Roy Kowalczyk

You are standing in a kitchen in Las Vegas in the middle of the night, in a body that is thirty-eight and five-three and works fine. The refrigerator hums. His feet ache the way a waiter's feet ache, a clean ache, earned. You have been Hiroshi Tanabe for less than a minute, and already you are tired of how little he reaches. The top shelf is a thing you would have to ask for. That is not the reason, or not all of it. The reason is that you stood at his sink and drank a glass of water and it tasted exactly like water, and you wanted something to taste like more. So you thumb the wheel, and it turns, and the light of the phone is the last thing his eyes do.

Weight. That arrives first, a lot of it, settled low and wide, and you are sitting on the edge of a mattress that dips under it. Cold air from a window unit. A lamp. Your hand is flat on your chest and under it are ribs you have to press to find, and a heart going steady and slow. The shirt is buttoned wrong by one. The tie hangs open around your neck like something you were about to be given.

You do not remember doing it, but your fingers have already undone the buttons and done them up again, right, and the tie is knotted in a way this bedroom has never seen. Your hands know how. They are thick, and the knuckles are swollen at the base. They crack themselves, one fist closing over the other, a pop like a dry twig.

The shirt against your back is cotton, thin, washed too many times. It gives you a morning: his hands at the cuffs, the left one always harder, a button he sewed back on himself with black thread because it was what he had. A wedding, years ago, in this shirt, someone's mother crying in a hallway. He bought the tie for a funeral and has worn it to every job estimate since, so the clients will see a man who owns a tie.

The wood floor is cold through one sock. The other foot is already in its shoe, and the leather is creased where his toes bend. Memory comes up through the sole: a long stairwell, a ladder, the smell of primer so strong it sweetens the back of the throat, eleven hours of it, and the joy of a straight line of blue along a ceiling edge, cut freehand, steady, nobody watching. He is proud of that and has told no one.

Your thumb finds the edge of the nightstand and there is a woman in it, only a laugh across a kitchen, a ring left in a dish, a lawyer's folded letter. His ex-wife. The feeling is not anger. It is a bruise he presses on some nights with the second drink, just to confirm it is still there.

The belly rests on your thighs, warm. Your lower back has a low, patient ache, a decade of reaching overhead. The beard is thick against your collar, and when you swallow you feel it move. Everything in him is slow and heavy and used, and none of it hurries.

You lift your hands and turn them over. Paint is in the creases, a blue so old it has become skin. You look up, past the lamp, and you say, in a voice that comes from lower than any you have owned, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere under the quiet, the wheel is already waiting.