Ravi Sethupathi

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You come in through the space where his headache is, the small white noise behind his eyes he hasn't noticed yet because he is still holding the headset in one hand, halfway between his face and the air.

He blinks. You blink with him, which is to say you learn that his eyes are brown and a little dry from the foam pads and that the room has a particular smell — old cotton, bottled water gone warm, something like propolis ground into the creases of his palms even though the hive yard is thirty blocks away and forgotten for the day.

His hands come up. You watch them come up without quite deciding it, turned palm to back to palm, like he's checking them against a memory of hands. There's a burn-colored line of resin under two of the nails. You did not put that there. It was already his.

The bed behind him is made badly, one corner escaped. A lamp is on though it's daylight outside the window, a coil of charging cable slack across the quilt. There had been, apparently, a program — a beach, a mountain, something advertised as full-immersion, and somewhere in the transaction between his optic nerve and whatever server, a door opened that wasn't supposed to and you walked through it wearing curiosity as your only shoes.

Now you have him.

He goes to the bathroom first, which is not your idea, it's a body's idea, bladders not caring who's driving. You let it happen and while it happens you look at his face in the mirror above the sink — ordinary, is the word, and you find you agree with the word, forty-five years of ordinary weather on it, no scar to speak of, no mark that says here is where something happened to him. He's a man things have not happened to, or not happened to in ways that show.

You take him outside because that is what you have, one day, and a body remembers streets even when you don't. He — you — walk down four flights because the elevator light is out and has been out, apparently, for some time judging by the resigned way his feet find the stairs without checking. The street is one of those wide ones with the plane trees, branches meeting overhead like a tunnel someone is always trimming and never finishing. There's a café on the corner, tables spilling onto the sidewalk, three old men arguing softly about something that might be soccer or might be the government, indistinguishable at that volume.

You sit him down at one of the tables because his legs want to sit and you have learned already, in the twenty minutes you've had him, that arguing with the wanting of a body costs more than it's worth.

A waiter comes. Says something you understand because Ravi understands it, the Spanish sitting in him like water in a jar, and you order a cortado because his hand reaches for the menu and his mouth already knows the word before you've decided anything. This is how it goes, mostly — less like driving, more like riding along behind someone's eyes while his habits do the steering.

The coffee comes. He — you — wrap both hands around the small cup, and there against the white ceramic you see it again, the resin-colored crescent under the nail, the roughness across two knuckles that isn't roughness from anything you did, it's roughness from lifting eighty hive frames a week for twenty years, it's roughness that has nothing to do with this street or this cup or this hour.

You think: nobody here knows what he does with his hands when he isn't here.

You think it almost like grief, though it isn't yours to grieve.

The afternoon goes the way afternoons go when a stranger is inside you and neither of you has anywhere urgent to be. He doesn't have anywhere urgent to be — that itself is a fact you gather without being told, the loose unclaimed shape of his schedule, no one waiting, no one whose face falls if he's late. A man alone on a Tuesday with bees thirty blocks off doing whatever bees do without him for one day, which is fine, which is what bees are built for, going on regardless.

You walk him past a kiosco, past a dog tied to a lamp post with its chin on its paws, past a woman sweeping the same three tiles of sidewalk over and over like the dirt is a debt she's still paying off. Everything ordinary. Every hour of it his, technically, even the ones you're spending.

Near evening you bring him back to the apartment, because bodies want their beds the way rivers want the sea, and you sit him on the edge of the mattress in the same bad light as before, lamp still on, cable still slack. The headset is where he left it, screen dark now, whatever door it opened closed again or closing.

You have him until you don't. That's the whole shape of it. No warning bell, no countdown, just the sense of a room getting less occupied, your wanting draining out of his hands like water finding a lower place to be.

The last thing you do with his fingers — not deciding it, just noticing it happen — is turn the headset over once, checking it the way you'd check a hive lid for weight, for the small vibration underneath that tells you whether anyone's home.

Then it's just him again, alone in the room, a taste of cortado still on his tongue that he'll wonder about for a day or two and then stop wondering, the way people do with dreams, the way bees do with any hour that isn't this one.