stop humming. He hums it on bad days.

The paper cup. I lift it, and it is cold, hours cold, and with the cold comes the other thing: the bottle in the cabinet under the sink, the careful count of what is left, the shame that is quieter than the drinking. Last night's weight sits behind my eyes. And under that, old and sweet, a cigarette on a porch, the quitting of it, years ago, still a hole in his hand where it used to go.

The notebook. The pen is blue. When my fingertip touches the page I get a woman's laugh in a car with the windows down, the road to Acadia, her feet on the dashboard. The one who got away. He wrote her name once in the margin of a design doc, then scratched it out until the paper tore. I do not read it. I do not have to. It aches in his chest like a swallowed stone.

The keys again, plastic worn smooth at the edges. Years of money in them, good money, the house paid, the silence paid for. Nobody calls. The code on the screen is clean. It is good work. He is good at something, alone.

I lift my hands from the keyboard and turn them over. They are broad and brown, the calluses faint, the nails clean. They are not mine. They are mine.

I look up at the window, the gray, the trap, my own breath on the glass, and say it out loud to the empty room, in his voice, low and a little rough:

"Alright, Marcus. Show me."

The cold coffee sits there. I wonder how long before the hunger finds me here, whether it is an hour, whether it is tonight, whether tomorrow I will still know the hymn.