Stephen Takeshi Morimoto

You are Dylan Pruett for one more minute, and the minute has already gone sour. The sun is flat and white on the lot in El Paso. Your shoulders hurt from a morning of rebar. Your beard is patchy under your fingers. Someone has just shouted your name from the truck, and the sound of it is like a coat that doesn't fit. That is the whole reason. You have been him sixty seconds, and he is a man who gets called to lunch. You want a man who is called to nothing.

You press spin.

There is no travel. The lot is gone and the ceiling is a lamp. It is a white disc of light, enormous, humming, and it is directly over your face. Plastic sits on your nose and mouth, and the air through it is cool and tastes of rubber. The count was running in his mouth. It stopped at seven, and you are the one holding the eight. Under your lids your eyes move once, left to right. On the table your hand opens and shuts twice, testing, and the fingers answer slowly, heavy and warm.

Then nothing comes, and you wait. Memory is not handed to you. It has to be touched.

The paper gown rasps against your ribs, and a flash comes: a closet, and a hanger with the navy jacket on it. His wife says something about the cold, and he says it is only a clinic. The polo, the soft blue one, went over his head first. There was a small tug at the ear, and he felt fond of his own habit of wearing it. The corduroys came after. They are olive, and he steps into each leg standing on one foot, because at sixty-three the balance is a thing to be a little proud of. Then the black shoes, with a hand on the wall. It is all in his hands and none of it in yours.

The wedding band is tight against the next finger. A porch comes up under it, with mid-morning coffee going cold. He has all the time in the world there, and he drums his fingers on the rail. Three children's voices overlap, grown now and arguing over a phone line about who will drive him home. He loved that noise. Behind it, quieter, is a worry he has told nobody, and it is why he is here. Under the lamp, under the gown, you can feel it low in the belly, where the soft weight sits over a thin frame, skinny and fat at once. The knees ache, and the back is stiff. The shaved jaw is smooth against the mask strap, and he had shaved it carefully this morning, as if for company. Wet leaves and concrete steps between the backyards come up too, late light on them, his evening walk. His breath was always a little short at the top.

A drink or two most evenings, the glass cold and the day put down. A faith with no name that he kept the way he kept the stairs, by using it.

Voices move around the table. Cloth brushes your shoulder. Someone reads out a number, and the number is a steady one.

You lift your hand into the lamp and turn it over. The ring catches the light. Freckles run down the back of it, pale brown, and the fingers start to drum on nothing, his habit and now yours. You raise your eyes.

"Well," you say, to the light, to the room. "Hello, Stephen."

Somewhere under the quiet, the question is already there. It asks how long, and when the wanting will come back.