Rohan Menon

Anil Deshpande's knees are the first thing I want to be rid of. Fifty-five years old and I have owned him for under a minute, and already the left one clicks when I shift on the kitchen stool. There is cold coffee at my elbow, a Philadelphia morning gone flat and gray behind the blinds, and a belly that rests on the counter's edge like a hand. I have the green eyes, the silver hair, the cleft in the chin. I liked him for about forty seconds.

Then I turned the cup, and a thing came through the handle: his wife's voice saying his name from another room, and the way he never answered. It was a soft grief, not mine. I put the cup down as if it were hot. I don't want to carry anyone's wife around. I want the next one, and the one after, and the wheel is already open on the phone.

I pay. I spin. The wheel ticks past a dozen faces.

Then my right hand is moving across a keyboard and I did not move it.

Cold air, filtered and thin. A hum from the racks. Wall screens throw green and blue across my forearm. My finger lands on a key, wrong, a half-beat off, and I do it again slowly, correctly. Then again, checking, and again. Ten times I check a thing that has not needed checking in years. My leg is bouncing. I did not tell it to.

The hoodie is heavy on my shoulders, and the cotton under it is damp at the collar. The lanyard drags on my neck, and when my fingers close on the badge the flash comes. It is a lobby, a plastic tray, his first day, his own photo looking back at him, grinning, twenty-two, terrified. Pride, a fizzing one. He had worn the hoodie that day too.

Now the cuffs, pushed up past the wrists, the way he does when a night gets long. This morning, or whenever it was: the black shirt pulled off the chair, the hoodie off the hook, sleeve by sleeve, one arm and then the other, cheap studs pressed into his ears with a thumb out of habit. A text he did not answer. Her name, then the way he stopped saying it. It sits under his ribs like a swallowed stone, and I have inherited the ache without the reason.

The keys under my fingertips are warm and worn. They know the pattern before I do. Under my shoes the carpet is thin and the floor is hard beneath it, and my feet are tired the way a body is at the long end of a shift. The window shows a pink tower going slowly blue. His back hurts low and to the left. I am small in him, narrow, light, and quick. Everything about him is wired a little tight.

I lift my hand off the keys and turn it over. Brown, thin-fingered, the nails bitten even. It is not Anil's hand, and not mine either, if I had one anymore.

I look up into the dark glass of the monitor, at a stranger's tall hair and round lenses, and I say quietly, "Okay. You'll do."

The leg keeps bouncing. I wait to feel how long it will last.