Suresh Nambiar

You were Jason Mikami for three minutes, and you spent two and a half of them in the bathroom mirror, looking at the scar through the eyebrow. It is a good scar. It did nothing wrong. The apartment over the shuttered video store hummed with the neighbor's television, and the cashier's smock hung on the door, and the whole life was already so legible, so finished, that you could see the end of it from the hook where the keys hang. That is what sends you back. You thought a body was a door. It is a hallway, and you have walked this one to the end in an afternoon. The wheel is a page. The page is open. You pay.

Then the kitchen.

Cold air still clings to the coat, and a fork is halfway to your mouth, and there is rice on it, and something dark and sour-sweet, and your mouth is already open for it. The pendant lamp is a warm bruise over the counter. The window is a black mirror with a fence in it. You are standing. Your knees are sixty-one years old and you can feel every one of them take your weight, and the belly sits against the counter's edge like a thing you have been carrying a long time and have stopped apologizing for.

Your left hand holds the container. The plastic is warm, a little soft at the rim. The fingers know exactly how to pinch it so it won't buckle. Something comes up through them, not yours: a Sunday, a steel tiffin, a woman's voice saying he was too thin and then, years later, saying he was not. It is gone. Leftovers, then. Somebody used to cook this.

The coat. The cuffs are stiff and the zipper teeth are cold under your thumb, and your shoulders remember the morning: standing at the hook in the hall, not wanting to go out, going out anyway, because the walk to the stop is the only conversation he has some days. The streetcar in slush. A girl's name he was not going to say aloud, and a text he wrote and did not send. She left in the autumn. He had not known how loud a quiet apartment could be until the second week. The coat held the cold of that platform all the way home, and he stood here with it on because taking it off would have meant staying.

The jeans are soft at the knee. The blue shirt under the coat clings a little at the back with old sweat. You swallow, and the throat is slow, a man's throat that has given up whiskey and doesn't miss it, and doesn't quite trust that it doesn't. The moustache brushes the fork. You feel its coarseness above your lip, and the gray in it is a thing you know the way you know your own name, except you do not know your name. The scalp is cool under the lamp where the hair has gone thin. You lift your free hand to the crown without deciding to. The gesture is his, tired and habitual.

The counter edge is granite, cold through the shirt. A bank statement in a drawer: a number that would have astonished the boy who got off the plane, and means nothing to the man standing here with a plastic fork and no one to tell. A temple, once, with his mother, and a hush he felt and never named. These days he sits by the window some mornings and calls it listening.

The fork comes down. You set it on the counter, and the click is very small.

You turn your hand over. The palm is broad, creased, a little dry, the knuckles thick. It is a stranger's hand and it is yours, and it holds nothing now.

You lift your eyes to the dark glass, to the face in it, and the moustache moves when you speak.

"Well. Hello, Suresh."

Whatever it is that wants again is already stirring under his ribs. You do not know how long you have him.