Terrence Boykin

You are leaving Gilberto Camacho because of his knees. For under a minute you have been him, and in that minute you found out what he cannot do. Standing in the dark kitchen of his small-town Ohio house, you tried to lift your arms over your head and the shoulder stopped you halfway, a hot wire. You do not want a body that has already finished its best years. The refrigerator hums. His wife sleeps down the hall, which tells you nothing, because she is not yours. You open the page, and the wheel turns under your thumb.

Then the kitchen is gone, and there is no gap between.

Your face is pressed into cotton that smells of someone else's sleep. Your breath is ragged, caught on something, and then it evens out in a single pull. Your left arm hangs off the mattress, the knuckles almost touching carpet. A thin stripe of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the wall. Your body draws the arm up by itself and rolls you onto your back. The hands fold at your chest. You have never slept this way. You know it because the body tells you it is wrong, like a coat buttoned crooked.

Your leg is already bouncing under the blanket, a small steady tremor in the right calf. It does not stop when you ask it to.

The sheet is tangled around your shin, and it gives you something. Not a picture first. A feeling: the relief of falling into this bed at the wrong hour, with the sun still up behind the curtains, because the shift ran long. Then the picture: a loading dock, a scanner clicking, cardboard dust, the back of a van swallowing boxes. The scanner is a gray brick with a trigger, and he has held it ten thousand times. He thinks of it the way you think of a stubborn dog.

The shirt under your hands is soft, washed thin. The cotton gives you a morning in the kitchen, a small child, a daughter, standing on a chair and pulling at this hem, and his wife saying his name, Terrence, in the voice that means hurry. The hem is the one she stitched. Your thumb finds the wedding band and turns it, and the metal is warm, and a wave of something plain and enormous goes through you. It is not romance. It is arithmetic. Two incomes, one child, a number in an account that he checks more than he admits. Somewhere between twenty-five and seventy-five thousand, the savings he built the way he stopped smoking: one day, then another, and the craving still there, patient, at three in the afternoon.

You press your palm to your upper arm and the ink is under the sleeve, bold lines, color gone soft. The memory comes in his heat: a chair, a buzzing needle, a friend laughing, being twenty-two and sure of everything. Under it, rising, a lower memory of prayer. A rug unrolled in a cramped space between the bed and the dresser, his forehead down, the quiet after. He has never touched a drink. His mother taught him that, and then he chose it himself, which is better.

The body is good. You notice that last, and with surprise. Athletic, long in the thigh, shoulders that do not hurt. You flex your toes against the blanket and nothing refuses you. The locs lie heavy against your neck. Your beard is a clean line along the jaw, and you run your fingers over it. He trims it on Sunday nights.

You raise your hands in the stripe of light and look at them. The ring. The scar-free knuckles. You turn them over. They are not yours, and they are the best hands you have been given in a long while.

Then you look up, at the dark, at the ceiling that belongs to a stranger, and say in his low voice, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The leg keeps bouncing. Somewhere under your ribs, small and already awake, the wanting begins to hum.