Nikhil Menon

Daniel Cheung's scalp is cold under my palm, the stubble of it, and I am standing in his kitchen in El Paso before the light has come, with his coffee going bitter in a mug I have not finished. I have been him for less than a minute. His knees ache a little from the sales floor, a bad habit of locking them. His keys are on the counter with a lanyard from a conference in Albuquerque, and when I touch it I get a hotel bar, a man laughing at a joke Daniel did not find funny. That is all I need to know about whether he was happy.

Nothing is wrong with him. He works. The body is good. But he rehearsed a call this morning, out loud, to a mirror, and the version of me that stood there understood that the call was a plea, and that it would be mine to make. I do not want to be a man who makes it. That is not a reason I would say aloud. I open the page. The wheel is already turning under my thumb.

Then the hold music loops to its first bar, and my shoulder drops a phone into my hand.

I am standing. There is a counter against my hip, granite-look laminate, cold through the cloth. A pen is in my right hand, stopped over the second digit of a number written on an envelope, and the phone is warm and slick from his ear. The music starts again, bright and stupid. I do not start the pen again.

The sweatshirt first. Green, heavy, the cuffs gone soft. When I pull the sleeve down over my wrist, it gives me a morning: him in a dark bedroom, not wanting to wake the light, finding it on the chair where it was thrown last night, pulling it over his head and smelling a woman's shampoo in the collar, still, and standing there with the cloth over his face a second longer than he needed to. He did not wash it. That is what I learn. He did not wash it for weeks. Then the jeans, stiff at the knee, belt notch worn past the last hole, and his thumbs knew to hook them up as he stood. Slippers, fleece-lined, cold floor under them, a Philadelphia floor, tile that sweats in winter.

The pen. My thumb finds the clicker without asking and clicks, once, twice, and a whole office opens: a standing desk, two monitors, a cold coffee, a meeting where he clicked it until someone looked, and he stopped, ashamed, and began again under the table. A good engineer. Quiet. Proud of a thing he built that nobody thanked him for.

The envelope under my hand is a bill. The paper's edge gives me the ex, a name I almost catch, a stair, the sound of her saying he never said what he was feeling, and his answer, which was to fix the dishwasher. Even her leaving he tried to solve.

My earlobes hum. Two small studs. He got them at twenty-six, a dare and then not a dare, and he has kept them like a small private yes.

The body underneath is easy and strong. Thirty-three. Shoulders that do pushups on a floor somewhere. A heart steady and unhurried, a little tired. Nothing hurts. His hunger is a clean thing in his stomach. He does not drink anymore. I can feel the place where wanting it used to live, tidied, like a room with the furniture removed.

The music loops again. I lift my left hand off the counter and look at it, turn it over: slim brown fingers, a pale line of pen ink on the side of the middle one, the nails clean. I look up at the window. First light is going white on the blinds.

"Hello," I say, and it comes out in his voice, lower than I expected. "Yes. I'm still here."

I do not know how long that will be true.