Patrick Dolan

You are standing in Calvin Choi's shop before it opens, and you have been him for less than a minute when you decide.

His keys are cold in your hand. The roll-up door is half raised and the street outside is the color of dishwater. Phoenix is not warm yet. You have the register drawer open, and you are looking at a hundred and twelve dollars in small bills laid out by somebody who counted them last night and believed in them. His shoulders are narrow. The patchy beard itches along the jaw and you rub it and it is a stranger's itch. You wanted something from him, and he has no way of giving it. He is polite and tired and he is twenty-four. His mother's name comes up when you touch the drawer, and you let it go. You close the drawer. You are already somewhere else in your head, at the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb is over the button before you have decided anything at all.

The room is dark and the television is moving on your face.

You are sunk. The couch has taken your weight and kept it. The remote is loose in your right hand, and the left lies on your stomach, on the zipper of a hoodie. The window beside you is blue, the blue before anything has started. Somewhere on the screen a bright frame cuts in and you sit up straight. The remote goes down on the couch arm. Your back leaves the cushion with a small cloth sound, and the spine under it is twenty-six years old and complains about nothing.

Then the things on him begin to talk.

The hoodie first, because the cuff is between your fingers. It is soft and worn thin at the wrist, and a night comes with it: a girl's laugh in a kitchen, her hand pulling this very cuff down over his knuckles because he was cold, and his pleasure at being fussed over, which is not yours but fills your chest anyway. Her name is a warm weight, Maren. Then the other name, the recent one, Joanne, and the pleasure goes sour like milk. He has not told Maren everything about Joanne. He has told her nothing. It sits in him like a swallowed stone.

The hair falls over your ears and tickles the back of your neck, gray and silver at twenty-six, and the memory under it is of a barber's chair and his own voice saying next week, next week, because a haircut is money and money is a number he checks on the phone at night. Under five thousand, all of it. The moustache moves when your mouth does. He grew it on a dare, then kept it out of spite, then out of habit.

The socks, thick and slightly damp at the heel. A Catholic grandmother's kitchen floor. Him at nine, kneeling on linoleum beside her, her rosary clicking, the smell of onions and Pine-Sol. He still crosses himself in empty rooms sometimes, fast, ashamed. Your hand twitches toward your forehead and stops.

The can on the side table. You do not touch it, but your throat remembers the second one of the evening, the way two drinks turn the apartment from a trap into a room. His hand knows the weight of the can before it reaches.

Under the feel of all that, the body: five foot five, a little soft through the middle, a dull ache low in the left hip where he sits wrong. The jaw is tight from a day of job listings, the cursor moving down the screen, every title asking for three years of something he has two of. The eyes are dry from the laptop and still gritty. His heart is slow and steady. It has never once been frightened of you.

On the screen, someone says something funny. He would have laughed here. You can feel the laugh waiting in his ribs, worn smooth by use, and you let it pass.

You lift your hands into the television light and turn them over. The knuckles are bony, the nails short, the palms dry. They are your hands now, and you look up at the dark room.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low and a little rough. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The remote is on the couch arm. Your thumb already aches for the wheel.