Samuel Prewitt

You are still Daniel Rourke when you open the page, and Daniel Rourke is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. The apartment in Tokyo is dark and the whole building breathes around you. Everyone is asleep. You stand in the kitchen in your socks with the laptop glowing against your forearm, and the beard you have worn for less than a minute itches under your thumb. He is a good body. Strong shoulders, a calm chest, a beauty mark you keep finding with your tongue-tip of attention, as if it were a tooth. Nothing is wrong with him.

But at the table, a half hour ago, you reached for a cup of something and your hands knew a gesture that wasn't yours, a way of folding a letter, and under it was a sadness like cold water in a boot. It wasn't yours either. You don't want to carry other men's sadness. You want to arrive in one clean second, before anything has settled. You press the wheel.

Then the fork stops.

It is just there, in the air, halfway to your mouth, and your mouth is open, and something warm and salty is already on your tongue. Daylight, flat and gray, comes through a window. There's a hum of a refrigerator. Your weight is on both feet on cold linoleum, and a plastic container sits in your left hand, its edge digging a line into the pad of your thumb. A coat is on you. You are standing at a counter, in the middle of a bite.

You close your mouth. You chew. Beans, rice, something peppery. Your tongue finds a space between your front teeth and rests there, a small doorway of air.

The coat comes first. Its collar scratches the back of your neck, nylon over cotton, and the cuff Velcro snags a few hairs on your wrist. Zipper cold against the breastbone. It brings a morning: this hand pulling it from a hook by the door because the sky was low and wet, the truck keys already in the pocket, a thought about a bearing housing that wouldn't seat, the bench in the lab with the machine half built and waiting. It was a good thought. He liked the problem. You feel the liking like a warm stone in the chest.

Under the coat, the shirt, a plaid soft from washing. A button at the cuff was sewn back on with the wrong color thread, and his thumb knows it and finds it, pleased in a small stubborn way. He did that himself at this counter on a Sunday. The thread was black because the drawer had only black.

Your right hand wants something. It drifts to the front of your trousers, finds a pocket, and there it is: a ring, plain, not on a finger but in the pocket, and your fingers turn it over, over, over without being asked. Memory opens like a drawer. A hallway in a different house, his mother's, a prayer rug rolled against the wall, a smell of cardamom and floor polish, and the ring was his father's. The weight of the metal is steadier than anything else in the room. He turns it when the work is hard. He turns it when the house is quiet. It has been quiet a long time, and he has stopped minding, mostly.

The tattoo you can't see under the sleeve, but the skin knows it, the half sleeve of a team crest, a mild heat where the cloth rubs. A stupid, joyful afternoon: a cousin, a long drive, a vow made over bad coffee, the needle's bite on the inside of the arm. He still loves the team. He is a little embarrassed that he does. You find you are smiling.

Your knees ache slightly, forty years of them. Your belly sits soft over the belt and the belt is a comfortable pressure. The scalp under the buzzed hair is cool, bare to the air. You run your tongue across a smooth jaw: shaved this morning, close, in the bathroom mirror, the razor drawing down in long steady strokes. Water, no drink at lunch, none ever, a clean habit of a clean life. Outside, past the glass, a gravel road, a line of barbed wire, a water tower small on the gray horizon.

You set the fork on the counter. You shrug the coat off, and the cold of the room finds your shoulders. You sit. You finish the container in even mouthfuls, looking at nothing in the dark of the window, and then you stop, and lift your right hand, and turn it over.

Square palm, a pale callus at the base of the fingers, a tiny nick near the thumb. A ring's worth of habit still in the fingertips. You look up into the glass and a stranger's blue eyes look back, gap-toothed, quiet.

"Hello, Samuel," you say, and the voice is a low, dry Texas that you have never owned.

How long? You flex the fingers. The refrigerator hums. You wonder what the wanting will sound like when it comes back, and whether it will find you here, or in ten minutes, or in ten years.