Sione Fuimaono

You are still Ray Quintana when you decide, and Ray's thumb is on the trackpad, and Ray's bald head is cold in the kitchen air of a house in Nashville where everyone else is asleep. It is Thursday and past the hour when anyone should be doing anything. You have been him for less than a minute. The vitiligo on his knuckles looks like spilled milk in the screen light. He is five-foot-four and the counter comes up to the wrong place on him, and the chair is a size too high, and the pastor's stole hangs on a hook by the door, and none of it is wrong, and none of it is yours. Something in you is already bored of the small door of him. Something wants a man who has to duck, who takes up the room. You do not say that to the screen. You pay, and the wheel turns.

The arrival: your breath goes from ragged to even in one pull, as though a hand had smoothed it. You are face-down. Cotton against your cheek, damp where your mouth was open. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it; the fingers are cold and thick. A line of streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains and lies across the carpet. The weight of you is enormous and sunk, all of it pressed into the bed: belly, chest, the long hair spilled across your neck like a hot rope. Your body wants to turn over. You let it. The arm draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at your chest, a posture he has never once slept in.

Then the memories come, because everything is touching you.

The sheet first, tangled around one ankle. Rough, washed too many times. A woman's laugh comes with it, her heel hooking the sheet away from him in the dark, years of it, thirty years of her stealing the blanket and him saying nothing and sleeping on his stomach so his back would be the wall she leaned on. It is not your memory. It is warm all the way through, like bread.

The shirt on your chest, soft, gone thin at the collar. A gray tee that a daughter bought him at a fair, the cheap kind, and he said it was too nice to sleep in and slept in it the same night. Three children. You feel them as three different weights: one he carried too long, one who stopped talking to him for a year over something about money, one who calls on Sundays and makes him laugh in the car park of the building where he works.

The mouth. You bring a hand up, and the nail of your thumb is already between your teeth before you decide it. Bitten to the quick, ragged, and the ragged edge catches your lip. His hands do this when he is thinking about the lobby. When the night man phones in sick. When the rent comes due and the number is a few hundred short, and has been a few hundred short for years.

Then the uniform, which is not on you but hangs on the closet door, and the shape of it reaches you anyway through the smell of the room, starch and boot polish and the warm dust of a radiator. The mornings he puts it on. Left sleeve first, because of a shoulder. The buttons up the front, one at a time, the belt, the flashlight that he has never once used on anyone, the keys. The long hair he does not cut, braided back under the collar, because his mother's brother wore his that way in Apia and it is the one thing he carries from there that he has never had to explain. In the lobby at three in the morning he sits at the desk and watches the glass doors and the wet leaves blow past on the concrete steps outside. His knees ache. His lower back has a stiff hot place where the chair meets it. He is fifty-four and the floor feels further away than it used to.

Under it all there is a low sweet ache of tiredness. A man worn into a good shape by love and by waiting. A few thousand dollars in an account. A church he doesn't go to, a God he talks to anyway, on the stairs between the backyards, in the late light.

You open your eyes.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. The ring on the left is plain gold, worn flat, tight over a knuckle that has swollen with the years. You turn the hand over. The palm is wide and creased and warm. You look up.

"Sione," you say, trying the name in a mouth built for it. The voice is low and rough with sleep, and it is the biggest sound you have ever made. Down the hall, a floorboard creaks, and a woman's breath turns over in her sleep. You do not know how long he lasts. You do not know when the wanting will come back.