Sunil Parekh

Caleb Redcloud's thumb is on the trackpad, and the kitchen in Phoenix is still blue with the hour before work. The coffee has not been made. His wife's car is not yet in the driveway, because he has no wife. I keep forgetting that. I have his freckled forearms and his clean white coat on the hook by the door, and I have a patient list for today with eleven names on it, and I have been him for less than a minute, and I am already bored of how well he sleeps. Nothing is wrong with him. He wakes up easy. He is kind without effort. Something in me hates that, so the wheel loads, and the pay button is under my thumb, and I press.

Water is running. That is first. Then mint, sharp, a foam of it on my upper lip, and a brush in my right hand stopped mid-stroke against a tooth that is not mine.

I start again, on the other side, slower. The back molars. The bristles find a soft place on the gum and I feel it in my whole jaw. I am heavy. The weight sits forward on me, a belly like a loaded crate, and my knees take it without comment, the way they have for years. Daylight comes gray through frosted glass, mid-morning, a day already half used. Phoenix is still dark behind me, and here the morning is nearly spent.

I spit. I rinse twice, cupping water in a palm that knows exactly how much to cup. The slippers are flat under my feet, the fleece worn to the shape of someone's toes. Through the sole, the tile is cold.

Then the shirt. A gray cotton T-shirt, soft as a rag, damp at the collar. It touches my back and he comes:

Four a.m., the same shirt, and he was pulling it over his head in the dark. He has been up before the sun for twenty years and he sleeps in what he wakes in, he is too tired to change. Last night he drank one whiskey, then a second, standing at the counter, and the house made no sound at all. He liked that and he hated it, both, evenly, the way you like a chair you have sat in too long.

My hand finds the edge of the sink, and the porcelain is chipped under the lip. A kitchen in Gujarat, a brass lamp, his mother's hands pressing a red mark onto a small framed god. He does not pray much now. He still touches the frame when he passes it. His thumb remembers where the glass is smooth.

The razor on the counter. Cold steel in my fingers. This morning he shaved himself raw at the jaw, slowly, because it is the one thing in the day that is only his. The skin there is smooth and tight, a little stung. Then the van, the back of it open under a Thursday sky, the brown shelving, the scanner clipped at his hip. He knows every porch on Main Street, the one stoplight, the diner that closed and still has its sign. A woman who waves from a window every day and has never once said his name.

My knuckles crack. I did not ask them to. Both hands, one finger at a time, the habit of a man alone with his hands.

His life is not mine. It comes in flashes and goes. I stand here in his pajama pants with toothpaste cooling on my lip and I know nothing of what he wanted. That is the arrangement. There was never anything left to ask.

I set the brush down bristles-up, out of the gray water it has always sat in. I turn my hand over. Broad palm, calluses at the base of the fingers, nails cut square. Then I lift my eyes to the mirror, to a stranger's brown eyes, and I say, quietly, in a voice lower than any I have had:

"All right. Let's see how long you last."

The faucet is still running. I do not know whether I will be him by tonight, or whether the wanting will already be back, small, behind the ribs, asking.