Rakesh Bhandari

Fourteen minutes is not long enough to learn a body, but it is long enough to be bored of one. You are sitting cross-legged on Danny Aguirre's dorm-room floor at close to three in the morning, his roommate's breathing even in the next bed, and you already know the shape of the problem: eighteen is a good age to be, but this particular eighteen has a calculus exam in six hours and a body that keeps yawning whether you want it to or not. Danny's gray eyes are somebody else's borrowed window and you are tired of looking through them at a textbook. There is a phone glowing in his hand — his hand, technically, though you have been steering it — and vessel.cards is already open in the browser, the wheel sitting there mid-spin from muscle memory, because this is not really a decision so much as an itch. You don't hate him. You don't feel anything about him, which is its own kind of answer. You press the wheel and let it go, and Danny Aguirre's fourteen minutes end without ceremony, the way all of them do, mid-yawn, his hand still holding the phone that is no longer going to matter to you at all.

There is no falling, no sound, no in-between. One instant you are looking down at gray eyes reflected in a phone screen and the next you are looking down at a bedspread, close enough to feel its weave against your forehead, and the eyes doing the looking are brown. Your knees are on carpet. Your hands are laced loosely together on the mattress edge, mid-collapse, the fingers already unclasping in surprise before you have decided anything about them. A held breath goes out of you unevenly, half a laugh cut off in the middle. The room smells like drywall and an oscillating fan. Somewhere behind you a nightstand clock reads a time that means nothing yet, and you are already coming back down onto both knees when you should be standing, because whoever was rising a half-second ago is not the one steering anymore.

The shirt is the first thing that talks to you — old cotton, a t-shirt gone soft at the collar from a hundred washes, and touching it with your own chin as your forehead meets the bedspread gives you a full morning: him pulling it over his head three days ago in a dark trailer, careful not to wake her, Priya's shape still turned away from him under the blanket, one bare foot sticking out from the sheet the way it always did no matter the season. You get the whole gesture of it — arm through sleeve, the little grunt when the collar catches on stubble he hadn't shaved in two days, the smell of yesterday's shirt still hanging on the doorknob because laundry was Sunday's problem. His knees against the carpet bring the roof back to you sideways, unasked — thirty feet up on the Fernandez job, shingles hot enough to feel through gloves, the particular ache low in his knees that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with fifteen years of kneeling on pitches, and how he still straightens up at the ridge line every single time to look out at the town going small and pale in the heat shimmer, because that view is the only part of the job he never got used to.

His hands remember before you do — that is the strangest gift of them, laced together loose and useless on the bedspread, and even doing nothing they want to move, tap, pick at a thread, the way they always want to move, have wanted to move since he was a kid failing to sit still through his mother's puja, swatted lightly on the wrist by an aunt for fidgeting with the diya. Prayer has never once come easy to him and it is not coming easy now — kneeling here at whatever hour this is, some old reflex from childhood pulling him down onto his knees toward a mattress instead of an altar because there is no altar in a single-wide, only a nightstand and a clock and Priya asleep behind him with her arm thrown wide, and beyond her, a boy's photograph taped inside the closet door that he still can't fully look at without his chest going tight — his son, seven states east with an ex-wife who did nothing wrong, a woman he still catches himself thinking of at four in the morning on a roof with more tenderness than he'll ever admit to Priya. He isn't praying for anything specific tonight. He is only doing what his mother used to do, murmured half-Sanskrit dropping into English dropping into nothing, eyes drifting open to the clock because his shift starts absurdly early and sleep is a debt he is always behind on, blood sugar a low simmering static he's stopped mentioning to anyone, calluses on his palms thick enough now that he can barely feel the bedspread's weave — except you can, sharply, newly, everything about this body announcing itself at once: the ache behind the knees, the itch in fingers that have never once in thirty-seven years managed stillness, the sun damage on his forearms that goes deeper than the shirt sleeves, deeper than skin, into how tired thirty-seven can feel when thirty-seven has spent twenty years on ladders.

You come up off the bedspread slower than he would have. You turn your hands over in front of your face — his hands, broad, nicked, a fresh red scrape across one knuckle from a flashing edge on Thursday's job — and something in you that has done this five hundred and sixty-three times still pauses on the sight of new hands doing exactly what old ones taught them.

"Amen," you say out loud, to the empty dark room, half a beat too late, and you don't know yet if you're going to stay long enough to mean it.