Raymond Hsu

You are standing in Marcus Whitlock's kitchen in Seattle with the last of the evening gone blue in the window, and you are tired of his hands. They are good hands. They fix things. All day they have been fixing other people's passwords, and tonight they would not stop shaking when you tried to make them do something small. A glass of water. The shake was not his fault. It was only that you noticed it, and noticing is the thing you have run out of patience for. Eight days and thirteen hours of dimples in the dark window, of stubble you scraped at and it came back anyway. You have the site open. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, and you let it.

Then the show cuts to a bright frame and you are sitting up straight.

The couch gives under you, a soft sag that is yours now. The remote is in your right hand and you set it on the couch arm without deciding to. The room is dark except for the television, and the television is saying something you missed the joke of. You do not laugh. Your breath comes slow and heavy, down low in a belly that rides over the waistband of soft pants.

Then the room starts giving him back, through what you touch.

The sweatshirt first. Navy, thick cotton, worn thin at the cuffs, and the cuff against your wrist opens a morning: this man pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the light off so as not to wake the woman asleep, one arm and then the other, the neck catching on his gelled hair, and his hand smoothing the spikes back up out of habit. He was careful about that hair. Fifty-eight and still careful. The feeling that comes with it is plain and sour, a man dressing for no one.

The couch under your thighs. Nubbed fabric, and with it a Sunday, two children small enough to climb him. They are grown now, and the feeling is an ache with no name on it, because they do not call as much as they used to.

Your socks, thick on the wood floor, and your feet remember a long shift standing, decades of it, a business, a loading dock, a ledger. Money. A great deal of it, quietly made, never spent where anyone could see. The knowledge comes as ease in the shoulders and a flat unease in the chest, the way a man feels about what he has.

There is a glass on the table at your knee. Your hand goes to it before you tell it to. The weight is right, the smell reaches you, and the want arrives in your throat, old and patient, with shame folded inside it like a note. Under the want, a rosary in a drawer. A church on a Sunday. A promise made in a dark pew. Under that, a lighter you carried for years after the last cigarette, because holding it settled him.

Your knees ache when you shift. Your lower back is a dull fist. The hands are broad and warm and know the remote, the glass, the weight of a grandchild's head.

You lift your right hand into the light of the screen and turn it over. Palm, then back. Lines you have never seen.

You look up, and you say it out loud, low, to the dark room:

"All right, Raymond. Show me what you've got."

And somewhere under the question is the other one. How long do you get him? The wanting is quiet now. It will not stay quiet.