Raymond Okabe

You are Gavin Reilly, and you are standing in a kitchen in Philadelphia with the refrigerator humming and a bowl of cereal gone soft in front of you. The house is asleep. Twenty years old, six-four, and your knees knock the underside of the table every time you shift. For under a minute this was a good body. Then you noticed how easy it was, how nothing in it pushed back, how the goatee felt like a costume on a boy who had never been told no. You wanted something that had been used. You wanted a man with weight in him. So you open the laptop, and the wheel is already turning, and your thumb is the one that comes down.

Cold. First the cold, in the nose and the teeth, and your breath leaves you in a long white rope. Both hands are closed around hemp, thick as a wrist, rough as a dry tongue. The rope is swinging. You are mid-pull and the bell above you answers, a low brown note, and you clap twice, the palms stinging in the cold, and you bow. The sound holds half a second past the swing. You go down further than you meant to, and you stay there, looking at wet stone, and then you rise, level and exact, as if someone taught this body to do it once and it never forgot.

The coat is zipped to your chin. It smells of cedar and of cold air. When you press your chin into the collar, a morning comes: a closet, a hanger, a woman's hand that used to hold this sleeve open. He puts his left arm in first, always, and the ring knocks against the zipper pull, a small click he has loved for years. The polo goes on before the coat, the gray stripes buttoned to the second button and not the third. The trousers are soft at the knee. The laces he ties twice, the way she said to, so they would not come loose on stairs.

The rope is in your hands again, the fibers printing themselves into your palms, and a different memory opens: a smaller temple, a summer, her voice saying wish for something small, you always wish too big. He did. He wished for her. He is wishing it now, you understand, and you are standing inside the wish. Something between the teeth: a toothpick, gone, though the jaw still works on it, a habit with nothing in it. He chewed one through the funeral. He chewed one through the sale of the company, the number that came back with so many zeros he went out to the car and sat. Money he has never once known what to do with. He gave it to quiet things. He has been sober eleven years, and the sobriety lives in the shoulders, a held readiness, like a man carrying a full cup.

Sixty-two years sit in the lower back and the right knee, a dull coin of ache that the cold is polishing. The stone under the soles is hard and wet. The ring is warm against the next finger. Nothing in the pockets but a key and a folded tissue. The freckles on your cheeks tighten in the wind, and you can feel them, which is absurd, a body's small private weather.

You lift your left hand. You turn it over. The knuckles are broad, the nails clean, the gold band worn thin at the bottom from years of washing. It is not yours. It does not know you. It flexes anyway.

You look up, past the bell, into the dark, and you say it low, to no one, in a voice that is gravel and patience: "Okay. Let's see how long."

The bell is still humming somewhere above you, and you do not know whether it will be a year or the time it takes the sound to die.