Randy Kelso

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You have been waiting a long time in the place where waiting is all there is, and then a man in El Paso draws a circle on his garage floor with sidewalk chalk his kids left behind, and you feel it the way a fish feels a hook — not pain, just direction.

You do not know him. That is the first thing to understand. Whatever people imagine about this — that it is settling of accounts, that the thing on the other side has been circling one particular life like a dog outside a house — none of it. He is a stranger. He is a heavyset man of forty-nine with a bad shave and a work shirt he has changed into as if this were an occasion, kneeling in a bare concrete room with nine candles from the grocery store, and he is calling out into the dark without any idea who is listening, the way a man puts a message in a bottle and doesn't picture the hand that opens it.

You come close and you look at him, because he has given you time — he keeps stopping to check the paper he has folded on the floor beside his knee. He has printed something off. The circle is not right. The words are not right either, not really, but the wanting is right, and the blood is right, and in the end that is the whole of the lock.

So you look.

Dark brown hair cut short at the back and sides, a little length left on top, no part, the way a barber does it in eleven minutes. Blue eyes, red-rimmed. A gap between his front teeth that shows when his lips move over the words, and you find you keep watching for it, the small dark window in the middle of his face. Forty-nine. Heavy through the chest and belly, the kind of heavy that comes from sitting in a chair for twenty years and a drink or two most evenings and quitting cigarettes eight years ago and eating instead. Big hands. A pale band of untanned skin on the left ring finger, thin as a thread, where a ring was for a very long time and is not now.

The house above him is turquoise, flat-roofed, chain-link around a yard of dust. You saw it from outside in the white desert light before you came in. There are three bicycles against the fence in three sizes and none of them have been ridden in a while. There is a photograph on the refrigerator with a woman's face in it and someone has not taken it down.

He is not desperate the way you expected. That is the thing you will think about later, when you are the one doing his job. He is *thorough*. He has been reading for months — you can smell it on him, the way months of reading gets into a person. He believes in something; he'd say so if you asked. He would not say the word God. He would say he thinks there's more to it than this, and then he'd click his pen twice and change the subject. He wants to be answered. He wants proof, from anything, that the world is bigger than a glass-walled office with the door propped open and a machine strapped to his face at night so that he keeps breathing.

He does not want to leave. You want to be clear with yourself about that, since no one else will be. He is not asking to be replaced. He thinks he is opening a door and standing in the doorway.

You could go elsewhere.

You don't.

He pricks his thumb with a sewing needle, wincing, ridiculous, human, and the bead comes up dark and round. He looks at it. He breathes out. He presses it to the chalk. And the last word he does not say aloud — he mouths it, lips only, no air behind it, as if saying it out loud would be showing off, as if there might be neighbors — and every candle flame in that room leans toward him at once like grass in wind.

When they straighten, so do you.

Here is what it is: heat, and weight, and a floor pressing back through the knees, and a nose that whistles slightly, and a taste of coffee gone old, and a heart going hard because it was already going hard before you got here. His body is a room someone left in a hurry with the lights on. You feel his breath still moving. You feel his hands at the ends of your arms.

You lift one. Turn it over. Look at the palm, the creases, the small dry cracks, the thread of pale skin above the knuckle where the ring was.

For good. There is no term on this and no door back and he did not know that, and now nobody knows it but you.

Monday you will drive to the office. You will find that his hand clicks his pen while you are reading email and you will not notice for a full minute. You will find that his youngest calls on Wednesdays. You will find that the ex-wife's name in the phone is still under one letter. You will find you have to strap the mask on at night or the body wakes you at three, drowning, and that the sound it makes is like a man surfacing.

You will do it all. You will do it better than he did some of it and much worse than he did the rest. And every so often, standing in his kitchen in the white flat light, you will feel the gap in the front teeth with your tongue and think: he made this. He said the word with his lips only, so no one would hear.

Somebody heard.