Nathan Eric Lindgren

Pittsburgh, and the house asleep around Daniel Kenji Watanabe's body. I am standing at his kitchen counter in socks, thumbing a wedding band round his finger, and I have been him for less than a minute.

It is not that he fails. He works. The knees are fine, the eyes are fine, the dimples do their small honest work in the dark window over the sink. But the hands came up to the counter and a calculation lay in them, a whole bridge of stress tables, and I felt it the way you feel a stranger's handwriting in your own pen. He was good at something I did not want. Forty-nine years of earned patience, and not one appetite in it that I recognized. Wanting is the thing I came for, and he has none left that is mine.

So the laptop is open, and the wheel is turning, and I let it.

Then the kitchen is gone and there is mattress against my cheek.

A breath tears out of me, ragged, mid-snore, and I smooth it into one even pull. Face-down. Sheets knotted around a leg. One arm hangs off the edge, the fingers brushing wood floor, and a streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across my back like a hand. The body is heavy and warm and twenty. My heart is slow and enormous. Under me the bed is damp where my face was. Wet Brooklyn is hissing outside.

I roll. The arm draws itself up and my hands fold on my chest, a corpse's posture, a prayer's. He has never slept like this. I lie there with my eyes open.

The T-shirt is cotton gone soft, and the collar touches my throat, and he comes.

A morning in a cold dorm room, Sunday, this same shirt pulled over this same head, the smell of the dryer sheet, his mother's brand. He is humming a hymn he does not notice humming. Then the pants, the drawstring knotted twice because it keeps slipping, and the shame under it: a number on a screen, sixty thousand dollars of loans and a card he is afraid to open. He prays about it on the edge of this bed. He is not sure anyone is listening, and he says amen anyway.

My thumb finds the ring. It is a silver band on his right hand, no, not a wedding band, a purity ring, and the thumb already turns it, over and over, the way it turns when he lies awake. A girl gave him a different promise once. Her laugh in a stairwell. Her coat. Three weeks ago she said his name the way you set down something heavy, and he stood on the stoop in the rain until the sodium light made his eyes ache. He still has her number memorized. The ring turns. He has never once had a drink to get past it, and the clean ache of that is almost a kind of pride.

The mattress pushes back against shoulders that are broad and sore from some lift he did yesterday. His beard is wiry against my wrist. Two small studs sit cold in the lobes. My calves hum. The stomach is empty, wanting breakfast and not knowing it.

I lift my hands into the streetlight. I turn them over, palms, knuckles, the thick fingers still holding a stranger's habit. Then I look up.

"Okay," I say, in his low voice, to the dark. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."