Terrence Obi-Walker

You are leaving Martin Kessler because of the kitchen light. It buzzes at this hour, before the street has started, and he stands under it in a bathrobe that is not his, holding a mug that is not his, with a knee that announces the stairs. He is fifty-nine. For forty seconds you have been fifty-nine. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. His unibrow is in the dark window, his silver hair, his blue eyes, and you look at them like a coat that fits and has no pockets. You wanted something to happen to you, and a man between jobs in Detroit is a man waiting for a phone. So you put the mug down, and the page is already open, and the wheel is already turning with its small dry tick.

Then the bench is under you.

Wood slats, cold through the jeans. Forearms on your knees. A rack of coats above you, a fluorescent tube humming, a window gone blue with the hour. You were mid-breath and the breath finishes itself, ragged, smelling of smoke. A bottle sweats on the floor by your boot. Your chest is narrow and quick. Your heart is going like you have just lifted something and set it down.

The hoodie comes first. Zipper teeth under your thumb, the cuff gone soft and shiny, and he is there: a Sunday-night closet, this hoodie pulled off a hook because the radiator in the apartment was dead again. The right arm in first, always, then the left, then the tug at the hem. He did it half asleep, thinking of rent.

Your thumb finds the nail of your forefinger and your teeth are already there. Bitten to the quick. It tastes of metal and chalk. A memory comes through the bitten edge: a pew, a hard-backed one, his mother's glove flat on his wrist to stop exactly this, the pastor's voice going on and on about the lamp under a bushel. He was nine. He kept biting.

The jeans, stiff with dust at the thigh. You drag a palm down them and there is the fly rail: rope wet with hand-sweat, a sandbag's weight coming into his shoulders, the blue running light turning his knuckles the color of the bottom of a pool. Eleven years of cues he never saw from the front. A pride he has told no one, because no one in the audience would know what he had done.

On the inside of your forearm there is a tattoo, small and badly done, and when your eye lands on it your face goes hot, his heat, not yours. A name, or the start of one, a night in Bushwick, a friend with a needle and a promise. Her name was not the one he ended up wanting. He has worn long sleeves for it. There is an ex, and her number is still in his phone, and he has not deleted it or called.

Your pocket holds a lighter. You close your hand around it and the pack-a-day rises in your throat, a craving older than the lift, a ghost of the stoop outside the brownstone, wet street, sodium light on the puddles, his cigarette glowing and the bills in his other hand. Twenty-five thousand under the water, and every month a little more of the tide. He never drank. He told himself that counted for something. He said it to God, sometimes, in the stairwell.

Your shoulders ache pleasantly. Your legs are thin and wiry, built for climbing. You are five-six, and the ceiling is a long way off, and the locs fall against your cheek when you lower your head.

You turn your hands over. They are quick, bitten, a stranger's, and they are yours.

You lift your eyes and say, quietly, "Okay. Okay, Terrence."

Your thumb finds the nail again. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back.