Mateo Rivas Cordero

Walter Ishikawa's knees are the reason, though I would never say so. Fifty-six years of them, and the left one has been announcing every stair of this house since I got here. Less than a minute inside him. I'm standing at his kitchen counter in the dark with a glass of water I haven't drunk, the refrigerator humming, a night-shift lanyard on a hook by the door, the whole sleeping street of Phoenix pressed against the window. A nurse's body. It knows how to stand for twelve hours. It knows where the light switches are. And it's the dullest thing I've ever worn: tired in a way that was decent and earned and had nothing in it for me. I wanted to be someone who'd be awake for a reason. I put the glass down, open the page, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the wheel is gone and I'm sitting down.

A chair, soft, the arm of it rough under my forearm. A lamp's warm light on one side of my face, the other side cool from a window. My jaw is clenched so hard the hinge aches, and I let it go, and it comes back on its own. My thumb has been working at the seam of the chair. A phone leans against a mug in front of me, and in it a face that is smoother than the one I'm wearing, younger, airbrushed, a boy's. The filter drops. The real face is under it: stubble-edged goatee, a pale map across one cheek. It holds still because the smoothing left it that way.

The shirt first. Cotton, thin at the collar, soft from a hundred washes. Against my back it gives me a morning: his hands pulling it off the pile on the dresser because the clean ones were gone, the smell of the hallway, the tag scratching his neck, thinking *whatever, nobody sees me anyway, it's just the headset.* The sweatpants, and the hum of his own legs after eight hours in a cubicle row, the foot that tapped under the desk to the rhythm of a script he could recite asleep. *Thank you for calling, how can I help.* Nine hundred times a week. Voices that yelled at him and never asked his name.

The socks are damp-warm. Under my heel the carpet gives me stairs: concrete steps between backyards, wet leaves slick on them, late light going orange over the roofs, him smoking on the landing because the pack a day is the one thing that's his. The craving sits behind my teeth now, dry and exact. Silver in my left ear, a small cold weight. I touch it and get a night, a friend's bathroom, a borrowed needle, him laughing and scared, nineteen and deciding something about his own body. A man or a woman, he'd have said, whichever one is looking back. No one's looking now. The mug is empty, rim ringed with coffee from three days ago. The papers on the table are bills, and under them a savings number he checks like a pulse, enough to feel dangerous. He quit drinking in the spring. His hands remember wanting to.

The vitiligo. I turn my wrist to the lamp and the memory is older than anything: a kid at a pool, a boy asking if it rubbed off, his mother saying *mijo, it's just where the light got in.* He hated that. He loved it. He's stopped deciding.

I lift my hand and look at it. The pale patches, the brown between them, the knuckles that bit down on a thousand angry calls. Mine. For now. I turn it over, and the palm is pink and ordinary.

I look up into the dark screen where my face waits.

"Okay, Mateo," I say, in his voice, lower than I expected. "Let's see how long you last."

My thumb is already over the phone, and the wanting hasn't come back yet. It will. I don't know when.