Mohan Rajagopal

You are Daniel Cheung, and you have been Daniel Cheung for less than a minute, and already you are bored of the way he stands. The bathroom mirror in his Denver apartment gives you the unibrow, the careful part in the dark hair, the five-foot-five of a man who has spent his life looking up at people in conference rooms. His phone lights on the sink with a calendar alert: a 7:30 with a client whose name means nothing. His shirt is ironed and hanging on the door. You know his whole life from the inside, laid out like a lanyard. The trouble is that there's nothing in it you want. You wanted something with weight, and this is a man who weighs what a briefcase weighs. You put the toothbrush down. The page is already open on the phone, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the room is dark, and heavy, and warm.

You are on your side. The mattress sags under a body that has made a hollow in it over many years. There is a blue light six inches from your face, and your thumb is stopped on glass. Your breath comes slow and wide, because there is a lot of chest for it to travel through. The air smells of old laundry, cold dust, and the faint metal of a window unit. Behind the blinds the dark is only beginning to thin.

Your thumb starts again. It is faster than his was, and steadier, flicking past everything he had paused on. A video of a man restoring a rusted knife goes by. So does a message thread you don't open. So does a photograph of a woman at a lake, squinting, a face his thumb had lingered on a moment before you came. The thumb moves on without asking you.

Then you touch the fabric, and it opens.

The long-sleeved shirt, soft from a thousand washings, gives you the sleeves first. He put it on last night in the bathroom with the door open. His wife was already asleep, and he kept the light off so as not to wake her. The left arm went in, then the right. He tugged the cuffs down over his wrists out of some habit of modesty, though no one was watching. There is a feeling in it that is only his: the tiredness of a man who has to be awake in a few hours, gentle and unresentful, a man who likes the dark house before the van.

The blanket under your palm is rough. A flash comes of Gayatri pulling it up over his shoulder years ago, saying his name as a complaint, *Mohan, you're freezing*, and laughing. It is a marriage of thirty years, without children, a quiet one, built around two people who stopped asking the house to be louder. You feel something in his chest give, as if a hand had been laid flat there.

Your free hand lifts and touches your face. It finds the beard, two inches of coarse silver, and the mole high on the cheek, and rubs the place with a knuckle. This is something his hands do when no one is thinking. The motion comforts him. It will comfort you a little, too, which is strange.

Under the beard, the jaw is a thick, familiar weight. Your stomach rests against the mattress, and when you shift, your lower back complains in the specific way of a man who lifts boxes at fifty-four. The knees are bad. The shoulders are strong in the way of old work, slow and certain. The fingers are thick and know exactly how to grip a package corner. There is a plain gold ring on the left hand, loose from sweat in the summer and snug now.

The phone gives you something else. Under his thumb, the screen holds the lake photograph a half-second longer. It is a girl he knew at twenty-two. He doesn't think of her often. He looks, on some nights, and puts the phone down, and is not unhappy. It is a door left open on a quiet room.

A bottle stands on the nightstand, the label turned away. You get a taste in the back of your mouth, long ago and sour, and then nothing: eleven years without a drink, a decision he made in a parking lot one morning and never reopened. Pride lives in it, small and private. He tells no one how often he reaches for it.

You turn your hand over in the blue light. It is broad and brown, the nails square, the knuckles grayed with fine hair. The ring catches. Daniel's hands were narrow, and these are not, and they are yours.

You look up, and your voice comes out low and a little rough, in a body that has barely spoken today.

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."